What comes to mind when we hear the word “drone”? For many of us, it is the image of a General Atomics MQ-1B Predator drone launching a Hellfire missile at a suspected militant target. But is this picture beginning to change? Should this picture change?

On September 25, 2015, the world's leaders adopted a new suite of development goals—the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—that are to guide policymakers for the next decade and a half. On first inspection, the declaration is breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Constituted by a list of 17 goals and 169 targets, it is arguably the most comprehensive global agenda adopted since the UN Charter in 1945. Its thematic repertoire ranges from poverty, health, education, and inequality, to energy, infrastructure, climate change, marine resources, peace, security, and good governance. The UN Secretary-General welcomed the SDGs by praising their “universal, transformative, and integrated agenda” that heralded a “historic turning point for our world.”

It is generally agreed by most observers that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have fallen short of achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. Today, women continue to be more likely than men to live in poverty, and more than 18 million girls in sub-Saharan Africa are out of school. One of the crucial reasons for the failure of the MDGs in relation to women was their inability to address the deeply entrenched and interlocking factors that perpetuate women's disadvantage. The new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as articulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, constitute an improvement over the MDGs. Goal 5, which enshrines the stand-alone goal on gender equality, is comprised of nine specific targets, including the elimination of gender-based violence and access to reproductive health. In addition, gender equality is mainstreamed into numerous others goals. Given that the global community is now poised to implement the SDGs, the challenge is how best to integrate a transformative approach into the planning, implementation, and delivery of the specific targets so that the SDGs contribute to achieving gender equality and women's empowerment.

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.

On August 2, 2015, after three long years of intergovernmental negotiations and consultations and some tense final moments, all UN member states finally endorsed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2016. The question of accountability—or, more precisely, the question of how governments will be held to account for implementing the commitments made in this new agenda—was a critical point of contention throughout the negotiations, resulting in a significant watering down of initial proposals by the end of the process.

There has been little discussion of central bank accountability in recent decades because monetary policy has been seen as an essentially technical problem. Yet, during the 2008 financial crisis and the economic dislocations that ensued, central banks gained considerably in authority—bailing out failing institutions, using unorthodox monetary tools, and wading into sovereign debt crises. At the same time, the financial crisis and the slow recovery that has followed have revealed just how uncertain and volatile the global economy can be—a situation that poses new dilemmas for monetary policy. This article looks at the existing model of central bank accountability and finds it wanting in this new, more uncertain environment. Because the principle of central bank independence involves a very narrow set of objectives—generally focused on an inflation target—and very few opportunities for sanction, the main mechanism for accountability is that provided by the publication of information about the bank's deliberations and activities. In an era of increased economic uncertainty, when central bankers themselves admit that simple rules and models are no longer adequate, a narrow, transparency-based form of accountability is not sufficient. I suggest that we need a thicker, more robust form of accountability that fosters more deliberation and debate, ensures that central banks are answerable to their publics, and broadens the standards by which they are judged.

In recent years philosophical debates on human rights have focused upon the contrast between humanist and political conceptions of human rights. Defenders of the humanist conception take human rights to be those rights that we have solely in virtue of being human. By contrast, defenders of the political conception aim to offer an account of human rights practice without any recourse to notions such as human dignity, personhood, etc. They take human rights to be those rights that we have in virtue of being subject to political authority. In this essay, I show some of the problematic implications of endorsing this aspect of the political conception. After analyzing some key functions that the concept of human dignity plays in human rights practice, I focus on the gradual extension of legal human rights to corporations. I analyze the negative effects that the distinctive functions of human rights norms can have upon the human rights of natural persons once corporations are recognized as legal persons bearing human rights. Turning to human rights jurisprudence I then explore the normative resources that the concept of human dignity has to offer in order to prevent such negative effects and which are unavailable to a conception of human rights that disregards the humanist core of human rights practice.

Discomfort with denationalization spans both proceduralist and consequentialist objections. I augment Patti Lenard's arguments against denationalization with an epistemological argument. What makes denationalization problematic for democratic theorists are not simply the procedures used to impose this penalty or its consequences but also the permanence of this type of punishment. Because democratic theory assumes citizens to be subject to developmental processes that can substantially alter a person's character in politically relevant ways, I argue in favor of states imposing only revocable punishments. Penalties removing people's rights and political standing must be accompanied by avenues for periodic reconsideration of such punishments in order to meet Lenard's standard of democratic legitimacy.

Patti Tamara Lenard assesses the justifications given for the right to revoke citizenship in democratic states and concludes that this practice is inconsistent with a commitment to democratic equality. She provides three normative reasons for the mismatch between democratic principles and revocation laws: that the practice of revocation discriminates between different citizens within each state; that it provides differential penalties for the same crime; and that it does not provide transparent justification or due process for this harsh punishment. Although I too am repulsed by this practice, I do not think it is necessarily undemocratic. Moreover, such analysis overlooks one legitimate motivation behind expatriation: the aim to regulate national allegiance. The new revocation initiatives act as a powerful symbolic tool in reinforcing a world order based on sovereign nation-states.

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?

Is the revocation of citizenship—a policy increasingly adopted by democratic states—a violation of democratic principles? In an article published in the Spring 2016 issue of this journal, I argued that it is. A true commitment to the best understanding of democratic citizenship does not permit the revocation of some citizens’ status by others. David Miller and Ben Herzog are unconvinced. Elizabeth Cohen agrees that revocation is a violation of democratic principle, but argues that my defense of this claim leaves room for it nevertheless. These thoughtful critiques raise two questions to which I would like to respond: (1) What is the nature of citizenship in democratic states? (2) What can legitimately be done by democracies to protect themselves?