Suchergebnisse

Introduction : war, politics, democracy -- Democratic security -- Citizens and soldiers : the difference uniforms make -- A modest case for symmetry : are soldiers morally equal? -- Leaders and the gambles of war : against political luck -- War, democracy, and Secrecy : secret law -- Must a democracy be ruthless? : torture and existential politics -- Humanitarian intervention and the new democratic holy wars -- Drones and democracy -- Democracy and the death of norms -- Democratic states in victory : vae victis? -- Looking backward : democratic transitions and the choice of justice.

On War and Democracy provides a richly nuanced examination of the moral justifications democracies often invoke to wage war. In this compelling and provocative book, Christopher Kutz argues that democratic principles can be both fertile and toxic ground for the project of limiting war's violence. Only by learning to view war as limited by our democratic values-rather than as a tool for promoting them-can we hope to arrest the slide toward the borderless, seemingly endless democratic "holy wars" and campaigns of remote killings we are witnessing today, and to stop permanently the use of torture and secret law.Kutz shows how our democratic values, understood incautiously and incorrectly, can actually undermine the goal of limiting war. He helps us better understand why we are tempted to believe that collective violence in the name of politics can be legitimate when individual violence is not. In doing so, he offers a bold new account of democratic agency that acknowledges the need for national defense and the promotion of liberty abroad while limiting the temptations of military intervention. Kutz demonstrates why we must address concerns about the means of waging war-including remote war and surveillance-and why we must create institutions to safeguard some nondemocratic values, such as dignity and martial honor, from the threat of democratic politics.On War and Democracy reveals why understanding democracy in terms of political agency, not institutional process, is crucial to limiting when and how democracies use violence.

We live in a morally flawed world. Our lives are complicated by what other people do, and by the harms that flow from our social, economic and political institutions. Our relations as individuals to these collective harms constitute the domain of complicity. This book examines the relationship between collective responsibility and individual guilt. It presents a rigorous philosophical account of the nature of our relations to the social groups in which we participate, and uses that account in a discussion of contemporary moral theory. Christopher Kutz shows that the two prevailing theories of moral philosophy, Kantianism and consequentialism, both have difficulties resolving problems of complicity. He then argues for a richer theory of accountability in which any real understanding of collective action not only allows but demands individual responsibility

We live in a morally flawed world. Our lives are complicated by what other people do, and by the harms that flow from our social, economic and political institutions. Our relations as individuals to these collective harms constitute the domain of complicity. This book examines the relationship between collective responsibility and individual guilt. It presents a rigorous philosophical account of the nature of our relations to the social groups in which we participate, and uses that account in a discussion of contemporary moral theory. Christopher Kutz shows that the two prevailing theories of moral philosophy, Kantianism and consequentialism, both have difficulties resolving problems of complicity. He then argues for a richer theory of accountability in which any real understanding of collective action not only allows but demands individual responsibility

AbstractArguments about the ownership of natural resources have focused on the claims of cosmopolitans, who urge an equality of global claims to resources, and resource sovereigntists, who argue that national peoples are the proper owners of their resources. This focus is mistaken: Whatever one believes about the in-principle claims of the global community, there remains the practical question of how the national surplus is to be distributed. And in addressing this question, we must look at a distinction heretofore ignored in resource discussions—that between resident workers and citizens. I argue that the extracted value of natural resources should benefit all residents of the states in which they are found, not merely all citizens. By contrast, control of natural resources should be vested in a democratic citizenry, who are nonetheless normatively constrained by the distributive principle described above. I illustrate the argument with data showing the gap, especially in the Gulf States, between principles that allocate benefits to all citizens vs. to all resident workers. My argument is grounded in a broader theory of collective agency as it applies to questions of distributive justice, and it is aimed not only to criticize practices in the Gulf but to support the more inclusive resource policies found in democracies.

A large and impressive literature has arisen over the past fifteen years concerning the emergence, transfer, and sustenance of political norms in international life. The presumption of this literature has been, for the most part, that the winds of normative change blow in a progressive direction, toward greater or more stringent normative control of individual or state behavior. Constructivist accounts detail a spiral of mutual normative reinforcement as actors and institutions discover the advantages of normative self- and other evaluation. There is also now much interesting research focused on the question of how to predict the emergence of future norms.I focus, however, on a different issue here: the death of norms that had once seemed well internalized and institutionalized. The issue arises in relation to one of the most dramatic features in the defense policy of the United States since 2001: the crumbling of highly restrictive normative regimes prohibiting interrogatory torture and assassination as part of the "global war on terror." My aim here is to sketch what I take to be the central features of cases in which even norms that are clearly defined and apparently well internalized in a democracy nonetheless lose their grip on policy. The ultimate lesson, however, is an unappealing irony: While democracies surely do better than authoritarian regimes in adopting and internalizing certain kinds of constraints, in part because of a greater sensitivity to public mobilization around normative questions, that same sensitivity makes the long-term survival of these norms precarious. In particular, I suggest that force-constraining norms are most effectively internalized by coherent and relatively insulated professional cadres who see themselves as needing to act consistently over time. But in a democracy the values and arguments of those cadres are susceptible to being undermined by a combination of public panic and the invocation by policymakers of a public interest that can override the claims both of law and pragmatic restraint. Democracy, hence, can be at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.The model I will describe may be of predictive use in helping us to see the special vulnerability of normative orders in democracies. But my hope is that it is also constructive in showing us how states and institutions committed to maintaining a certain normative order, especially democratic states, might best try to entrench those norms. While my argument is conceptual and philosophical, it draws on this recent history. I also add two qualifications to this article's title. First, I am not addressingallnorms, but specific norms concerning the state use of force in national security policy. I therefore do not make claims about the generalizability of the conflict I describe to other norms, for example, norms of racial, sexual, or religious orthodoxy or hierarchy, or norms of reciprocal interaction. Second, reports of a norm's death are frequently exaggerated, since norms can be latent, then resurrected. Arguably, the anti-torture norm was resuscitated by President Obama in 2009 when, as one of his first official acts as chief executive, he moved to prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. I write here about the path of decay, whether or not that path is unidirectional, and why previously salient norms no longer seem to govern policy choice among political decision-makers.

This paper treats the question in political theory and international law of whether non-uniformed fighters ought to enjoy combatant privileges. It does so by exploring our treatment of collective violence, and of citizen responsibility for state action. Consider two forms of involvement in collective violence. On the criminal law model, an individual can be punished for violent acts committed only by confederates, so long as he was part of a joint criminal enterprise. On the law of war model, by contrast, an individual cannot be punished for killings and violence committed on the battlefield (subject to certain humanitarian restrictions), so long as the killings are committed as part of international hostilities, and independent of the legitimacy of the case for war. Reconciling these two models means probing the logic of participation in both violence and politics. I argue for extending combatant privileges to some non-uniformed combatants who are pursuing what can be termed "political" objectives, provided they observe other humanitarian constraints, roughly along the lines of Article 44 of the First Protocol to the Geneva Conventions. The reasoning that exculpates the regular soldier naturally extends to the non-uniformed combatant as well. While instrumental considerations do bear on non-uniformed combatancy, I argue that the basic question of non-uniformed combatant privilege has to be answered from within a theory of shared citizen responsibility for war. A corollary of this argument is that there is (very limited) conceptual room for holding liable soldiers fighting unjust wars by otherwise legal means.

The root of positivism is the idea that a legal system's criteria of legal validity have authoritative status just in virtue of social facts, where "social facts" consist of the behavior, beliefs, dispositions, and attitudes of certain persons in the community whose legal system it is. John Austin's version of positivism treated the seat of command (or legislation) as the scene of the social facts constitutive of law's authority, and habitual obedience as the relevant form of those facts. Modern positivists, following H.L.A. Hart, have instead treated the scene of adjudication as the source, and "following a social rule" as the form of those facts. But there are notorious problems with the conventionalist account of law's authority, central among which is that it makes mysterious the persistence of law's authority in circumstances of serious and pervasive disagreement. Taking up a proposal by Scott Shapiro and Jules Coleman, I propose a way of understanding the social facts constitutive of a community's authoritative criteria of legality in terms of judicial collective action. This model of collective action grounds law's normativity socially, despite judicial disagreement, thus maintaining the insight of positivism.

"Do the United States and France, both post-industrial democracies, differ in their views and laws concerning discrimination? Marie Mercat-Bruns, a Franco-American scholar, examines the differences in how the two countries approach discrimination. Bringing together prominent legal scholars--including Robert Post, Linda Krieger, Martha Minow, Reva Siegel, Susan Sturm, Richard Ford, and others--Mercat-Bruns demonstrates how the two nations have adopted divergent strategies. The United States continues, with mixed success at "colorblind" policies, to deal with issues of diversity in university enrollment, class action sex-discrimination lawsuits, and rampant police violence against African American men and women. In France, the country has banned the full-face veil while making efforts to present itself as a secular republic. Young men and women whose parents and grandparents came from sub-Sahara and North Africa are stuck coping with a society that fails to take into account the barriers to employment and education they face. Discrimination at Work provides an incisive comparative analysis of how the nature of discrimination in both countries has changed, now often hidden, or steeped in deep unconscious bias. While it is rare for employers in both countries to openly discriminate, deep systemic discrimination exists, rooted in structural and environmental causes and the ways each state has dealt with difference in general. Invigorating and incisive, the book examines hot-button issues of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and equality for LGBT individuals, delivering comparisons meant to further social equality and fundamental human rights across borders"--Provided by publisher.