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Abstract:
The war on terror and the war in Iraq have occasioned a ferocious debate over the Bush administration's commitment to neo-conservatism as the guiding philosophy behind war aiming at democratic transformation. Two recent, widely noticed 2006 books have attacked neo-conservatism - one, by a former neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama (After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads), and a second, by a centrist liberal, Peter Beinart (The Good Fight). Each seeks to anatomize neo-conservatism and what, in each author's view, has gone wrong with it; each seeks to offer an alternative foreign policy.

This review essay examines the two books, considering the respective cases they make against neo-conservatism and the rationales it has provided for the Iraq war and the war on terror. The essay considers the broader intellectual framework of neo-conservatism and its history within American conservatism, and the long-running American foreign policy debate over realism and idealism, setting out a seven point schema of neoconservative doctrines. It is respectful of Fukuyama's critiques, and particularly the internal contradictions that Fukuyama identifies within and among neoconservative premises that have led to what Fukuyama sees as disastrous policies. Still, the essay does not believe - even granting the strength of the critiques - that Fukuyama has decisively knocked down the neoconservative case for the Iraq war or, more broadly and importantly, the neoconservative commitment to democratic transformation as against realist doctrines of the accommodation and stability of corrupt or wicked authoritarian regimes. With respect to Beinart, the essay praises his call for the Democratic Party to recognize that the fight against transnational Islamist terrorism is really a fight against a form of totalitarianism, and hence similar to the Cold War. It rejects, however, Beinart's characterization of neo-conservatism and Bush administration foreign policy as likewise a threat to American values, different in degree but not necessarily in kind. The essay also rejects the new foreign policy proposed by Fukuyama or Beinart - amounting, in each case, to a version of increased realist multilateralism, what Fukuyama calls realistic Wilsonianism - concluding that each is guaranteed from the outset to be merely ineffectual.

(Parts of this essay are drawn from a short review by the author of the Fukuyama book appearing in the Times Literary Supplement.)

Terror, terrorism, Iraq, democracy, Middle East, war, war on terror, Cold War, Fukuyama, Beinart, neoconservatism, neoconservative, realism, idealism, multiculturalism, Islam, jihad, multilateralism, international law, United Nations, Burke, Muslim, Europe, 9-11, Truman, Reagan, Bush

Abstract:
The war on terror and the war in Iraq have occasioned a ferocious debate over the Bush administration's commitment to neo-conservatism as the guiding philosophy behind war aiming at democratic transformation. Two recent, widely noticed 2006 books have attacked neo-conservatism - one, by a former neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama (After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads), and a second, by a centrist liberal, Peter Beinart (The Good Fight). Each seeks to anatomize neo-conservatism and what, in each author's view, has gone wrong with it; each seeks to offer an alternative foreign policy.

This review essay examines the two books, considering the respective cases they make against neo-conservatism and the rationales it has provided for the Iraq war and the war on terror. The essay considers the broader intellectual framework of neo-conservatism and its history within American conservatism, and the long-running American foreign policy debate over realism and idealism, setting out a seven point schema of neoconservative doctrines. It is respectful of Fukuyama's critiques, and particularly the internal contradictions that Fukuyama identifies within and among neoconservative premises that have led to what Fukuyama sees as disastrous policies. Still, the essay does not believe - even granting the strength of the critiques - that Fukuyama has decisively knocked down the neoconservative case for the Iraq war or, more broadly and importantly, the neoconservative commitment to democratic transformation as against realist doctrines of the accommodation and stability of corrupt or wicked authoritarian regimes. With respect to Beinart, the essay praises his call for the Democratic Party to recognize that the fight against transnational Islamist terrorism is really a fight against a form of totalitarianism, and hence similar to the Cold War. It rejects, however, Beinart's characterization of neo-conservatism and Bush administration foreign policy as likewise a threat to American values, different in degree but not necessarily in kind. The essay also rejects the new foreign policy proposed by Fukuyama or Beinart - amounting, in each case, to a version of increased realist multilateralism, what Fukuyama calls realistic Wilsonianism - concluding that each is guaranteed from the outset to be merely ineffectual.

(Parts of this essay are drawn from a short review by the author of the Fukuyama book appearing in the Times Literary Supplement.)

Terror, terrorism, Iraq, democracy, Middle East, war, war on terror, Cold War, Fukuyama, Beinart, neoconservatism, neoconservative, realism, idealism, multiculturalism, Islam, jihad, multilateralism, international law, United Nations, Burke, Muslim, Europe, 9-11, Truman, Reagan, Bush

Abstract:
The use of foreign law and unratified international treaty law by U.S. courts in U.S. constitutional adjudication has emerged as a major debate among justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for a majority approving the practice in the March 2005 decision of Roper v. Simmons, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer undertaking an unusual public discussion of the practice in January 2005 at American University law school. This article examines the arguments made by Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Breyer for and against the practice, setting them in the broader context of constitutional theory. It criticizes the practice, and Justice Breyer's pragmatic defense of it, on grounds that it claims the use of foreign law merely provides "information" to the court about practices in other places, whereas in fact it is a potent source of ideology and values-based justification. The article further criticizes the practice on the basis of the value of democratic sovereignty and the adherence to the political legitimacy of a particular people and its democratic will. The article closes by suggesting that, beyond political theory, the practice of citing foreign law needs to be understood as sociology and social theory, and as the promotion of a shared set of globalized elite bourgeois values by particular Justices of the Supreme Court.

US Supreme Court, foreign law in US courts, democratic sovereignty, sovereignty, constitutional law, comparative law, comparative constitutionalism, constitutional comparativism, pragmatism, international law, global law, elite, elitism, globalization

Abstract:
Anne-Marie Slaughter's widely noticed book, A New World Order (Princeton UP 2004), proposes that the emerging form of global governance is neither a world government nor global governance by partnerships of public international organizations and global civil society, yet neither is it the existing relationship of sovereign states. Slaughter's concern is to resolve the governance dilemma of global governance, which is in essence that while we collectively recognize the advantages of global government, we also fear its anti-democratic and unaccountable concentration of power. A form of global governance is emerging, she argues, which can resolve this dilemma in the form of global government networks - networks of national agencies (and courts) working with their counterparts and homologues worldwide to deal with a wide variety of global concerns. Fundamental to this conception of global government is Slaughter's view that the unitary state is becoming disaggregated into its constituent parts, which increasingly act on their own account in the wider global environment. This (lengthy) book review summarizes and critiques A New World Order, offering both an internal critique of the argument's consistency as well as an outside critique of the argument from the standpoint of the value of democratic sovereignty. The review locates Slaughter's argument within the debate over international relations realism and idealism, and further locates it within a continuum of seven idealized positions in the debate between global governance and sovereignty, with pure sovereignty at one extreme and world government at the other, with the most relevant positions of democratic sovereignty and liberal internationalism located in the middle. The article concludes that Slaughter's vision of global governance through global government networks, ingenious as it is, does not finally avoid spitting us on at least one horn of the global governance dilemma, because ultimately it privileges global networks over democratic sovereignty.

International law, global governance, democracy, sovereignty, democratic sovereignty, European Union, administrative law, international organizations, global civil society, nongovernmental organizations, NGO, NGOs, liberal internationalism, Anne-Marie Slaughter, transjudicialism

Abstract:
Targeted killing, particularly through the use of missiles fired from Predator drone aircraft, has become an important, and internationally controversial, part of the US war against al Qaeda in Pakistan and other places. The Obama administration, both during the campaign and in its first months in office, has publicly embraced the strategy as a form of counterterrorism. This paper argues, however, that unless the Obama administration takes careful and assertive legal steps to protect it, targeted killing using remote platforms such as drone aircraft will take on greater strategic salience precisely as the Obama administration allows the legal space for it in international law to shrink.

Moreover, the paper argues that non-state enemies of the United States will not always be al Qaeda or groups covered by Security Council resolutions or the US Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Eventually there will emerge other threats that do not fall within the existing armed conflicts, and the United States is likely to seek to address at least some of those threats using its inherent rights of self-defense, whether or not a conflict within the meaning of international humanitarian law (IHL) and its thresholds is underway, and using domestic law authority under the statutes establishing the CIA. In that case, a US administration seeking to offer a legal rationale justifying its use of targeted killing might discover that reliance upon a state of IHL-armed conflict does not provide it the robust authority to use force that the US has traditionally asserted under its rights of inherent self-defense.

This is a policy paper, not a law review or scholarly article, and it offers blunt advice to the Obama administration and the US Congress with a particular normative goal in mind - to preserve the legal rationales for the use of self-defense in targeted killing, whether or not an IHL armed conflict is underway, consistent with the positions taken by the United States in the 1980s, and culminating with a statement of the US position on self-defense against terrorism and targeting terrorists in third-state safe havens by then-State Department legal advisor Abraham Sofaer in 1989. The point of the paper is to urge the Obama administration, and offer it advice, on how to preserve the legal category of targeted killing as an aspect of inherent rights of self-defense and US domestic law.

As such, this paper runs sharply counter to the dominant trend in international law scholarship, which is overwhelmingly hostile to the practice. It urges the Obama administration to consider carefully ways in which apparently unrelated, broadly admirable human rights goals, such as accepting extraterritorial application of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or accepting its standards as a complement to the lex specialis of IHL, or accepting recent soft-law standards offered by some influential NGOs such as the International Committee of the Red Cross to define "direct participation in hostilities," have the effect of making legally difficult, if not legally impossible, a counterterrorism strategy of targeted killing using standoff platforms that the Obama administration has correctly embraced as both more effective and more discriminating from a humanitarian stance. It is frank, practical advice to the Obama administration that it must assert the legality of its practices in the face of a hostile and influential international soft-law community or risk losing the legal rationale for a signature strategy.

The draft policy paper runs 20,000 words and is a Working Paper of the Series on Counterterrorism and American Statutory Law, a project of the Brookings Institution, the Georgetown University Law Center, and the Hoover Institution, none of whom are responsible for the contents of individual papers. A finalized version of the paper will appear in Benjamin Wittes, Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform (Brookings Institution Press 2009).

targeted killing, drone, predator, al Qaeda, counterterrorism, Pakistan, self-defense, international humanitarian law, terrorism, CIA, covert action, combatant, direct participation in hostilities

Abstract:
This short policy article argues that both the Bush administration, in its final two years in office, and Congress have an obligation and interest in taking US counterterrorism policy beyond the current "war on terror" operated on the basis of executive power and discretion, to comprehensively institutionalize it for the long term through Congressional legislation. It argues that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is mistakenly aimed merely at satisfying the narrow requirements of the Hamdan decision, and is far from the comprehensive legislation that institutionalizing counterterrorism policy requires in order both to have democratic legitimacy with the American people and to have a permanency that goes beyond the discretionary whims of any particular administration. The article very briefly lists topics which comprehensive legislation would address - surveillance, detention, rendition, interrogation and the definition of torture, a domestic intelligence agency, classified information reform, military tribunals, a special civilian counterterrorism court, legal protections for interrogators and indemnities to detainees for mistakes, rules on uses of force short of armed conflict, the role and interpretation of international law in US counterterrorism policy, and Congressional oversight. But it argues that the underlying issue is one of principles to guide counterterrorism policy, and that what matters first in Congressional legislation is the enactment of American values through a democratic process; the advantages accruing to executive discretion and its approach to counterterrorism have now been exhausted. Given profound disagreement among Americans as to the proper balance of national security and civil liberties, and as to what concretely constitutes such things as torture, degrading treatment, etc., the only appropriate mechanism for resolving such deep disagreement in a democracy is to require legislators to vote on actual techniques of interrogation and intelligence gathering - in detail, specific descriptions, without euphemism or generalities. Is, for example, waterboarding always torture and therefore always forbidden? Anything less than such specificity - a key failing of the Military Commissions Act - dodges the question of democratic legitimacy. Let legislators raise their hands and vote on the specifics that enact America's values, and reveal where precisely, without abstraction or platitudes, they locate the necessary tradeoffs between security and liberties.

Terror, terrorism, war on terror, counter terrorism, Hamdan, NSA, surveillance, Patriot Act, Detainee Treatment Act, Military Commissions Act, McCain Amendment, executive power, executive discretion, Yoo, neoconservatism, Iraq, interrogation, torture, CIA, Geneva Conventions, Guantanamo, jihad

Abstract:
This 1998 chapter from an edited book on religion and human rights argues that international human rights and liberal internationalism can be thought of partly as religious movements, with an eschatological world view of a politically unified world under an overarching moral doctrine of international human rights. Yet this same liberal internationalism-human rights eschatology can also be seen as the ideological project of a global new class, an emerging global bourgeoisie that sees itself at once in technocratic, yet redemptionist terms, driven by the material facts of economic globalization but motivated by a universalist religious vision. The chapter sharply criticizes the unstated assumption in the liberal international-human rights view that the universal is the same as the international, and instead argues that universal values and rights, determination of the content of which is asserted by liberal internationalism and the human rights movement to be in the exclusive competence of international institutions, might just as well be determined by democratic nation states. This is not, however, a claim of moral relativism, because it is skeptical not of the idea of universal values as such, but of the idea that they are only properly identified by international actors, rather than national or local ones. The chapter moreover argues that the claim that the international, rather than the merely national, is disinterested and therefore universal in determining universal values, incorrectly assumes that the international, merely because it is transgeographic, has no material or class interests and is therefore impartial and morally universal - on the contrary, this chapter argues, the international, far from universal, has all the interests of those who live and work transgeographically. This essay is strongly critical of the universalist claims of liberal internationalism and the international human rights movement, while also not accepting moral relativism as a critique of human rights claims. (Note: the pdf takes a minute or so to download.)

human rights, liberal internationalism, religion, new class, international law, global governance, international tribunals, International Criminal Court, jurisprudence

Abstract:
Microcredit is a widely practiced, widely revered technique of international development. It aims to increase incomes of the poor by giving them access to capital which can be used to create small businesses or other productive economic activity. Microcredit, despite its partly "market" approach to the capital needs of the poor, has a deeply ambivalent relationship with global capital and globalizing markets. It is an open question whether microcredit is an activity aimed at extending global markets by drawing the world's poor into them, or whether instead it seeks to be a mechanism creating "faux" markets which compensate the poor for their exclusion from world markets. Microcredit is both an extension of, and remedy for, the logic of global markets.

Microcredit, globalization, global markets, microfinance, global capital, nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations, international development, poverty, world people, women and poverty, NGO

Abstract:
Microcredit is a widely practiced, widely revered technique of international development. It aims to increase incomes of the poor by giving them access to capital which can be used to create small businesses or other productive economic activity. Microcredit, despite its partly market approach to the capital needs of the poor, has a deeply ambivalent relationship with global capital and globalizing markets. It is an open question whether microcredit is an activity aimed at extending global markets by drawing the world's poor into them, or whether instead it seeks to be a mechanism creating faux markets which compensate the poor for their exclusion from world markets. Microcredit is both an extension of, and remedy for, the logic of global markets.

Microcredit, globalization, global markets, microfinance, global capital, nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations, international development, poverty, world people, women and poverty, NGO

Abstract:
The war in Iraq requires a rethinking of the rules of conduct in war, international humanitarian law. The nature of asymmetric warfare in the conflict has turned out to be less a question of technological disparities than the weaker side turning to systematic violations of the laws of war as its method. Over time, we risk creating an international system in which it is tacitly assumed and permitted that the weaker side fight using systematic violations of the law as its method. Part of this trend arises from the biases of 1977 Protocol I which blessed activities of irregular forces operating without uniforms and commingled with civilians. While the United States rejected this protocol partly because it objected to reductions in the level of civilian protection in the protocol, it was endorsed by most leading human rights organizations, seemingly out of a preference for internationalism rather than caring about the fundamental substantial issue of civilian protection. The trend of the last twenty years which has shifted "ownership" of the laws of war - the ability for shape and interpret them - from leading militaries to international NGOs has gone too far, and "ownership" of the laws of war and their meaning needs to shift partly back to the "state practices" of leading democratic sovereign states that actually fight wars.

Human rights, laws of war, international law, international humanitarian law, nongovernmental organizations, International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Geneva Conventions, Protocol I, Iraq war, jus in bello, Nuremberg, victor's justice, prisoners of war, POW, collateral damage, just war theory, double effect

Abstract:
The war in Iraq requires a rethinking of the rules of conduct in war, international humanitarian law. The nature of assymetric warfare in the conflict has turned out to be less a question of technological disparities than the weaker side turning to systematic violations of the laws of war as its method. Over time, we risk creating an international system in which it is tacitly assumed and permitted that the weaker side fight using systematic violations of the law as its method. Part of this trend arises from the biases of 1977 Protocol I which blessed activities of irregular forces operating without uniforms and commingled with civilians. While the United States rejected this protocol partly because it objected to reductions in the level of civilian protection in the protocol, it was endorsed by most leading human rights organizations, seemingly out of a preference for internationalism rather than caring about the fundamental substantial issue of civilian protection. The trend of the last twenty years which has shifted "ownership" of the laws of war - the ability for shape and interpret them - from leading militaries to international NGOs has gone too far, and "ownership" of the laws of war and their meaning needs to shift partly back to the "state practices" of leading democratic sovereign states that actually fight wars.

Abstract:
Humanitarian inviolability - the ability of humanitarian agencies to be able to carry out their activities free from attack - depends upon the understanding that humanitarian agencies are neutral and impartial, but the very concept has been thrown into crisis, most spectacularly by the bombing attacks on the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross Baghdad headquarters in 2003. This article asks what the proper conceptual basis of humanitarian inviolability ought to be, and asserts that its traditional basis, neutrality, is insufficient morally to ground what humanitarian agencies do; it suggests that a better moral ground is rational incontestability of humanitarian aid at moments of extreme human need. At the same time, the article argues that most of the activities carried out by U.N. and NGO agencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are not neutral in this special humanitarian sense, but instead are nation building activities which are not neutral but which involve politically contestable choices; the tragedy of the attack upon the U.N. in Iraq was that it sought improperly to protect itself by appeal to humanitarian inviolability based upon rationally incontestable delivery of relief aid, when in fact it was engaged in nation building involving highly contestable political choices in the rebuilding of political and social institutions. Moreover, in order to situate itself as neutral as between Iraqi terrorist insurgents and the U.S., the U.N. sought to protect itself in effect by inviting attack upon U.S. occupation forces. The article criticizes U.N. comments after the attack upon the U.N. headquarter as improperly blaming the U.S., and instead invites the U.N. to reconsider the proper scope of neutrality and its relation to the U.N.'s necessarily politically value-laden role in nation-building. The article also criticizes the sense among NGO agencies that humanitarianism and humanitarian neutrality are the highest values and instead asserts that confronting moral evil, even with violence, is instead the highest value, and that neutral humanitarianism is always necessarily adjunct to that value.

Humanitarian aid, humanitarian relief, United Nations, non-governmental organizations, NGO, neutrality, International Committee of the Red Cross, Iraq, Afghanistan, nation building, occupation, Kofi Annan, Mark Malloch Brown, war, armed conflict, terrorism, Al Qaeda, Taleban, Taliban

Abstract:
The editors of the leading yearbook of global civil society studies offered to the authors of this article an opportunity to present a skeptical account of global civil society as the opening chapter in the 2004/5 yearbook. The article examines the standard account of global civil society as the transnational equivalent, in a globalized world, of civil society in a domestic society, and further as, in Kofi Annan's oft-repeated view, international NGOs as the representatives of the peoples of the world to international organizations such as the UN. The article attacks this standard view, arguing that the analogy between transnational NGOs and civil society organizations in a domestic democratic society is fatally flawed. Civil society does not act as the representative of citizens to a domestic democratic state, because citizens also vote; their democratic claims are not intermediated exclusively or even primarily by civil society organizations, but directly at the ballot box. International organizations are undemocratic and will always be that way, and international NGOs, for their part, cannot "represent" the peoples of the world and cannot substitute for democracy. The article then asks why international NGOs and international organizations such as the UN have so aggressively adopted the ideologically-laden language of civil society. The authors argue that this ideologically elevated language of civil society offers legitimation to each party - undemocratic international organizations gain faux-democratic legitimacy from international NGOs claimed to represent the peoples of the world, while NGOs gain legitimacy, access, and status as the people's representatives in global governance. The system nonetheless remains undemocratic and, the article suggests, undermines commitment to actual democracy by substituting values of human rights for democracy. The authors conclude by calling on international NGOs to give up faux-claims of representativeness and a promised role in global governance in favor of a return to narrower missions, discrete tasks, and measurement of success based on competence and efficiency. The article is a sharp attack upon inflated claims for global civil society, international organizations, and global governance.

Global Civil Society, international organizations, international law, nongovernmental organizations, NGO, international nongovernmental organizations, human rights, civil society, United Nations, liberal internationalism, sovereignty, democracy, democratic deficit, globalization, legitimacy

Abstract:
This short policy paper considers US counterterrorism policy with particular attention to treatment of detainees in matters of challenging detention, interrogation, trial of detainees, and release. It analyzes the existing US war on terror and considers future policies that would address both national security concerns and human rights/civil liberties concerns. The paper is written by two experts and advocates in counterterrorism-related issues, coming from the center right and the center left in American politics, as part of a project of the Stanley Foundation, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, which publishes papers by pairs of experts coming from conservative and progressive points on the political spectrum, on US foreign policy topics in preparation for the 2008 elections. The purpose of the joint essay is to explore common ground between political positions that might otherwise go unaddressed, while identifying differences in policy positions. Kenneth Anderson is research fellow with Stanford's Hoover Institution, and Elisa Massimino is Washington Director of Human Rights First, which has been a leading human rights advocate in issues of the war on terror.

terror, terrorism, Hamdan, Hamdi, Common Article Three, enemy combatatant, unprivileged belligerent, Guantanamo, detainees, war on terror, laws of war, counterterrorism, human rights, Geneva Conventions, Military Commissions Act of 2006, national security court, military commissions,

Abstract:
This article discusses the role of the United States military lawyer in projecting a moral vision of the laws of war, rather than simply acting in a technical and purely lawyerly fashion. The article argues that it is essential that US military lawyers acting in laws of war matters, and especially acting in diplomacy related to laws of war treaties, be willing to project the moral vision which underlies US military interpretations of the laws of war, beyond pure legalism, in order to compete with the moral visions of the laws of war expressed by human rights and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who, believing that they represent humanity in the abstract, rather than some set of parochially national interests, therefore believe that the interpretation, enunciation, evolution, and ownership of the laws of war properly belongs to NGOs and not to military establishments, and not to the US military establishment in particular. The article considers the cases of the Ottawa convention banning landmines, the International Criminal Court debates, and the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo to critique the failure of US military lawyers to assert a moral vision of the laws of war that goes beyond mere national interest or the interest of the United States as a client. It concludes with a call for US military lawyers and their institutional government client to find a role for military lawyers to express a moral vision based around the core concept of the protection of noncombatants, and move beyond mere legalism.

Laws of War, international humanitarian law, Geneva Conventions, military lawyers, nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, human rights, war, International Criminal Court, Protocol I, landmines, Guantanamo detainees

Abstract:
This paper is a response to Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, 'The Limits of International Law' (Oxford 2005), part of a symposium on the book held at the University of Georgia Law School in October 2005. The review views 'The Limits of International Law' sympathetically, and focuses on the intersection between traditional and new methodologies of international law scholarship, on the one hand, and the substantive political commitments that differing international law scholars hold, on the other. The paper notes that some in the symposium claim that the problem with 'The Limits of International Law' is that it improperly conflates the new rationalist methodologies of international law, such as rational choice theory, with substantive political outcomes in international law - particularly attachment to the sovereignty of states, as against the preferred political outcome of traditional international law scholars, liberal internationalism.

The paper argues, however, that the rationalist methodology of 'The Limits of International Law', if successful, essentially undercuts the substantive political claims of liberal internationalism, by denying to it the claim that the international legal order exercises an exogenous pull upon the behavior of states. If the rationalist methodology of 'The Limits of International Law' is successful, then the substantive political position of democratic sovereignty (rather than liberal internationalism) is effectively the last man standing as the bearer of idealist values in international law - there will be no point to considering liberal internationalism because it would exert no exogenous pull upon state behavior beyond what states would otherwise exhibit, whether from state interest or from a state's ideals and values. The stakes for the rationalist methodology are therefore considerable because the rational choice methodology of "The Limits of International Law" bears directly upon what substantive political positions are available as vehicles for values and ideals in the international order.

The paper also notes that the whole debate as to whether international law exerts an exogenous tug upon the behavior of states has a curious resemblance to debates in the philosophy of mind and intention - to the writings of analytic philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Elizabeth Anscombe - over the 'ghost in the machine' of intention and behaviorist skepticism about the ghost in the machine. International law's new rationalist methods thus somewhat resemble behaviorism's attempt the strip the ghost out of the machine, stripping the ghost of the exogenous pull and tug of international out of the machine by showing that it is, examined closely enough, simply a manifestation of state interest.

international law, rational choice, customary international law, realism, idealism, liberal internationalism, democratic sovereignty, sovereignty, multilateralism, democracy, public international law

Abstract:
The Bush Administration has tended to see international nongovernmental organizations in a pragmatic way, as functionally the international equivalent of domestic "volunteer" organizations. This article argues that the Bush Administration ought to see international nongovernmental organizations as organizations seeking to substitute so-called "international civil society," on the one hand, and public international organizations, on the other, for the authority of democratically sovereign states. Looking beyond the particular issues on which international NGOs press political agendas - human rights, environmentalism, etc. - the function of international NGOs is to delegitimize democratic sovereignty in favor of liberal internationalism. The article argues that the Bush Administration, rather than merely battling with international NGOs over particular issues, ought to aim to change the culture of the "international community" to recognize the virtues of democratic sovereignty over utopian internationalism.

Nongovernmental organizations, international NGOs, international nongovernmental organizations, liberal internationalism, sovereignty, democratic sovereignty, democracy, international civil society, international criminal court, Kyoto Protocol, foreign policy, civil society, United Nations, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, globalization

Abstract:
The Bush Administration has tended to see international nongovernmental organizations in a pragmatic way, as functionally the international equivalent of domestic "volunteer" organizations. This article argues that the Bush Administration ought to see international nongovernmental organizations as organizations seeking to substitute so-called "international civil society," on the one hand, and public international organizations, on the other, for the authority of democratically sovereign states. Looking beyond the particular issues on which international NGOs press political agendas - human rights, environmentalism, etc. - the function of international NGOs is to delegitimize democratic sovereignty in favor of liberal internationalism. The article argues that the Bush Administration, rather than merely battling with international NGOs over particular issues, ought to aim to change the culture of the "international community" to recognize the virtues of democratic sovereignty over utopian internationalism.

Nongovernmental organizations, international NGOs, international nongovernmental organizations, liberal internationalism, sovereignty, democratic sovereignty, democracy, international civil society, international criminal court, Kyoto Protocol, foreign policy, civil society, United Nations, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, globalization

Abstract:
This 2004 expert declaration was offered on behalf of defendant corporations in Agent Orange litigation heard before Judge Jack Weinstein in 2005 as part of an Alien Tort Statute action by Vietnamese individuals and associations. I have posted it to SSRN because of the numerous requests I have had for it, and as it has been cited in scholarship.

The Declaration starts by offering a basic discussion of the sources of international and in particular customary international law and the meaning and role of opinio juris, and their relation to ATS cases following the Sosa case. It then addresses laws of war issues relevant to the use of Agent Orange in the Viet Nam War - the discussion focuses on the law in the 1960s, but frequently draws comparisons to contemporary law of war. It has a special discussion of proportionality in the law of jus in bello, both then and now. The declaration further offers a detailed discussion of the meaning of poison and poisoned weapon in the context of the Hague Regulations of 1907, the 1925 Geneva Protocol, and the Chemical Weapons Convention, among others.

The Declaration then turns and takes up the question of corporate liability in international law, taking the view that it does not exist, and that ATS cases in US courts have created from whole cloth both civil liability in international law as well as liability for corporate, rather than individual, actors. It does so by analyzing relevant portions of the Nuremberg cases, and concludes by pointing out that although several important international law treaties, including the Statute of the International Criminal Court, have affirmatively considered corporate liability, in fact it has not been created in international law, despite numerous opportunities to do so. This portion of the Declaration has been particularly of interest to scholars examining corporate liability and ATS cases.

Agent Orange, Weinstein, Vietnam War, laws of war, international humanitarian law, Alien Tort Statute, ATS, corporate liability in international law, proportionality, Hague Regulations, Geneva Protocol, Chemical Weapons Convention, opinio juris, customary international law

Abstract:
This article was offered in 2001 as the Times Literary Supplement's main commentary the week following 9-11. The essay argues that 9-11 required war as a response, and challenges views expressed in the days following 9-11 by commentators such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and Michael Ignatieff that the proper response by the United States should be criminal law in nature - either international criminal law, through international tribunals or procedures, or domestic criminal law of the kind pursued in the first 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It further argues against the functional pacifism of many Christian theologians who, while approving of just war principles in theory, never manage to approve any actual war in practice. At the same time, the essay observes that the war on terror declared by President Bush, while comprising one or more particular wars, starting with war to topple the Taleban regime in Afghanistan, is a metaphorical war, akin to the War on Drugs, rather than an actual war. Appearing just a few days after 9-11, this essay makes a case for war as war, for soldiers and not policemen against terror.

terrorism, war on terror, terror, September 11, 9-11, World Trade Center, Taleban, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Michael Ignatieff, international tribunals, just war, war, armed conflict, pacifism, functional pacifism

Abstract:
This essay, originally prepared for a symposium on Guantanamo and international law, provides an brief overview of the elements that a comprehensive US counterterrorism should encompass. This overview is set against the question of how the US, as the world's superpower, ought to address its international law obligations. The essay then sets that question against the still-further question of what it means to be the superpower in a world that some believe is gradually evolving into a multipolar world, but which is currently a world of a conjoined US-international global system of security.

The essay defends the concept of counterterrorism as strategically best understood as war and rejects the concept of counterterrorism as mere law enforcement. Yet it also rejects the Bush administration's view that the war on terror is at all times and places a war in the legal sense of international humanitarian law. It points out that the most important strategic activities of counterterrorism - and its legal regulation - today lie in matters that are neither law enforcement nor actual war - in intelligence gathering, surveillance, detention, interrogation, and the use of force in abduction and targeted killing outside the scope of either criminal arrest or war in the strict legal sense. Those are the areas where policy ought in fact to be debated, including its legal and human rights aspects; these are the matters in which there are vast lacunae in law and policy.

The essay speaks against au courant liberal realism, arguing that not only is it morally wrong, but that its current version disingenously seeks to have its cake and eat it too - to apply hard realism to United States policy, but then salving its idealist conscience by appealing to the international community to act in idealist ways that it knows it cannot and will not. Finally, the essay warns against the post-Bush administration return to early-Clinton era meek multilateralism that, while apparently conciliatory and cooperative with allies and others on many issues, is simply cover for political passivity.

national security court, counterterrorism court, counterterrorism, terrorism, Bush administration, realism, idealism, liberal realism, Guantanamo, superpower, multipolar, unipolar, multilateralism, war on terror

Abstract:
This is the English language version of an essay (10,000 words) appearing in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), considering the history and future of the United Nations and global governance through the lens of Paul Kennedy's recent work, The Parliament of Man. The essay is highly skeptical of what it describes as platonism about the future of the UN as the seat of global governance. It offers an alternative view of how to consider the work of the UN, in three areas: security, economic development, and values. The essay argues that, particularly with the rise of new great power tensions and multipolarity, the fantastic dream of the UN as the seat of a gradually arising global government, as Kennedy imagines things, should be given up in favor of a UN devoted to a modest set of quotidian tasks and the place for the great powers to engage in multilateral discussion, argument, and negotiation. (This essay will also be posted in Spanish on SSRN in its final published form in the Revista de Libros.)

United Nations, UN, global governance, Paul Kennedy, Parliament of Man, multilateralism, collective security

Abstract:
This essay considers the respective roles of the United Nations and the United States in a world of rising multipolarity and rising new (or old) Great Powers. It asks why UN collective security as a concept persists, despite the well-known failures, both practical and theoretical, and why it remains anchored to the UN Security Council. The persistence is owed, according to the essay, to the fact of a parallel US security guarantee that offers much of the world (in descending degrees starting with NATO and close US allies such as Japan, but even extending to non-allies and even enemies who benefit from a loose US hegemony in the global commons such as freedom of the seas (leaving aside pirates)) important security benefits not otherwise easily obtained.

Much of the world can afford to pay lip service to UN collective security as an ideal, and to nourish it as a Platonic form, precisely because they do not have to depend upon it in fact. Not all the world falls within even the broadest conception of the US security umbrella, however, and these places include such locales as Darfur and other conflict zones in Africa. In those places, according to the paper, the US should engage with UN collective security to offer what the US will not, or cannot, offer directly.

The paper also argues that the Security Council should be understood, in a world of rising multipolarity especially, not as the "management committee of our fledgling collective security system," as Kofi Annan put it, or even as a concert of the Great Powers, but as simply the security talking shop of the Great Powers. Sometimes the Security Council can act as a collective security device, and sometimes as a concert of the Great Powers (e.g., the first Gulf War), but the condition of multipolarity argues that Great Powers are competitive and that the Security Council will find its limits, but also its role, mostly as the place for debate and argument, diplomacy successful or not - but not management of global security.

The essay also argues that those who want to see an end to loose US hegemony in favor of the supposed freedoms and sovereign equality of a multipolar world should think carefully about what they wish for. The dreams of global governance by international institutions turn out to have their greatest possibilities precisely in a world that, to a large extent, relies upon a parallel hegemon rather than collective institutions for its underlying order. In a multipolar, more competitive world, the winner is unlikely to be liberal internationalist global governance or UN Platonism or collective security, but instead the narrow, often directly commercial, interests of rising new powers such as China. The paper closes with policy advice to the United States on what it means and how it should - and should not - engage with the UN on security and the Security Council.

(The paper runs some 15,000 words and is part of a special symposium issue on a multipolar world.)

United Nations, Security Council, multipolar, international security, collective security, peacekeeping, UN reform, Peacebuilding Commission, Great Powers, NATO, multilateralism

Abstract:
This essay, intended as a chapter in a book on ethical issues in global philanthropy, analyzes the problematic relationship between the United Nations and global civil society. Offering a brief history of the ideological transformation of international NGOs into 'global civil society', it critiques the idea of global civil society as representing the world's peoples to international organizations. It notes, however, that the idea of global civil society is considered somewhat passe today as a vehicle of legitimacy for global governance - likewise, for that matter, the UN, also somewhat passe in leading intellectual circles as the chosen vehicle for the platonic ideal of global governance. Leading intellectuals of global governance today lean instead toward such ideas as global government networks and other forms of governance that look to technocratic expertise in particular, indeed narrow, areas as their source of (deliberately limited) legitimacy, rather than seeking broad-based political legitimacy for governance. The debate over the legitimacy of the UN via legitimation from global civil society, while of great importance, perhaps, to the UN and to global civil society, appears in important respects to have been by-passed by theorists of the technocracy that has no more 'global' ambition than to ensure that the internet arrives on time. (The essay proceeds through stylized, highly notional time periods as a means to offer a convenient way of characterizing different phases of conceptualization of global governance, global civil society, the UN, and legitimacy.)

United Nations, global governance, international NGOs, nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, UN, global civil society, transnational advocacy, social movements, legitimacy, global government networks, transnational government networks

Abstract:
This essay offers a review (4000 words) of "NGO Accountability: Politics, Principles and Innovations," Lisa Jordan and Peter van Tuijl, eds. (London: Earthscan 2006); following AJIL permission, it is given in unedited form and is available in final form in 103 AJIL 1 (January 2009).

International and transnational NGOs have been under criticism for alleged lack of accountability since they emerged into prominence in the 1990s. In recent years, the debate over NGOs has shifted from legitimacy and "representativeness" to accountability in the narrower senses of internal governance, fiduciary responsibility, relationships with national governmental authorities, and similar issues. The volume under review seeks to cover both aspects of the debate, with emphasis on the latter, narrower issues. The review essay argues that the debate over representativeness and legitimacy - accountability in the large sense - cannot be left aside, but continues to be present, if only because the incentives that led NGOs to claim to represent the 'peoples of the world' in the first place have not gone away but have instead merely been submerged under critical pressure. The review essay argues that the question of NGO accountability as a matter of claims to governance remain salient, because global civil society still seeks a role in global governance in a way that relies upon claims of representativeness and that is not satisfied by narrower mechanisms by which NGOs make themselves accountable for other, narrower purposes, such as internal corporate governance or fiduciary accountability for charitable assets.

Global governance, accountability, nongovernmental organizations, NGO, democratic accountability, global civil society,

Abstract:
This essay (6,000 words), which appeared in the Weekly Standard ostensibly as a comment on Mitt Romney's religion speech of December 2007, contains something to offend nearly everyone. It bluntly attacks presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and his evangelical followers for their demand for a Christian president, and calls them religious bigots.

The essay also rejects, however, a central claim of Romney's religion speech, that all religious doctrines are beyond criticism or political argument - asserting that Romney, in the attempt to insulate himself from any questions of religion, has endorsed what might be called conservative multiculturalism and moral relativism. The essay argues that this is a disastrous move not just for American conservatives, but for American politics more generally, and urges that liberal toleration has to be understood not as a form of relativism putting religious doctrine beyond scrutiny but instead as a liberal suspension of public judgment on matters that one might well believe one entitled to judge in private. In effect, if the question is what parts of a candidate's religious beliefs are properly subject to public political scrutiny, Huckabee and his evangelical followers say all-in; Romney says, all-out. Neither of those can be considered the answer of liberal toleration. The essay then proposes, in its second half, three rough rules of thumb for determining whether a proposition of religion believed by a candidate for public office ought to be considered fairly open for political discussion.

An enormously important reason why it matters that a liberal democracy get these answers right, the essay concludes, is that it matters today, in the world as it stands today, to be able to ask these questions of Islam, and of Muslim candidates. The answers to important questions - relations of church and state, apostasy, free expression, the status of women and gays, etc. - cannot simply be set aside. Either voters will not trust Muslim candidates and will simply refuse to elect them, because they are not allowed, under rules of multicultural political correctness (including Romney's conservative multiculturalism), to ask these questions - or we can put these questions properly on the table, while at the same time having liberal grounds for ignoring questions of doctrine having no substantial bearing on public policy. The former will save everyone's delicate feelings; only the latter, however, will provide the path for full participation in a democratic political community. (This essay is an unabashed, unapologetic jeremiad and it angered many readers when it first appeared.)

Mormon, Muslim, Islam, multiculturalism, toleration, relativism, Romney, Huckabee, Christianity, religion, evangelical, Hitchens, atheist, Bollinger, polygamy, citizenship, citizen, political community, identity politics

Abstract:
This article, published in a special post 9-11 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, offers a defense of the view that terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden should be tried, if captured, outside of regular US civilian courts and in some form of military commission.

The article argues that terrorists should be seen as criminals as well as enemies of the United States. Criminals who are simply deviants from the domestic social order are properly dealt with within the constitutionally constituted civilian court structure. Enemies who are not also criminals - legal combatants - are properly prisoners of war. Transnational terrorists are, however, best understood as both criminals and enemies - entitled neither to the full constitutional protections of the domestic political community but also not entitled to the protections as POWs.

The article analyzes the Third Geneva Convention and the requirements to be a legal combatant, as well as the procedures for determining who is or is not a legal combatant, and notes that the literal language of Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention does not require that a tribunal be constituted to make such determinations although, as a matter of policy, the article urges that 1997 Department of Defense regulations establishing such military tribunals be used.

International law, international humanitarian law, Geneva Conventions, laws of war, armed conflict, terrorism, military commissions, constitutional law, prisoners of war, legal combatants, unprivileged belligerent, illegal combatant, Protocol I, Al Qaeda

Abstract:
This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne State in early 2007) addresses risk assessment and cost benefit analysis as mechanisms in counterterrorism policy. It argues that although policy is often best pursued by agreeing to set aside deep foundational differences, in order to obtain a strategic plan for an activity such as counterterrorism, foundational differences must be addressed in order that policy not merely devolve into a policy minimalism that is always and damagingly tactical, never strategic, in order to avoid domestic democratic political conflict. The article takes risk assessment in counterterrorism, using cost benefit analysis, as an example of a foundational disagreement that cannot easily be elided. Examining an extreme, indeed crude, recent example of cost benefit analysis applied to the risks of terror and the costs of counterterrorism - John Mueller's widely noticed Overblown - the article suggests that cost benefit analysis, at least applied in this way, runs roughshod over other important values in counterterrorism policy, such as justice, but in addition, makes radical yet unstated assumptions about what cost benefit analysis seeks to compare in establishing counterterrorism policy or estimating the risks and costs of terrorism - unstated assumptions that, in fact, assume the conclusion. The article notes that cost benefit analysis tends to promote a policy-minimalizing "event specific catastrophism" - seeking above all to prevent simply the next, serial terrorist attack, with however no greater strategic vision. Indeed, the article says in conclusion (as Philip Bobbitt has noted) cost benefit analysis is "relentlessly tactical," not strategic; it also tends toward serial 'event specific catastrophism' as its analytic frame; and it is a method of evaluating proposed courses of action, not generating them, and hence promotes a strategically questionable tendency to reaction as a response to terrorism. This article presents these ideas in brief fashion, however, as the first draft in a larger project on cost benefit analysis and counterterrorism, and it does so by reference to a book that is unabashedly crude in its approach to both cost benefit analysis and terrorism/counterterrorism. The critical project will extend beyond this particular article, which is in effective a a first pass at developing a critique. It is also an article that does not extend beyond events of early 2007 (when the original address was given) and should be read in that light.

terrorism, counterterrorism, war on terror, cost benefit analysis, strategy, tactics, Mueller, Sunstein, Fallows, risk, uncertainty, Bobbitt

Abstract:
This essay is a book review from the Times Literary Supplement of Philip Bobbitt's widely remarked and admired Terror and Consent. The review compares Bobbitt's unabashedly strategic view of the response of democratic states to terrorism, and contrasts it with more narrowly cost-benefit analysis-driven approaches to responding to terrorism. The review criticizes 'tactical' approaches to terrorism as too focused upon 'event driven catastrophism'. The review considers Bobbitt's analysis of the changing nature of states, and the rise of what he calls the 'market-state'. The essay ends by querying whether the market-state, as Bobbitt conceives it, retains sufficient social capital in the form of citizen participation, rather than merely consumers engaged in passive consumerism, to defend the values of secular, Enlightenment based democracy against challenges posed by the religious fanaticism of jihadist terrorism.

Terrorism, counterterrorism, Bobbitt, strategy, tactics, war on terror, legitimacy, state, market, democracy, jihad

Abstract:
This article, written on the basis of the author's experiences monitoring Yugoslavia for Human Rights Watch in the years prior to the civil wars and through the beginnings of war to the end of 1992, argues that the Yugoslav federation under Tito's supposedly more liberal communism in fact adopted multiculturalism - group identities and group rights - rather than liberalism, with liberalism's focus on individual rights and identities. The paper analyzes the political theory underlying the breakup of Yugoslavia and argues that the policy of the regime, and particularly its intellectuals, deliberately obfuscated the difference between multiculturalism and liberalism, conflating the two and so making Yugoslavia appear both more liberal and more unified than it actually was. The article treats the breakup of Yugoslavia as a warning to Western democracies not to embrace multiculturalism and the management of difference through the embrace of top down illiberal strategies and urges that, instead, Western democracies should learn from the disasters of multiculturalism in Yugoslavia and adhere to liberal individual rights. Even though published in 1993, it offers an argument relevant today in debates over Islam and modernity, that societies such as that of the United States must choose modernity and liberalism over multiculturalism.

liberalism, multiculturalism, ethnic cleansing, civil war, human rights, modernity, just war, international law, group rights, identity theory, Tito, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Human Rights Watch

Abstract:
This short (3000 word) essay is intended to be a chapter in a book on globalization aimed at undergraduates, answering certain globalization questions in short yes/no chapters. Under certain circumstances international NGOs, when they treat themselves as "global civil society," make claims about representativeness and intermediation with respect to the "peoples of the world" in relation to international organizations and the international community. This short, simplified account of global civil society expresses considerable skepticism about such claims.

nongovernmental organizations, NGO, NGOs, global civil society, civil society, United Nations, UN, legitimacy, democracy, globalization

Abstract:
Establishment of the Ottawa Convention Banning Landmines was regarded by many international law scholars, international activists, diplomats and international organization personnel as a defining, 'democratizing' change in the way international law is made. By bringing international NGOs - what is often called 'international civil society' - into the diplomatic and international law-making process, many believe that the Ottawa Convention represented both a democratization of, and a new source of legitimacy for, international law, in part because it was presumably made 'from below'. This article sharply questions whether the Ottawa Convention and the process leading up to it represents and real 'democratization' of international law, challenges the idea that there is even such a thing as 'international civil society', at least in the sense that it is democratic and comes 'from below', and disputes that there can be such a thing as 'democratic' processes at the global level. It suggests, by way of alternative, that the Ottawa Convention and the process leading up to it should be seen as a step in the development of global transnational elites at the expense of genuinely democratic, but hence local, processes.

Abstract:
This reply declaration elaborates the November 2, 2004 declaration on behalf of corporate defendants by Kenneth Anderson in the Agent Orange product liability ATS case heard before Judge Jack B. Weinstein. I have posted the declaration and this reply declaration to SSRN because of frequent requests for them from academics and because the declaration has been cited in scholarship.

The reply declaration addresses the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the claim that its use in that period violated the laws of armed conflict. It discusses treaty and customary law of poison and poisoned weapons, issues of proportionality in the law of war, and sources of evidence for customary international law. In addition, it amplifies on views stated in the declaration that corporate and civil liability do not exist in international law, and discusses their status in international law with how these concepts are treated in US district court cases under the Alien Tort Statute.

Agent Orange, products liability, Vietnam War, Weinstein, customary interanational law, proportionality, corporate liability in international law, Alien Tort Statute, ATS, international law, laws of war, international humanitarian law, poison, poisoned weapons, Hague Regulations, Geneva Protocol

Abstract:
This 1996 essay reviews three books: Anthony T. Kronman, 'The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession' (Belknap 1993); Steven Brint, 'In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life' (Princeton 1994); and Christopher Lasch, 'The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy' (WW Norton 1995). The review essay argues that lawyers in the United States should be seen as part of the professional New Class who use the law as a monopoly in the management by elites of the rest of society. The review examines the history of New Class theory - especially as criticized by Steven Brint - and locates lawyers within it as a group characterized by claims to expertise. The essay suggests that, contrary to Kronman, the dissatisfactions of American lawyers has to do less with the loss of calling of a profession than with the simultaneous demand of New Class lawyers to be simultaneously therapeutic-legal managers of society while commanding market rate compensation for apparent legal expertise that consists in large part of rent-seeking for access to the public-private divide that the law polices. The requirements of the older form of the lawyer as respected authority within a particular community restricts the mobility essential to securing market compensation for expertise and access. The unhappiness that Kronman identifies within the legal profession is, according to the conclusion of the article, best explained that it is not a glorious profession because it is not a glorious class, and lawyers are right to be unhappy. This article predates the increasing focus of social theory on the globalized professional - lawyers, managers, NGO workers - but it points toward a form of critical analysis in social theory of the horizontal integration of a globalized bourgeois class that seeks to manage global masses at the expense of vertical leadership and integration with particular national and local communities.

class, new class, legal ethics, lawyering profession, social theory, lawyers, professions, sociology, experts, therapy, therapeutic, rights talk, globalization

Abstract:
This brief review (1100 words) examines Stephen Hopgood's half journalism-half anthropological journey inside the world of Amnesty International. The book is an outstanding piece of both reportage and analysis, and the review discusses the various pressures, political and ideological and social, on AI and those that work in its International Secretariat. As the review notes, AI is more like a religious order than anything else, and that observation has ramifications for the NGO world beyond AI.

Amnesty International, human rights, nongovernmental organizations, NGO, multiculturalism, liberal internationalism

Abstract:
This is the original Spanish language version of an essay (10,000 words) appearing in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), considering the history and future of the United Nations and global governance through the lens of Paul Kennedy's recent work, The Parliament of Man. The essay is highly skeptical of what it describes as platonism about the future of the UN as the seat of global governance. It offers an alternative view of how to consider the work of the UN, in three areas: security, economic development, and values. The essay argues that, particularly with the rise of new great power tensions and multipolarity, the fantastic dream of the UN as the seat of a gradually arising global government, as Kennedy imagines things, should be given up in favor of a UN devoted to a modest set of quotidian tasks and the place for the great powers to engage in multilateral discussion, argument, and negotiation.

United Nations, Paul Kennedy, global governance, Parliament of Man, UN, Security Council, General Assembly, Nato, international security, development, human rights, Kofi Annan, Ban Ki Moon

Abstract:
This review essay from the Times Literary Supplement (London) examines what it means to be an amateur, looking at musical performance and composition, in a world in which performance has become increasingly professionalized. It points out that although we often think of 'amateur' in the sense that Wayne Booth, the literary critic, meant in his memoir (For the Love of It) of what it meant to be a passionate, yet amateur, cellist - the sense of someone who will never be as skilled as the professional who makes it his or her life work, there is in fact another meaning. There are non-professionals - musicians who do not make their livings by music -and hence, on Booth's definition, count as 'amateurs', who do so because their consumate dedication to their art, however esoteric and unmarketable it might be, precludes it from having a commercial audience. Charles Ives was one such composer, who made his living as an insurance executive, and refused to make any compromises in his atonal, modernist music. The essay considers, therefore, the effect of commodification on the making and composition of music and, by extension, the arts.

Music, amateur, amateurism, Charles Ives, Wayne Booth, commodification, art, cello, profession, professionalism, commercial, commerce

Abstract:
This review essay from the Revista de Libros (Madrid) is a Spanish translation and adaptation of a review that originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (London) in September 2006, of Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons (Profile/Yale UP 2006). (Traducido del ingles por Luis Gago, Revista de Libros.)

El ensayo considera los argumentos sobre el neoconservadurismo ofrecidos por Francis Fukuyama - tanto la historia intelectual del neoconservadurismo como un analisis de sus exitos y fracasos.

(The review praises Fukuyama's sober and careful intellectual history of neoconservatism, and breaks the idea down into seven interrelated propositions. It considers Fukuyama's argument that neoconservatives violated their own tenets in undertaking the Iraq war, particularly the neoconservative skepticism about grand social engineering projects and the neoconservative belief that these typically lead to unanticipated bad consequences. Fukuyama also argues that the Iraq war and the project of Middle East democratization miss the fundamental point about Islamist extremism, which is that it is primarily a phenomenon of Muslims adrift in modernity in the West, particularly Western Europe, rather than the Middle East. The review accepts much of this critique but uses it to offer a critique of Western multiculturalism, arguing instead for a re-embrace of traditional liberalism - a substantive liberalism that embraces free expression, the rights of women, and values that multiculturalism suppresses.

While accepting that the book is persuasive on a neoconservative naivete concerning Iraq and what force can do, it argues that there is a much more sophisticated neoconservatism in the form of realists who came to realize that the acceptance of corrupt, brutal, and repressive authoritarian regimes in the name of stability, accommodation, and containment had paved the way for much of the current Islamist extremism, and that the old realism could no longer serve. This not-naive realism-into-idealism is not really addressed by Fukuyama's critique. In any case, Fukuyama's positive program - a vague multilateralism, what he calls realistic Wilsonianism appears to be simply the traditional liberal internationalism with somewhat less emphasis on the UN; it does not appear to be capable of anything other than ineffectuality.)

neoconservadurismo, Iraq, Francis Fukuyama, terrorismo, Islam, Islamismo, realismo, idealismo, multilateralismo, democracia

Abstract:
This very short (2000 words) online opinion piece addresses the question of why the author gave up home delivery of the New York Times. It argues that, quite apart from issues of political bias, the New York Times has successively moved to turn itself from a newspaper into a magazine, and, in facing the pressures of the Internet economic model, into a device for creating, caring for, and feeding the newspaper's "online communities" - a business model increasingly based on selling cultural participation in shared-bias-communities. The Times is moving toward a content model that presumes that its readers read it for free online, which is to say, the limited factual content that can be supported through the highly limited revenue stream of online ads - and the author has decided to pay at the discounted rate at which the Times, looking at the evolution of its content, values its readers. It increasingly treats its readers as online; why should anyone pay any different?

New York Times, media, media economics, media business model, newspapers, newspaper economics, online advertising

Abstract:
This essay reviews a book by distinguished cultural critic Wendy Kaminer on the rise in American society of culturally and politically powerful forces of irrational belief that have become increasingly able to impose what amounts to their private pieties on the polity and the public square. Kaminer has a wide range of targets in mind, ranging across the religious and belief spectrum, from Christian creationists to New Age occultists. She argues that the prevalent multicultural ethic gives them ground to demand that their beliefs be taken seriously and not effectively challenged on rational grounds.

public policy; new age; occultism; organized religion; enlightenment; philosophe; skeptic; homeopathy; homeopath; Wendy Kaminer; Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials; Irrational; secular humanism; liberal; recovered-memory syndrome; social behavior; authoritarianism; progressive; relativism

Abstract:
This essay reviews a book of cultural criticism directed against what the author, Henry Giroux, regards as the corporate manipulation of culture, particularly the culture of children, by corporate interests, particularly the Disney company. The review argues that, contrary to Giroux's argument, Disney and such corporations relentlessly press the message of American left-liberal politically correct piety.

Corporate America, Consumption, Henry A. Giroux, Christopher Zasch, Disney Corporation; Children; Learn; Social Justice; Patriarchy; Machismo; Gender; Progressive; Cultural; Social Agenda; Political Agenda; Popular Will; General Will; Force; Corporatism; Noncommodified Public Sphere

Abstract:
This brief 1994 book review essay (5500 words) examines Telford Taylor's memoir, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (1992). The review is a personal one, set against two things - the author's work, while reading Taylor's memoir, in Iraq for Human Rights Watch leading a forensic team excavating Kurdish victims of the 1988 al-Anfal campaign, and the diplomatic discussions leading to the formation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. The essay argues that the Nuremberg trials, according to Taylor, had a certain deflationary emotional affect - deliberately ratcheting down the emotions of what had occurred to the limited world of the courtroom. It was able to do that because the WWII allies had been willing to pay the price of victory and had 'earned' the right to conduct a trial. The Yugoslavia tribunal, by contrast, and at that time, was premised on a claim to universal justice that did not depend upon the willingness of its sponsors to intervene in the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia. "Nuremberg was a lovely hood ornament," said one of the author's unnamed sources, a senior European military judge advocate, "on the ungainly vehicle that liberated Western Europe, but it was not a substitute for D-Day."

Nuremberg, Telford Taylor, war crimes, genocide, international tribunals, ICTY, Al Anfal, Human Rights Watch, Kurdistan, Iraq

Abstract:
This law journal note dating from the Central American civil wars of the 1980s discusses ways in which the US Congress could impose detailed action requirements related to human rights as a condition of continuing US military assistance to the government of El Salvador.

Protection; Human Rights; Abuses; Foreign Assistance Act; El Salvador; Certification Requirement; Action Specific; Country Specific; Gross Violations; Arms Export Control Act; National Guardsmen; Good Faith Progress; Good Faith Efforts; Specter Amendment; Archdiocese of San Salvador

Abstract:
This is a review from the 1995 Times Literary Supplement of a book on the violent Waco encounter between federal law enforcement agents and members of the Branch Davidian religious cult that left many people, including many children, dead. The book presents the available evidence at what preceded the Reno Justice Department decision that sufficient evidence of child abuse was taking place that forcible intervention was warranted, as well as what transpired in the showdown. The book remains a standard account.

Waco, David Koresh, Branch Davidian Compound, FBI, CS tear-gas, Blow Up, Fire, Fire-fighter, Law Enforcement, Religious Sect, Patriot, Janet Reno, US Congressional Hearings, US Treasury Agents, Conspiracy, Hubris, Gas Mask, Children, Expose, War Crimes, Laws of Armed Conflict, Collateral Damage

Abstract:
This essay reviews books on Guatemalan and Mayan culture, art, politics, and society. The books under review range from an anthropological-art history examination of the altar carving of a famous church in Santiago Atitlan to accounts of the culture and politics of indigenous Mayan peoples of Guatemala.

Guatemala; Santiago; Atitlan; Altar; Art and Society; Highland Maya Community; Chavez; Christenson; sculpture; ritual; civil war; village; military; Chiapas; poor; global capitalism; cultural resilience

Abstract:
This essay reviews a book about General Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian strongman toppled by the Bush Sr. administration in 1989; Noriega was tried on drug charges in Miami and has spent many years in prison. This book examines Noriega's background and rise to power, involvement in drugs and politics in Central America, including the famous murder of Hugo Spadafora, and his trial in the United States. The book's author covered the trial for newspapers; the review's author monitored human rights in Panama in the two years prior to the US invasion and covered the invasion for human rights organizations.

General Manuel Noriega; Diaz Herrera; Panama City; Priest; Troops; Steve Albert; William Hoeveler; Trial; Politics of American Justice; Prisoner-of-War; International Law; Third Geneva Convention; Dictator; Invasion of Panama; Interventionist; Combat; Security Council; Somalia; Haiti; Intervention

Abstract:
The rise of international criminal law has been one of the remarkable features of international law since 1990. One of the less-explored questions of international criminal law is its social effects, within the international community and the community of public international law, in other parts and activities of international law. In particular, what are the effects of the rise of international criminal law and its emerging system of tribunals on the rest of the laws of armed conflict? What are the effects upon apparently unrelated aspects of humanitarian and human rights law? What are the effects upon other large systems and institutions of public international law, such as the UN and other international organizations? As international criminal law has emerged as a visible face of public international law, has it supplanted or even ‘crowded’ other aspects and institutions of public international law? This brief article offers a high-altitude, high-speed look at the effects of international criminal law on other parts of public international law and organizations.

Abstract:
This working monograph (about 120,000 words) analyzes the relationship between public international organizations such as the United Nations system and international non-governmental organizations under conditions of globalization. It argues that international organizations and international NGOs are locked in an embrace of mutual legitimation, each giving the other important political legitimacy, in favor of liberal internationalism and at the expense of democratic sovereignty. The monograph argues that the legitimacy that each gives the other is based on flawed assumptions about the nature of civil society and "international civil society," on the one hand, and global governance and the possibilities of international, global democracy, on the other. It concludes by calling for a strengthening of democratic sovereignty as against liberal internationalism.

International organizations, non-governmental organizations, NGOs, civil society, international civil society, legitimacy, globalization, democracy, international law, sovereignty, human rights, international elites, United Nations, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, anti-globalization, new social movements

Abstract:
This 1997 review in the Times Literary Supplement (London) conjoins two books - the first, by investment banker turned finance historian Peter L. Berstein, is a history of the idea of risk, as it developed from Renaissance times through contemporary finance. The second, by the former editor of the derivatives journal Risk, Lillian Chew, is an account of contemporary financial derivatives and their uses and abuses. The point of linking these two books in a single review is to point out that the basic ideas behind today's financial derivatives - forms of forwards, options, swaps, and so on - are very old. The analysis of risk dates back to the Renaissance, and in particular to a debate between Pascal and Fermat over the issue of how to divide the stakes in an incomplete game. It is noteworthy that although the two mathematicians framed the issue as game theory, for Pascal, at least, the issue was very much theological as well - it had bearing on the formulation of his famous Pascal's Wager. Bernstein notes, however, that the systematic analysis of risk, while old, is not ancient - classical philosophy, science, and mathematics had no concept of risk analysis, which had its origins in medieval Arab algebra, and indeed, the very idea was seen as a challenge to God, divine will, and fate - it was, in Berstein's view, a key cultural component in the growth of the secular West. Chew picks up the story in the 1990s, with the development of sophisticated financial instruments which, no matter how sophisticated, still play off the basic concept of leverage with borrowed money - hence, for all the complexity, they either hedge against risks or magnify them. She offers several telling accounts of disasters with derivatives from the 1990s, such as the Orange County default. Her account of derivatives is lucid and remarkably accessible to the nonspecialist and much recommended even a decade later.

Risk, finance, finance history, derivatives, swaps, forwards, futures, options, financial instruments, leverage, Pascal, Fermat

Abstract:
This essay originally appeared in the LA Times book review as an obituary essay on Dominique Aury, author (under the name Pauline Reage) of the pornographic classic Story of O. The essay argues that Story of O is a fairy tale in which the heroine, O, seeks to escape from modernity's enforced virtues of equality, freedom, and choice into a world of the virtues of hierarchy - the eroticized analogues of religious submission. The novel is driven forward by a downward spiral in which O seeks to surrender herself to her masters and so escape from modernity's insistence on liberty and equality. In each instance, however, O's submission is permitted only upon the condition imposed by her masters that she consent to her enslavement, thus returning her to the condition of freedom and equality. In each iteration of the novel's trademark sado-masochism, she abases herself still further in seeking a submission that would carry her outside of modernity's conditions, and cannot obtain it. The essay also comments on the relationship of the fairy tale-novel to Aury's own life and the lover for whom she wrote it, the eminent editor and critic Jean Paulhan. (Note: The PDF takes a little while to download.)

sadism, masochism, Story of O, sado-masochism, submission, dominance, S&M, sexuality, bondage, discipline, Dominique Aury, Pauline Reage, Jean Paulhan, pornography, eroticism, virtue, hierarchy, equality, freedom, liberty, submission, consent

Abstract:
This 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Review essay examines Richard and Joan Ostling's account of contemporary Mormonism in the United States. Richard Ostling, a reporter for Time Magazine, obtained extensive access to Mormon Church officials in the course of researching the book, and it gives the fullest account available currently of Mormon life in America. The review finds the book to be very evenhanded and objective, and perhaps the best introduction to the Mormon faith extant today, whether by Mormon church members or non-members.

Mormon, Mormonism, Joseph Smith, Mormon Church, Book of Mormon, Ostlings, Rigoberta Menchus, History, Theology, Brigham Young, Ezra Taft Benson, Mormon Fundamentalism

Abstract:
This review of Francis Fukuyama's widely noticed repudiation of American neoconservatism appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (London). The review praises Fukuyama's sober and careful intellectual history of neoconservatism, and breaks the idea down into seven interrelated propositions. The review considers Fukuyama's argument that neoconservatives violated their own tenets in undertaking the Iraq war, particularly the neoconservative skepticism about grand social engineering projects and the neoconservative belief that these typically lead to unanticipated bad consequences. Fukuyama also argues that the Iraq war and the project of Middle East democratization miss the fundamental point about Islamist extremism, which is that it is primarily a phenomenon of Muslims adrift in modernity in the West, particularly Western Europe, rather than the Middle East. The review accepts much of this critique but uses it to offer a critique of Western multiculturalism, arguing instead for a re-embrace of traditional liberalism - a substantive liberalism that embraces free expression, the rights of women, and values that multiculturalism suppresses. While accepting that the book is persuasive on a neoconservative naivete concerning Iraq and what force can do, it argues that there is a much more sophisticated neoconservatism in the form of realists who came to realize that the acceptance of corrupt, brutal, and repressive authoritarian regimes in the name of stability, accommodation, and containment had paved the way for much of the current Islamist extremism, and that the old realism could no longer serve. This not-naive realism-into-idealism is not really addressed by Fukuyama's critique. In any case, Fukuyama's positive program - a vague multilateralism, what he calls realistic Wilsonianism appears to be simply the traditional liberal internationalism with somewhat less emphasis on the UN; it does not appear to be capable of anything other than ineffectuality.

Fukuyama, Iraq war, multiculturalism, Islam, Islamism, jihad, terror, terrorism, neoconservative, neoconservatism, foreign policy, realism, idealism, realistic Wilsonianism, development, political Islam, End of History

Abstract:
This 2000 review essay from the Los Angeles Times Book Review examines the perennial debate over teaching reading to children - phonics or whole language. It focuses first on the 2000 report of the National Reading Panel of the National Institutes of Health, a study examining reading pedagogy limited to statistically defensible studies, rather than anecdotal reports in education journals. That report, in carefully couched language, endorses the use of phonics while acknowledging the importance of (eventually) learning to read 'in context'. The NIH study indeed concludes that the characteristics of phonemic awareness "most effective in enhancing" reading and spelling skills included "explicitly and systematically teaching children to manipulate phonemes." The review concludes, on the basis of that report and other recent books on reading, that the phonics arguments clearly have the better argument grounded in actual evidence. It addresses the political and ideological undertones to the debate - the recent election of Bush as the No Child Left Behind president, and the association of phonics instruction with conservative reformers - and discussing the writings of Gerald Coles, who endorses whole language pedagogy as a mechanism for left-wing social change, for pedagogy and schools as ideological agents of progressive social change, going far outside any agenda of teaching reading. It takes up broader critiques of prevailing self-esteem pedagogy from the right-wing in Maureen Stout's The Feel Good Curriculum. It ends with a discussion of practical ways in which parents can address gaps in their children's reading skills through Diane McGuinness's provocative, useful, but somewhat over-confident (given the state of current scientific evidence as found in the NIH report) advice to parents on dealing with remediation. The general conclusion of the review is that given by linguist Steven Pinker in the preface to McGuinness's book: "Language is a human instinct, but written language is not ... Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on. This basic fact about human nature should be the starting point for any discussion about how to teach our children to read and write."

reading, phonics, whole language, Steven Pinker, Gerald Coles, National Reading Panel, self-esteem, education, language, linguistics, No Child Left Behind,

Abstract:
This Times Literary Supplement (London) review essay from 1996 takes up Hillary Rodham Clinton's It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us, and Emmy E. Werner's, Pioneer Children on the Journey West. The review takes a tough line against the therapeutic yet simultaneously authoritarian ethic of Clinton's book; it argues that Clinton has essentially conflated a set of local community institutions - places of identity - with state institutions of therapeutic and social control - bureaucratic loci of state management of deracinated, passive individuals. It sets this against the ethic of responsibility evoked in the diaries of girls making the journey westwards in 19th century America; Emmy Werner, for her part, curiously tries to read into those accounts of responsibility, independence, and self-reliance a history of trauma and weakness that would benefit from contemporary therapeutic management. The review essay attacks both books as promoting the hegemony of the helping professions and its authoritarian management of an increasingly more helpless populace.

Children, West, Dunblane, Wolverhampton, Social Category, Embedded, Emmy E. Werner, Westward Journey, Literacy, therapy, therapeutic, authoritarianism, helping professions, Survivor Children, Poverty, Vulnerability, At Risk, Stress, Trauma, Altruism, Mutualism, Hillary Rodham Clinton, thera

Abstract:
Regardless of whether one believes that the war on terror should be an aggressive, forward-based, offensive war as the Bush administration does, or instead something not conceived as a war at all, as many Democrats do, it is long since time for Congress to take steps to legislate US counterterrorism policy. Only the people's representatives - the legislature - have the democratic legitimacy to establish long term counterterrorism policy. What would comprehensive counterterrorism policy look like? The issues that matter most are not technocratic ones of institutional design, important as those are - but instead values issues, America's values in the struggle against jihadist terror. They include surveillance, detention and rendition, interrogation and torture, classification of information, and the establishment of special terrorism courts. The Bush administration should mark well that what lives by executive discretion dies by executive discretion, and if the war on terror is as important as it thinks it is, it should be willing to institutionalize it through legislation.

terror, war on terror, September 11, surveillance, FISA, interrogation, Guantanamo, torture, detention, laws of war, classified information, terrorism courts

Abstract:
This 1995 Times Literary Supplement (London) review examines John L. Brooke's impressive The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology 1644-1844. Brooke argues against long prevailing scholarship that, on the one hand, views Mormon theology as genuinely American and, on the other hand, understands it purely functionally - without regard for its theological content, but instead as a function of social pressures on impoverished populations in upstate New York from whence came Joseph Smith. The former view is incorrect, Brooke says, because the roots of Mormon theology lie in Europe in gnostic and splinters of the "radical reformation" that lay outside both the "magisterial reformation" and Puritanism, and was concealed beneath of the social suface of religiously radical, yet extremely un-Puritan, religious communities of the British and Scandanavian periphery. Mormon cosmology owes a great debt to gnosticism. The latter, sociological functionalism, is inadequate to explain the content of Mormon theology and why it, rather than the myriad social movements in upstate New York and surrouding areas, had such appeal. Brooke offers a new explanation of and for Mormon theology that accounts for it theologically, historically, and sociologically, locating it firmly within a radical gnostic tradition outside of and on the periphery of traditional Protestantism, both outside the magisterial reformation and Puritanism. It accounts in part for why - given its early embrace of polygamy, scripture outside of the Bible, and a host of still more seemingly non-traditional Christian doctrines - Mormonism has always seemed so different from the rest of Christianity.

Mormonism, Mormons, Joseph Smith, Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, Brigham Young, gnosticism, reformation, Puritanism, Adam, Bible, Book of Mormon, mysticism, Christianity, magic, purity, danger

Abstract:
The Swiss playwright and novelist Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-90) is remembered among English-language audiences primarily as the author of the 1956 play, The Visit of the Old Lady. He is, however, a leading playwright and novelist, primarily of detective fiction, of Europe and the German language in the post-war period. This review from the Wall Street Journal examines the full body of his work in a three volume selection of his writings published by the University of Chicago. One important consideration is Durrenmatt's place as a German language writer, yet Swiss, rather than German, following the horrors of the Second World War. Durrenmatt spent the war as a neutral in Switzerland, looking on rather than participating; his writing, however, is centrally about justice. The review briefly argues that neutrality has moral limits, and that even neutrality in the service of humanitarianism - of the kind exemplified by the heroism of the International Committee of the Red Cross, headquartered in Switzerland and long the moral pride of Switzerland - has its limits. If everyone wants to be the neutral humanitarian, then evil will inevitably triumph; you cannot have the ICRC without also having Churchill, and neutrality is therefore always a derivative moral virtue.

Durrenmatt, Switzerland, International Committee of the Red Cross, Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, World War II, neutrality, humanitarianism, ICRC

Abstract:
This 1995 Times Literary Supplement essay examines two books on the underlying philosophies of the ecology and environmentalism movements. The first, by Sorbonne professor and lately French Minister of Culture Luc Ferry, offers a critique of ecological philosophies that seek to de-privilege humanity in favor of a larger conception of nature. Ferry writes in a breezy, witty style which has at its aim reasserting liberal humanism and its human-centered ethic as against any ethic that treats human beings as merely species or merely thing within nature. The review argues that Ferry goes over the top in making his case, however, by invoking the historical fact that the Nazis had a special love of animals and nature; Ferry seeks to link anti-modernity trends in environmentalist philosophy with ugly forms of illiberalism - ignoring, among other things, the Nazi infatuation with modernity. Zimmerman, a serious Heideggerian philosopher as well as radical environmentalist, offers a commanding philosophical overview of the conceptual trends within radical ecology - deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism. Their differences are many; all three, however, reject both liberal humanism and accomodationist gradualist environmentalism of the kind upon which virtually all actual environmental public policy is based. Zimmerman, according to the review, impressively argues the case for radical ecology as an ethic; the review suggests, however, that his appeal to postmodernism gives his the necessary freedom and relativism to reach his conclusions, but that ultimately, being committed to some reasonably objective concept of progressivism, he backs away from postmodernism into precisely the modernity that he began by arguing against.

Our Natural Selves, The New Ecological Order, Luc Ferry, Deep Ecology, Philosopher, Anthropocentrism, Saint-Julien Trial, Natural Rights, Mineral King, Aquinas, Augustine; Ecology, Radical Ecology, Deep, Anthropocentric Humanism, Social Ecology, Egalitarian, postmodernism, emancipation, modernity

Abstract:
This obituary essay on the final book by the cultural critic Christopher Lasch appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995. The essay examines Lasch's final work, The Revolt of the Elites, against the rest of his body of writing. In particular, it examines Lasch's populism and stance against the increasingly transnatonal elites loosely characterized as the New Class. It discusses Lasch's emphasis on the family as the locus of what remained a significantly Freudian cultural discourse, and examines the ways in which Lasch saw the family as being taken apart and then reassembled according to the mores of the administrative state. The review essay concludes by asking to what extent Lasch was a communitarian, and what role he assigned elites in society.

Christopher Lasch, communitarianism, New Class, social theory, family, cultural criticism, transnational elites, administrative state

Abstract:
Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency is one of the most important evaluations of the Bush Administration's War on Terror to come from inside the administration. More than just a memoir, the book offers a cogent historical and legal analysis of the profound dilemmas that confront administration officials caught between competing demands of protecting the American public while respecting civil liberties. The review sympathetically considers the issues as presented in the book, and traces through the ways in which these difficult matters, all the ones that have confronted the Bush administration and created so many political disputes, will continue to confront its successors of either political party. The review agrees with Goldsmith that there is no magic formula by which they will go away.

Jack Goldsmith, war on terror, counterterrorism, Bush administration, David Addington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, civil liberties, national security, office of legal counsel, Hamdan, Hamdi, Boumediene, executive power, torture memos, enemy combatant

Abstract:
This 1997 Times Literary Supplement (London) essay reviews the 1996 Star Trek (Next Generation) film First Contact, along with a book of essays in cultural studies about Star Trek (Taylor Harrison, et al., Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek). Of greatest long term interest in the moral and political philosophy of Star Trek is the so-called Prime Directive - non interference in local culture on local planets. This Vietnam era ethic of cultural relativism was prominent in the original 1960s Star Trek series as much for its assertion as for being regularly violated by Captain Kirk and his crew. The review essay argues that among liberal elites, cultural relativism has transmogrified from a doctrine of do-your-own-thing of the sixties and seventies into a doctrine of liberal authoritarianism justified, peculiarly, on a claim of cultural relativism - transformed into the ideology of multiculturalism. the liberal authoritarian argument of the 1990s was, according to the review essay, that since standards are all relative and hence arbitrary, those that apply might as well be mine if I have the political will and power to do so. The essay describes the iron cage of relativism, leading to arbitrariness and authoritarianism precisely because, lacking any claim of even provisional objectivity, there is no place outside where a moral reformer might stand and deliver an immanent moral critique. (Note: The pdf takes a minute or so to download.)

Star Trek, moral relativism, cultural relativism, authoritarianism, multiculturalism, Prime Directive, cultural studies

Abstract:
This 1996 Times Literary Supplement essay examines two very different books about aspects of warfare. Robert O'Connell's Ride of the Second Horseman is a speculative history of the rise of warfare among human beings, looking back to early human beings. It is a striking account, even though speculative, because it deals in early human behavior without offering an explanation from evolutionary biology. O'Connell acknowledges that non-human species can engage in warfare, and specifically notes ants. In that process, he carefully distinguishes - as few writers do - between aggression, violence, weapons use, predation, and war. His conclusion is that although both ants and humans engage in warfare, and although ants do so as a genetic adaptation, war among human beings is a cultural adaptation (and a late one at that) to ecological conditions of resource scarcity. He offers an account of the rise of war based around the domestication of plants and animals, and the tempting targets for raiders of the fruits of agriculture - really taking off into warfare with the domestication of the horse, on the one hand, and the development of the walled city, on the other. Siege warfare, war against the walled city, is therefore the most ancient form of warfare - and, then as today, the most brutal and unsparing of noncombatants. Shawn Roberts considers the threat posed by landmines especially in civil wars, and the way in which they create long term problems for peace and reconstruction.

Robert L. O'Connell, history, warfare, Ride of the Second Horseman, genetic, human behaviour, human aggression, weapons possession, prehistory, American liberalism, sociobiological, haplodiploidism, class, ideology, religion, nomad, farmer, soldier, war, civil war, Bosnia, peacekeeping forces

Abstract:
This essay from the Times Literary Supplement (23 May 2003) reviews books on Lincoln's speeches and writings, particularly the Second Inaugural Address. It examines the transition from the First Inaugural Address to the Second Inaugural Address, finally focusing on how Lincoln seeks to steer between moral relativism about the war - each side does as it sees right - and moral absolutism. The books under review are: William E. Gienapp, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography; Daniel Farber, Lincoln's Constitution; Christopher A. Thomas, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life; Ronald C. White, Jr., Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural Address; and James Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision: The Second Inaugural Address.

Lincoln, Civil War, slavery, Second Inaugural Address, moral relativism, Lincoln Memorial, Constitution, equality, liberty

Abstract:
This 1997 review in the Times Literary Supplement covered the then, as now, incendiary issue of the nude photography of children and adolescents. It reviewed photobooks by two leading photographers of children in the nude, Jock Sturges and David Hamilton. Sturges, an American, photographed mainly on nude beaches in France and Europe, often following the same families and children for years on end; he had been indicted on child pornography charges in the 1908s, although the jury took only a few minutes to find for him. Hamilton, British, has photographed in France and in various islands. The photography of child and adolescent nudes is contrasted with Michael Graffenried's photography of older adults in long-standing European nudist and sun-worshipping camps, and with Laura Kipnis' argument that the regulation of pornography in America has a firm class basis (this argument has received its most famous airing in Judge Richard Posner's famous - and overturned - opinion invalidating regulations against nude exotic dancing in strip clubs that nonetheless made exceptions for artistic nude expression in the dance department of the local university).

The review argues that the intense anxiety over the nude photography of children is a result of the religious right and the authoritarian left in America having 'sacralized' childhood as the last transcendental object. Even to make a photograph of a nude child is to profane it. The review asks why this is.

This anxiety - legal as well as aesthetic - emerges in Sturges' work in the extreme formality of his portraits - his use of a box camera requiring considerable time to obtain an image in particular. Yet ultimately, the review argues, Sturges accepts a conventional definition of female beauty - and his apparently formal aetheticism actually conceals a striking romanticism. Hamilton - less worried about legal action than the American Sturges - is far more explicitly erotic in his compositions, but while individual photographs are sometimes arresting, taken together, it is all slightly vulgar (it has been remarked of Hamilton's work that the Americans think it criminal child porn, the British think it embarrassingly smutty, and the French, who publish most of his work, consider it art). The review questions whether the sacralization of childhood is such a good thing - childhood and adolescent are in fact far more ambiguous than either the American religious right or the authoritarian liberal-left would make them out to be, and the pressure to treat them as the last sacred and transcendental objects is ultimately an unsustainable romanticism.

Jock Sturges, David Hamilton, Laura Kipnis, Richard Posner, photography, pornography, child pornography, religious right, nudism, romanticism, aesthetics, obscenity, obscene, autonomny, secular, sacred, religion

Abstract:
This 1998 Times Literary Supplement essay reviews a massive history of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Cross movement up through the end of the Second World War - a book which was the first to use access to ICRC archives of the Second World War. The book is an outstanding piece of scholarship. The book review examines, against the backdrop of the history of the ICRC, the meaning of international humanitarian law and the laws of war. It questions whether the culture of legalism that has characterized evolution of the international law of war is a sufficient basis on which to ground the law of war. It suggests, quoting military historian quoting law of war scholar Adam Roberts, that the more essential category for the control of behavior of armed forces in war is honor and professionalism, not law as such; the law provides, instead, a template that codifies categories of the honorable exercise of the profession of arms.

Henri Dunant, Red Cross, Napolean III, Peacetime, Volunteer, Society, Geneva, International Committee of the Red Cross, Caroline Moorhead, Red Cross Movement, World War One, World War Two, Humanitarian, Neutrality, Moral Value, Relief, Suffering, Publicize Atrocity, Max Huber, Institution

Abstract:
This short comment in the Financial Times (London) defends World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz against charges of having broken Bank rules or engaged in self-dealing in his dealings with his romantic companion Shaha Riza, and argues that any failures lie with the Bank's ethics committee.

World Bank, Wolfowitz, Riza, ethics, governance, development, international development

Abstract:
This 2005 article from the Weekly Standard criticizes the 2005 Amnesty International report and associated press releases and press conferences referring to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as an American gulag. It more broadly criticizes the human rights movement for wanting it both ways - on the one hand, using extraordinarily inflammatory rhetoric such as raising the spectre of Soviet death camps, while on the other hand, calling for that very same, apparently deeply criminal regime, the Bush administration, to perform the tasks of human rights enforcement that the human rights movement would like to see performed elsewhere in the world, such as rescuing Darfur from genocide. The article argues that a human rights movement arguing such inconsistent propositions - you are a great criminal, but please come rescue us - increasingly, and sadly, fails the test of moral seriousness.

Guantanamo, detainees, interrogation, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Darfur, human rights, gulag, American gulag, torture

Abstract:
This 1993 Times Literary Supplement (London) review considers the intellectual, literary and high cultural understanding of war in the modern age, taking into account such writers as Clausewitz, Ruskin, Proudhon, and the Freud-Einstein correspondence on war. Pick gives sensitive, nuanced readings of these literary and political figures on war, and an outstanding discussion of Clausewitz and his concept of friction in war, the tension within an army of the machinery and its animal passions. The Freud-Einstein correspondence on war, Pick notes, is not very illuminating, and is better understood as a cultural artefact of a certain perception of the role of intellectuals in politics.

El Salvador, Depredation, Terror, Subversives, Ends, Conduct of War, Military Discipline, War Machine, Daniel Pick, On War, Proudhon, De Quincey, Clausewitz, Civilization and its Discontents, Anti Personnel Land Mines, International Committee of Red Cross, Mine Injuries, Einstein-Freud

Abstract:
This commentary in the Times Literary Supplement concerned the case of the Cuban refugee boy Elian Gonzalez, and argued that the Clinton administration was right in concluding that, in the case of a six year old child, his father was the competent person to determine whether he should remain in the United States or return to Cuba. It argued that American conservatives betrayed the fundamental principle of parental rights over the upbringing of their children to which conservatives generally attach themselves.

Elian Gonzalez, Cuba, Castro, refugee, parental rights, child custody

Abstract:
This Times Literary Supplement (London) review essay from 2002 considers the question of memorials and memory in the wake of 9-11, the debate over what to do with Ground Zero, in the context of a review of the book Celluloid Skyline, a book of documentary photographs and commentary on Manhattan as seen through the eyes of Hollywood cinema. The book draws upon archives of photographs of Manhattan made for purposes of reproducing the Manhattan skyline and city scenes in Hollywood movies, but constitute today one of the finest photographic collections of architectural Manhattan of the thirties and forties. The review essay focuses in particular on why the film King Kong is so much more impressive in the first film, using the Empire State Building, with its tiered mountain-like shape, than in the second, using the World Trade Center, an undifferentiated block-skyscraper, a featureless rectangular prism.

City, Architecture, Monument, New York, September 11, Ground Zero, Memorials, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, Image, Hollywood, Empire State Building, Twin Towers, World Trade Center, Skyscraper, Commerce, Planner, Urban Planning, Commercial Use, Space, Terrorist Hijacker

Abstract:
This short essay (7,000 words) discusses the business strategy of American newspapers and, in particular, the New York Times. The essay describes the business model of the NYT has having moved, in its content and marketing to readers, from a daily newspaper tailored around the news justified because it happened, to a magazine of commentary and analysis on the front page, and finally, under pressure of the economics of web advertising, to a collection of online communities of readers organized by a writer. Reporting of new facts not already in the information stream is expensive; opinion equals commodification; newspaper as collection of blogs has a competitive advantage only in cocooning communities of like-minded readers. The magazine and online communities models of newspapers only really work under the 'information economics of the leisure class', drawing on Veblen's models of leisure and conspicuous consumption in which the 'news' is not valued for its factual accuracy, timeliness, relevance, or newness, but as a marker of status. Notably, in the financial crisis, readers otherwise happy to take the NYT merely as a status and opinion marker have started to worry once again about the quality of its factual reporting on business and economics - thus leaving behind, for this purpose, Veblen-economics. The essay concludes on a personal note; the author concluding that there is no point being the last out of town subscriber to the print edition of the NYT, when the newspaper itself has discounted the nature of its offering to fit the economics of online advertising - the author concludes that he should treat himself precisely as the Times does - as someone picking it up online for free.

The essay does not address the issues raised by recent proposals to allow newspapers to become nonprofit ventures, but they are present by implication, because the essay goes to the heart of the changing business model of newspapers, as newspapers - on economic, not political grounds - leave behind news as traditionally understood in favor of a model of group solidarity and what Cass Sunstein described as group think cocooning. Veblen-economics is not a convincing account of a charitable purpose for newspapers, although these issues are present by implication and not written out in the essay. The essay is the extended version of a short op ed, A Requiem for My NYT Subscription, also posted to SSRN.

newspapers, media, new york times, Veblen, leisure class,

Abstract:
This 1993 Times Literary Supplement (London) review considers the intellectual, literary and high cultural understanding of war in the modern age, taking into account such writers as Clausewitz, Ruskin, Proudhon, and the Freud-Einstein correspondence on war. Pick gives sensitive, nuanced readings of these literary and political figures on war, and an outstanding discussion of Clausewitz and his concept of friction in war, the tension within an army of the machinery and its animal passions. The Freud-Einstein correspondence on war, Pick notes, is not very illuminating about the nature of war itself, and is better understood as a cultural artefact of a certain perception of the role of intellectuals in politics.

El Salvador, Depredation, Terror, Subversives, Ends, Conduct of War, Military Discipline, War Machine, Daniel Pick, On War, Proudhon, De Quincey, Clausewitz, Civilization and its Discontents, Anti Personnel Land Mines, International Committee of Red Cross, Mine Injuries, Einstein-Freud