What were the primary justifications for the Iraq War, and how do they relate to classical and contemporary just war thought? Identifying three such justifications—anticipatory, punitive, and humanitarian—Cian O'Driscoll clarifies the debate within the just war community about the invasion.
Debates about trying and punishing terrorists reveal how the failure to construct a shared normative consensus in international criminal justice continues to bedevil the international community. The only way to achieve this consensus is to engage in the messy business of politics.
If global democratization is to advance beyond the current point, it is necessary to confront the practical challenge of institutional design: How might ideals of global democracy be put effectively into practice given the many constraints imposed by the existing global political order?
The primary task undertaken by the liberal-democratic project throughout its modern history has been that of legitimately constituting and controlling the public powers wielded by sovereign states. As such, the principal institutions of modern representative democratic systems—constitutional structures and electoral processes—have consistently been developed with state power as the target for democratic control. However, contemporary democrats concerned with the project of building democratic institutions on a global scale now confront a new and important set of questions about how far we should expect any global democratic mechanisms to resemble the familiar democratic institutions employed within states.
After long and awkward negotiations, on November 19, 2009, the heads of state and government of the European Union finally nominated Catherine Ashton as the Union's new High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security. The next day an Internet user nicknamed ''hoeckt'' posted the following comment on a popular German news site: This morning I listened to an interview with [Ashton] on B5 [radio station] and was flabbergasted. She has already understood how they work at the EU level. She wants to do diplomacy the silent way, which to me means that there will be no transparency; nobody will know what she is doing, and how. And hence nobody will be able to judge success or failure of her actions.
As part of a broad scholarly discussion about how democratic practices may be integrated into global political culture, this article identifies an as yet unrealized opportunity to bring deliberative democracy and an additional infusion of legitimacy into international governance. We propose that a fully developed set of democratic global institutions should include, in some manner, one of the most venerable citizen-centered deliberative mechanisms—the jury. A handful of countries, such as Japan, Russia, and Argentina, have made varying degrees of progress in recent years toward incorporating new jury systems to burnish their legal institutions. Furthermore, civic reformers often have regarded the jury system as an important element of public policy-making, as in the case of citizens' juries—deliberative bodies of typically randomly selected citizens that are asked to consider testimony and evidence to arrive at recommendations on public policy questions. To date, however, there exists no movement toward a multinational or global jury system, and few have ever taken up the cause, even as a matter of conjecture.
When faced with security threats from terrorism and other forms of nonstate political violence, how should liberal-democratic states respond? Finlay discusses books by Tamar Meisels, Seumas Miller, and Timothy Shanahan.
This book provides not only an exhaustive treatment of the benefits and drawbacks of cosmopolitan democracy, but also the most detailed statement to date of how some form of cosmopolitan democracy could be realized, writes reviewer Luis Cabrera.
The lesson of the first 100 days of Guantanamo is not one of how truth and justice triumphed, but of how efficiently a bureaucratic machine on a war footing circumvented ethical norms and suppressed dissent, writes reviewer Petra Bartosiewicz.