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Our age has confronted no greater ethical, political and institutional challenge than ensuring the protection of civilians, as victims of both war and of mass atrocity crimes. Awareness of the problem of civilian protection is growing and has been accompanied by a much greater evident willingness -- at least in principle -- to do something about it. New paradigms for a new century Two normative advances in this area are, first, the dramatically upgraded attention given since 1999 to the law and practice relating to the protection of civilians (POC) in armed conflict; and, second, the emergence in 2001, and far-reaching global embrace since 2005, of the concept of the responsibility to protect (R2P). There is now more or less universal acceptance of the principles that state sovereignty is not a licence to kill but entails a responsibility not to do or allow grievous harm to one's own people. The international community also bears a responsibility to assist those states that need and want help in meeting that obligation, and a responsibility to take timely and decisive collective action in accordance with the UN Charter. Libya and its aftermath UN Security Council Resolution 1973, authorizing military intervention in Libya to halt what was seen as an imminent massacre, was a resounding demonstration of these principles at work, and seemed to set a new benchmark against which all future arguments for such intervention might be measured. However, the subsequent implementation of that mandate led to the reappearance of significant geopolitical divisions. The Security Council's paralysis over Syria during the course of 2011, culminating in the veto by Russia and China of a cautiously drafted condemnatory resolution, has raised the question, in relation to the sharp-end implementation of R2P, of whether Resolution 1973 would prove to be the high-water mark from which the tide will now retreat. The future for civilian protection The crucial question is whether the new geopolitics of intervention that appeared to have emerged with Resolution 1973 is in fact sustainable, or whether, as suggested by the subsequent response to the situation in Syria, a more familiar, and more cynical, geopolitics will in fact reassert itself. This author takes the optimistic view that the new normative commitment to civilian protection is alive and well, and that, in the aftermath of the intervention in Libya, the world has been witnessing not so much a major setback for a new cooperative approach as the inevitable teething troubles associated with the evolution of any major new international norm. The Brazilian 'responsibility while protecting' initiative, focusing on clearer criteria for and more effective monitoring of the use of force, offers a constructive way forward. Adapted from the source document.

The article discusses the problem that was recently raised in Lithuanian historical literature and public discourse by G. Beresnevicius, A. Bumblauskas, S.C. Rowell: was the medieval Lithuanian state (Grand Duchy of Lithuania; GDL) an empire? Traditional historiography did not use concepts of "empire" and "imperialism" in the work on GDL. For Non-Marxist Russian historians, GDL was simply another Russian state, so there could not be Russian imperialism against Russians. For Marxist historians, imperialism was a phase in the "capitalist formation," immediately preceding the socialist revolution and bound to the specific period of world history, so the research on precapitalist empires and imperialism was suspect of anachronism. For the opposite reason, deriving from the hermeneutic methodology, the talk about how the medieval Lithuanian empire and imperialism was an anachronism for Non-Marxist Polish and German historians too, because they considered as Empires only polities that claimed to be successors to Roman Empire. However, the Lithuanian political elite never raised such claims, although theory of the Lithuanian descent from Romans (Legend of Palemon) could be used for this goal. Using the recent work in comparative historical sociology of empires by S.N. Eisenstadt, I. Wallerstein, A. Motyl, B. Buzan, R. Little, A. Watson, M. Beissinger, Ch. Tilly, Th.J. Barfield and M. Doyle, the author argues that GDL was an empire because it was (1) the greatest state in Europe in the late 14-early 15th century, (2) militarily expansive in all directions if not held in check by superior military power, (3) displayed the territorial structure characteristic for empires, consisting of metropole and periphery, (4) had an informal empire and sphere of hegemony, (5) established imperial "Pax Lituanica" on broad territories securing long-distance trade roads. Typologically, it was a patrimonial empire, typologically distinct from the "barbarian kingdoms" created by ancient Germans and Vikings. After the internal crisis in 1432-1440 that is interpreted as "Augustan threshold" (in M. Doyle's sense), the Lithuanian empire evolved into a federal state by the early 16th century. Drawing on the distinction between "primary empires" and "shadow empires" proposed by Th.J. Barfield, GDL is classified as subtype of "shadow empires," called "vulture empires." GDL started as a "vulture empire," using for its expansion a geopolitical situation created by the decline of the Mongol empire and aspiring to unite under its power all lands of the former Kiev Russia. The most important outcome of the failure of the Lithuanian imperial project is the emergence of the three different Eastern Slave peoples (Belorussian, Ukrainian, Great Russian), while the probable outcome of its success would be the continuation of the undivided old Russian ethnicity. Adapted from the source document.

The quinquennial Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference represents a highly important event from the perspective of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Though not a party to the treaty itself, the EU has made a consistent effort since the 1990s to coordinate the positions of its member states and achieve higher visibility in the NPT review process. The aim of this article is to examine the role of the EU in the 2015 NPT Review Conference deliberations. Drawing on on-site observations, statements and in-depth research interviews, it argues that the recent institutional changes notwithstanding, the influence of the EU as a distinct actor in the NPT context remains very limited, and the EU's common position is in bigger disarray than ever before. This year's Review Conference demonstrated the widening rift between the member states, in particular in the area of nuclear disarmament and the related issues. The inability to maintain a coherent common position limits the EU 'actorness' and impedes its striving for relevance in the NPT forums. The dynamics outlined in this article further highlight the limits of the EU CFSP in security matters in which the national positions of individual member states are as divergent as in the case of nuclear disarmament. (International Affairs (Oxford) / SWP)

When Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States first appeared in bookstores in March 1962, its author had modest hopes for its success, expecting to sell at most a few thousand copies. Instead, the book proved a publishing phenomenon, garnering substantial sales (seventy thousand in several editions within its first year and over a million in paperback since then), wide and respectful critical attention, and a significant influence over the direction of social welfare policy in the United States during the decade that followed. By February 1964, Business Week noted, "The Other America is already regarded as a classic work on poverty." Time magazine later offered even more sweeping praise, listing The Other America in a 1998 article entitled "Required Reading" as one of the twentieth century's ten most influential books, putting it in such distinguished company as Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Harrington's own knowledge of poverty was, for the most part, acquired secondhand, as he would recount in two memoirs, Fragments of the Century (1973) and The Long Distance Runner: An Autobiography (1988). Born in 1928 in St. Louis, the only child of loving and moderately prosperous parents of sturdy Irish-Catholic lineage, educated at Holy Cross, Yale Law School, and the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1949 to become a writer. In 1951, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement as a volunteer at its soup kitchen; there he got to know a small subset of the nation's poor, the homeless male alcoholics of New York City's Bowery district. Within a few years he left the Catholic Worker (and the Catholic Church) and joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the battered remnants of the American Socialist Party, a party then led by Norman Thomas. A tireless organizer, prolific writer, skillful debater, and charismatic orator, Harrington succeeded Thomas as America's best-known socialist in the 1960s, just as Thomas had succeeded Eugene Debs in that role in the 1920s. Socialism was never the road to power in the United States, but socialist leaders like Debs, Thomas, and Harrington were, from time to time, able to play the role of America's social conscience. In the years since Harrington's death from cancer in 1989, at the age of sixty-one, no obvious successor to the post of socialist tribune in the Debs-Thomas-Harrington tradition has emerged. Harrington's most famous appeal to the American conscience, The Other America, was a short work (one hundred and eighty-six pages in the original edition) with a simple thesis: poverty in the affluent society of the United States was both more extensive and more tenacious than most Americans assumed. The extent of poverty could be calculated by counting the number of American households that survived on an annual income of less than $3,000. These figures were readily available in the census data, but until Harrington published The Other America they were rarely considered. Harrington revealed to his readers that an "invisible land" of the poor, over forty million strong, or one in four Americans at the time, fell below the poverty line. For the most part this Other America existed in rural isolation and in crowded slums where middle-class visitors seldom ventured. "That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them," Harrington wrote in his introduction in 1962. "They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen." That was then. Fifty years since the publication of The Other America the poor are still among us -- and in a testament to the lasting significance of Harrington's work, not at all invisible. Whether or not the poor exist is thus no longer a matter of debate; what if anything can be done to improve their condition remains at issue. Adapted from the source document.