Suchergebnisse

In der aktuellen Debatte um eine (Wieder)Einführung der Wehrpflicht in Deutschland wird immer wieder das schwedische Modell als eine Möglichkeit genannt – auch wenn oft nicht klar ist, was damit genau gemeint ist. Das skandinavische Land hatte 2018 die Wehrpflicht für Männer und Frauen nach neun Jahren wieder eingeführt. Der Verteidigungsattaché der schwedischen Botschaft in Berlin, Kapitän z.S. Jonas Hård af Segerstad, war damit als Referatsleiter im Verteidigungsministerium befasst und erläutert in einem Gastbeitrag, was dieses schwedische Modell ist, wofür

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman— The call for limited government is a recurring theme in Republican politics. Ronald Reagan's refrain that government is the problem, not the solution, has taken many rhetorical forms... READ MORE
The post The Myth of Limited Government appeared first on Yale University Press.

Henning Melber challenges Ludo de Witte who claims to reveal the "true role" of Dag Hammarskjöld "in the imperialist catastrophe that savaged the Congo". Melber argues that De Witte's blog offers no new empirical evidence, and demonstrates a failure to understand global institutions and the role of individuals within them. He argues Ludo de Witte shows a total denial of local dynamics and agency, which has led to misperceptions bordering on conspiracy theories.
The post Conspiracy Theory as Myth-Busting? appeared first on ROAPE.

Nearly two months into the war in Gaza, the Biden administration finds itself in a bind. International support for Israel, once strong in the aftermath of Hamas' brutal October 7 attacks, has given way to broad condemnation as Tel Aviv's campaign has left at least 15,000 Palestinians dead in addition to 30,000 injured and 1.8 million displaced.The White House's answer to this anger has been twofold. In public, President Joe Biden and his allies have emphasized the need for Israel to follow international law in its campaign to destroy Hamas but avoided weighing in on whether Israel has already violated the laws of war. In private, officials have urged their Israeli counterparts to "fight more surgically and avoid further mass displacement of Palestinians" after the temporary truce ends, according to the New York Times.But what does it mean for Israel to conduct a "surgical" war against an enemy embedded in an area roughly the size of Philadelphia with more than two million residents? And what does international law mean to a state whose leaders appear committed to destroying Hamas by any means necessary?Few thinkers are better equipped to answer these questions than Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. Moyn has long grappled with the relationship between war and morality, most notably in his 2021 book "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War."RS spoke with Moyn about how U.S. policymakers think about war and what the Gaza conflict means for the future of international law. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.RS: U.S. officials have reportedly admonished Israel to be more 'surgical' in its war against Hamas in Gaza. How do you interpret that call? What does it tell us about how officials view war more broadly?Moyn: It seems as if American policymakers are pushing on Israel their own solution to a controversial war, which is to combine an unlimited right to self-defense with a humanization of the conduct of the hostilities. Now, the truth is, Israel probably got to that combination before September 11, 2001, and the United States learned it from Israel in the first place. But given that America is Israel's patron and protector, it's now in a position of teaching the lesson to Israel that it learned from it. Now, I'm all for saying that these wars — the War on Terror, the campaign in Gaza — are parodies of humanized war because they're so costly in civilian lives. But they're not as bad as they could be because of this new policy — it's still largely rhetorical, but it's policy too — of containing the collateral damage and saying that that makes the war more tolerable.RS: Why is the U.S., and the Biden administration in particular, so focused on questions of international law in war? To the extent that they have placed checks on Israel, it's been to suggest that international law is the thing that they must be holding to, rather than a broader sense of morality.Moyn: Well, it's really only a part of international law, which is itself very interesting. Claiming an unlimited right to self-defense isn't just a moral claim; it's also a legal claim, and it's wrong. It was wrong in the War on Terror, and I think it's wrong when Israel asserts it today. We could get into the details on that side of the equation, but you're right that in our debates, international law has become something that for many listeners means constraint not of the right to wage war but of how it's waged. I think that Joe Biden, in his so called 'bear hug' strategy, thought that once it became clear how controversial this war was going to be, he would push humanitarian concern as a way of not interfering with Israel's claimed right of self-defense, [just as] America didn't tolerate those who said its wars were illegal while sometimes accepting the criticism that the way it conducts them is illegal.RS: How, both in its justification and in its conduct, does this war differ from the wars that the U.S. carried out following 9/11?Moyn: It is more similar to the ground campaigns that America fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, which involved a pretty substantial commitment of troops and a lot of blood spilled just because ground warfare is bloody, especially when it involves cities like Fallujah or Gaza City. It's not similar to the absolutely no-holds-barred phase of the War on Terror where the George W. Bush administration asserted that international law just didn't apply to what it did to detainees. The whole point of humanized warfare is that Israel is claiming that it's following the law. But it's also not similar to the later, so-called "sustainable" phase of America's War on Terror when America pulled out troops even while extending its drone campaign and special forces deployments and then claimed to sanitize that phase of the War on Terror without all the messiness of American troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel's currently in a phase that combines lots and lots of violence with claims to still be following international law. It has had phases of its struggle against Hamas that involved just bombing or its own use of special forces that were about conducting the struggle but making it as antiseptic as possible. It's just that Israel can't conduct that kind of campaign while promising to remove Hamas from power altogether.RS: Do I understand correctly that, generally, law of war questions only concern conduct within the war and not whether the broader goals of a war are appropriate or inappropriate? Doesn't it leave those questions entirely to the discretion of states?Moyn: It depends on how you define laws of war, but what we call international humanitarian law, or the laws of armed conflict, is really exclusively about how you fight. And there are other laws about when, whether, under what circumstances you can fight at all. You could call that body of law part of the laws of war, but it wouldn't be what most people mean when they use that phrase.RS: I guess I'm thinking about the question of proportionality.Moyn: The reason that's a tricky concept is that it applies in both stages of the analysis. In the so-called jus ad bellum analysis — when the resort to force in the first place or on a continuing basis is legal — there's the question of whether the exercise of a self-defense right is proportional. That is a totally different inquiry than what has generally been talked about in terms of proportionality because that's in the jus in bello — the laws of war about the conduct of hostilities. And there the question is, does the collateral damage in any particular attack outweigh the anticipated military advantage of that attack? We could argue that Israel is being disproportionate in the war in general, on the first part of the question, or we can argue with regard to any particular attack whether its attacks are disproportionately harmful to civilians.RS: Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik recently wrote that the lesson of this war is "brutal and short: human rights are not universal and international law is arbitrarily applied." Do you agree with that take?Moyn: No, because it was a lesson that the whole history of human rights and international law already taught.RS: Can you tell me more about that?Moyn: Well, there was never a time when human rights weren't selectively applied, and there was never a time when international law wasn't the law of the powerful. This campaign seems like a rather late date to learn what has always been obvious.RS: Is that a fundamental problem for international law? Or is there a possibility of a more effective international legal system in the future?Moyn: Sure, it's not as if there isn't a struggle within politics, and therefore in law, to make the law different than it has been. I could say that American law works to the advantage of the powerful and against the weak, and that would be true, but that doesn't mean we can't change it for the better.I think international law has been changed for the better at times, but it's never been freed from this syndrome that it's a body of law of, by, and for states, framed with their approval, and interpreted by them to suit their ends. We can struggle to make it more constraining in more ways, but never is it apart from the political context. Never will it transcend selectivity and inadequacy.RS: You've already written a book-length answer to this, so I'll forgive you if it's not the easiest one to answer quickly, but do you think that international law can be a tool to fight for an actual end to war? Or is it simply a tool to manage war into the future?Moyn: I do think there are a lot of resources in it. It is revolutionary that we can make claims not just that states are fighting brutally but that they're engaged in illegal war-making. The trouble is that, if we prioritize the first claim, the second claim gets lost in the shuffle. I think that's what's happened in our time through the War on Terror, with the emphasis on torture and later civilian death in drone campaigns. It seems to be repeating itself in this situation, with the emphasis on civilian death, which is not dishonorable, but in the end there's only a political solution, which means we should focus at some point on who's in the right, who has a just claim, and what would make political violence something of the past.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!

In this post, we attempt to refute some of the most salient myths about dollarization in Latin America.

Globale Hungerkrisen und gestiegene Nahrungsmittelpreise sind aktuell in deutschsprachigen feministischen Debatten kaum ein Thema. Dies ist überraschend, da Fragen zu Ernährungsgerechtigkeit und...

From my new piece in The Washington Post: Misinformation presents a challenge to the American political system. Unsupported claims can distort debate, deceive voters and encourage contempt for the other party. In the final days of the presidential race, for...

Just as there are adult reasons for vape companies to sell flavored vape pods, there are adult reasons for drug dealers to color their fentanyl.

As we head into the last half of the UN's Agenda 2030, my progressive friends and colleagues continue to denounce the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as "neoliberal" or even "the continuation of coloniality and a legitimisation of …

As we step into 2024, it's crucial to adopt a more informed perspective on these dubious claims.

Earlier this month, Joe Biden made his first visit to the southern United States border as President, after two years of back-and-forth over his administration's immigration policy. While the cost-benefit debate of immigration has always been politically contentious, a new book by economists Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky provides data and insight on how decades of immigration policy have shaped the United States over time.

Luigi and Bethany sit with Boustan to unpack gender, country of origin, culture, and other cross-sectional variations in this data. How do immigrants and their succeeding generations impact the jobs, wages, and housing prices for the native-born? Conversely, who is left to make a change if all motivated people leave a country? Can data sway the immigration story beyond the border crisis?

I recently sat down with John Stossel to discuss popular myths about globalization, as well as the Cato Institute's Defending Globalization project.

Employers are desperate to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers who seemingly have vanished from the workforce. People with criminal histories represent a large pool of labor that could fill the gap. So why aren't more managers hiring them?

With outrage on all sides, it is difficult to get to the truth about gender-affirming care for youth. Are puberty blockers chemical castration? Or are they just a pause button? PolitiFact breaks it down.

How secure is your online health data? The answer depends on which part of the internet you engage with. If you log directly onto your patient portal after a doctor's visit, that information is clearly covered by HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which has strict protections about releasing data. "But once you're […]