The increasingly widespread and energetic engagement with the idea of just war over the last fifty years of thinking on morality and armed conflict—especially in English-speaking countries—presents a striking contrast to the previous several centuries, going back to the early 1600s, in which thinkers addressing moral issues related to war did so without reference to the just war idea.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established following the UN Millennium Declaration, which was approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2000. Described by some as the “world's biggest promise,” they set out a series of time-bound targets to be achieved by the international community by 2015, including a halving of extreme poverty, a two-third reduction in child mortality, a three-quarter reduction in maternal mortality, and universal primary education. The MDGs were, however, often criticized for having a “blind spot” with regard to inequality and social injustice. Worse, they may even have contributed to entrenched inequalities through perverse incentives. As some have argued, in order to achieve progress toward the MDG targets at the national level, governments focused their attention on the “easy to reach” populations and ignored more marginalized, vulnerable groups. The aim of this essay is to examine the extent to which this widespread criticism has been successfully addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2015.

This article addresses the question what—if anything—we can and should expect from the practice of international criminal justice. It argues that neither retributive nor purely consequentialist, deterrence-based justifications give sufficient guidance as to what international criminal courts should aim to achieve. Instead, the legal theory of expressivism provides a more viable (but not unproblematic) guide. Contrary to other expressivist views, this article argues for the importance of the trial, not just the punishment, as a form of expressivist messaging. Specifically, we emphasize the communicative aspect of the judicial process. The final section, acknowledging the limited success of international criminal justice so far in terms of fulfilling its expressivist potential, diagnoses the main obstacles to, and opportunities for, expressivist messaging in the contemporary practice of international criminal justice.

In recent years, American military forces have been deployed in an ever-expanding array of humanitarian, peacekeeping, peacemaking, and nation-building operations. In practice American forces have often been reluctantly committed, and almost always with an extreme emphasis on force-protection and the avoidance of American casualties. Often this issue is discussed in the framework of perceived political constraints on American use of the military – in terms of how many casualties the American public will accept in exchange for a given mission. Beneath the level of the political constraints on American leaders, there lies a deeper tension having to do with the implicit moral contract between the United States and its military personnel. Although military personnel are required to follow all legal orders, morally the traditional contract between soldier and state rests on shared assumptions about the purposes for which national militaries will and will not be used.

This paper discusses obligations of international distributive justice-specifically, obligations rich countries have to transfer resources to poor countries. It argues that the major seven OECD countries each have an obligation to transfer at least one percent of their GDP to developing countries.

The strategy of the paper is to defend this position without having to resolve the many debates that attend questions of international distributive justice. In this respect, it belongs to the neglected category of nonideal theory. The key to the strategy is to show that a significant amount of good would be accomplished by a one percent transfer, despite the fact that one percent is quite a small amount.

To make this showing, the paper takes health as a fundamental measure of individual well-being and examines the improvement in life expectancy that would likely result from devoting the one percent transfer to the major determinants of health. It adduces data indicating that substantial progress towards raising life expectancy in developing countries to the global average of 64.5 years can be expected from expenditures of $125 per capita, divided between health care, education, and basic nutrition and income support. A one percent transfer from the major seven is enough to cover expenditures on that scale for the poorest fifth of the world's population.

Nonintervention has been a particularly important and occasionally disturbing principle for liberal scholars, such as John Stuart Mill and Michael Walzer, who share a commitment to basic and universal human rights. On the one hand, liberals have provided some of the strongest reasons to abide by a strict form of the nonintervention doctrine. It was only with the security of national borders that peoples could work out the capacity to govern themselves as free citizens. On the other hand, those very same principles of universal human dignity when applied in different contexts have provided justifications for overriding or disregarding the principle of nonintervention.

In explaining this dual logic I present an interpretive summary of s'Mill famous argument against and for intervention, presented in his “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” (1859), that illustrates what makes Mill's “few words” both so attractive and alarming to us. We should be drawn to Mill's arguments because he is among the first to address the conundrums of modern intervention. The modern conscience tries simultaneously to adhere to three contradictory principles: first, the cosmopolitan, humanitarian commitment to assistance, irrespective of international borders; second, respect for the significance of communitarian, national self-determination; and, third, accommodation to the reality of international anarchy, which puts a premium on self-help national security. I stress, more than has been conventional, the consequentialist character of the ethics of both nonintervention and intervention.

Comparing Mill's “Non-Intervention” and Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars (1977) links two classic statements on just wars of intervention. I conclude that interventionist arguments should go beyond the three paradigmatic cases Walzer explores in Just and Unjust Wars. But while they can draw on Mill's “Non-Intervention,” they need to offer a more convincing set of criteria for when such interventions are likely to do more good than harm

The workings of global finance are like that part of the iceberg beneath the waterline – vast, unseen and, for many, unknown. The interaction of global finance with human rights is especially opaque. The globalization of each phenomenon has occurred very largely independently of the other. Even the recent surge in interest in the global economy and human rights has been heavily focused on the real economy and on what (non-banking) corporations do and how they behave. The particular dimension of interactions between finance and human rights has, by and large, been a blank space. In this article we seek to bridge the gap in understanding, perspective, and practice between the two fields by investigating actual and potential linkages in respect of four specific features of global finance – two financial products: bonds and derivatives; and two financial processes: risk management and procyclicality. These have been chosen as an illustrative sample of the complex and diverse ways in which the global financial system interacts with human rights. Although these products and processes played an important role in the recent global financial crisis, and although the interface between global finance and human rights is extensive, they have not so far featured on the human rights agenda or been the subject of detailed human rights critique. As such they provide an overview of the types of human rights issues in the financial sector that have so far been hidden from view. The paper therefore constructs an argument as to why the bridging of the gap is important and provides pointers as to how it can be done.

The language of human rights is increasingly being advocated as a framework for policy dialogue. To make this feasible, indicators must be developed that help to hold the state accountable for its policies, that help to guide and improve policy, and that are sensitive to local contexts without sacrificing the commitment to the universality of rights. Can it be done?

This article examines ongoing attempts to devise indicators and argues that they are not based in a sufficiently clear conceptual framework. It argues for greater intelligibility in devising indicators concerning what they should be assessing, how to reflect the universalism of rights across different contexts, and how to weigh the conflicts of interest that characterize the public policy decision-making process.

The international rule of law is often seen as a centerpiece of the modern international order. It is routinely reaffirmed by governments, international organizations, scholars, and activists, who credit it with reducing the recourse to war, preserving human rights, and constraining (albeit imperfectly) the pursuit of state self-interests. It is commonly seen as supplanting coercion and power politics with a framework of mutual interests that is cemented by state consent.

Intervention often violates both respect for state sovereignty and the right to self-determination. McMahan focuses on the latter ethical dimension rather than the former political and legal one, although his claims have important implications for issues of state sovereignty. He challenges the common assumption that respect for self-determination requires an almost exceptionless doctrine of nonintervention by first defining the notions of “intervention” and “self-determination,” and then analyzing Walzer's doctrine of nonintervention. The recognition that there are different ideals of self-determination results in a less rigid and more permissive doctrine of nonintervention.

Too much of the debate about how respect for human rights can be advanced on a global basis currently revolves around crisis situations involving so-called mass atrocity crimes and the possibility of addressing abuse through the use of military force. This preoccupation, as understandable as it is, serves to mask much harder questions of how to deal with what might be termed silent and continuous atrocities, such as gross forms of gender or ethnic discrimination or systemic police violence, in ways that are achievable, effective, and sustainable. This more prosaic but ultimately more important quest is often left to, or perhaps expropriated by, international lawyers. Where the politician often finds solace in the deployment of military force, the international lawyer turns instinctively to the creation of a new mechanism of some sort. Those of modest inclination might opt for a committee or perhaps an inquiry procedure. The more ambitious, however, might advocate the establishment of a whole new court. And surely the most “visionary” of such proposals is one calling for the creation of a World Court of Human Rights. A version of this idea was put forward in the 1940s, but garnered no support. The idea has now been revived, in great detail, and with untrammeled ambition, under the auspices of an eminent group of international human rights law specialists.

In recent years, there have been concerted efforts to ensure that the different components of the international response to crisis-affected countries, whether conducted under the banner of the United Nations or not, are integrated in pursuit of a stated goal of comprehensive, durable, and just resolution of conflict. This includes a drive to purposefully make humanitarian assistance to victims, one of the principal forms of outside involvement in crisis situations, supportive of the “international community's” political ambition. The implication of the coherence agenda is that meeting lifesaving needs is too limited in scope, and that the principles of impartiality, neutrality, and independence that have typically characterized humanitarian action should be set aside in order to harness aid to the “higher” goals of peace, security, and development.

The liberal international order is being challenged today by populism and unilateralism. Though it has been resilient in the past, the current challenges from within the order are unprecedented. Without being too pessimistic, I expect the LIO will survive but retract to its original core states in North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia, shedding some of its universal pretensions. States that remain within the liberal order, in turn, will compete with an alternative Chinese-led international hierarchy built around all or part of the current Belt and Road Initiative countries. While international institutions can facilitate cooperation, they do not bridge this emerging divide sufficiently to forestall conflict and, in any event, will not be sufficiently robust to prevent a new cold war. As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this brief essay sketches this argument and concludes with some possible ways of moderating future conflicts.

What lessons should policy makers, particularly those at United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York and those of the Clinton administration in Washington, be taking away from the military, humanitarian, and diplomatic dilemmas in the former Yugoslavia? Specifically, what have we learned about moral choice as it pertains to recent UN activities? What in fact are the moral choices, and how might they be framed by those in power to make decisions?

It is unlikely that George W. Bush feels constrained by international law when deciding whether to use military force abroad. Nevertheless, many of the United States' allies are reluctant to cooperate with and participate in military actions that cannot reasonably be justified under international law. And supportive allies, while perhaps not strictly necessary to the United States in its recent and foreseeable military campaigns, do make the military option easier to pursue. A war against Iraq would be difficult without access to bases and airspace in countries as diverse as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Canada. For this reason, at least, it would seem to be worth the president's while to adhere to international law where possible and, where this is not possible, to seek to change the rules.

What first caught my eye when reading Patti Lenard's clear and carefully argued critique of citizenship revocation was a claim at the end of her first paragraph: the power to revoke citizenship, she says, “is incompatible with democracy.” That is quite a strong claim, and my thoughts turned immediately to the fons et origo of democracy, ancient Greece. Weren't the Greek city-states notorious for the readiness with which they disenfranchised, banished, exiled, even outlawed some among their own citizens? And in the case of Athens especially, wasn't this in part because it was a democracy (at least for those who qualified for citizenship), and expulsion from the demos was one of the devices used to protect it?

India is gradually changing its course from decades of inward-looking economics and strong anti-Western foreign policies. It has become more pragmatic, seeing important economic benefits from globalization, and some political benefits of working with the United States to achieve New Delhi's great-power aspirations. Despite these changes, I argue that India's deep-seated anti-colonial nationalism and commitment to strategic autonomy continues to form the core of Indian identity. This makes India's commitment to Western-dominated multilateral institutions and Western norms, such as humanitarian intervention, partial and instrumental. Thus, while Indian foreign-policy discourse shows little sign of seeking to fully challenge the U.S.-led international order beyond largely reformist measures of building parallel institutions such as the New Development Bank, India will continue to strongly resist Western actions that weaken sovereignty norms.

Responsibility for the provision of global public goods is generally couched in moral terms: terms that, to one side of the important moral argument, signal the deficit of global collective action despite recent engagements in the normative concept of “sovereignty as responsibility.” In this context the article seeks greater emphasis, in morally informed reflection on world politics, on political responsibility. The argument is made in two steps. The article considers first the specificity of moral responsibility and the inextricability of moral and political interest in international relations. Having situated both with regard to the decision-making structures of national government, the article argues, second, for a normative reconfiguration of political duty in terms of task-efficacy, republican legitimacy, and political leadership. As a result, a badly needed marriage between national priorities and global threats and challenges is made possible.

Among the many disruptions caused by artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies (including automation, cyberwarfare, surveillance, loss of privacy, fake news, infrastructure vulnerability), the effects on development pathways are likely to be significant and complex. AI will enable low-income countries to leapfrog in several sectors, including e-governance, e-finance, e-health, and e-education. Yet AI will also lead to automation, reducing the demand for labor, especially unskilled labor. Labor-intensive sectors such as apparel will provide fewer jobs, and lower export earnings. Development strategies will need to adjust accordingly.

Andrew Kuper begins his critique of my views on poverty by accepting the crux of my moral argument: The interests of all persons ought to count equally, and geographic location and citizenship make no intrinsic difference to the rights and obligations of individuals. Kuper also sets out some key facts about global poverty, for example, that 30,000 children die every day from preventable illness and starvation, while most people in developed nations have plenty of disposable income that they spend on luxuries and items that satisfy mere wants, not basic needs.