Since the 1990s, notions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been shaped by the global diffusion of citizenship practices and the advent of a corporate sustainability community that encourages firms to improve their environmental and social performance.These understandings of CSR have recast corporate responsibility away from a liability model to one that places a moral obligation on firms to address the societal ills connected to global markets.We analyse the CSR reports of large German and US firms published from the mid-1990s to 2013 to gauge how multinational firms’ understandings of their obligations have evolved in light of this changing normative environment.We find that many firms have expanded how they define their responsibilities, but these global CSR norms have been grafted onto nationally determined notions of to whom corporations are responsible and on what basis. Despite these national differences, firms in both countries have engaged more substantively with environmental than social sustainability and are more likely to describe their responsibilities for the environment in terms of an ethics of care.

In this essay, I first discuss the necessity of examining the history of peacebuilding from an evolutionary standpoint. In so doing, I compare my model to other paradigms and demonstrate that there are insights to be garnered from the peacebuilding behavior of nonhuman species, particularly when it comes to avoidance of conflict and reconciliation. However, I suggest that, at its base, the struggle for power between nonhuman species drives the pursuit of cooperation, the dominance hierarchy (in the case of the primates), a reflection of power as a means to an end, which in this case is group survival.I conclude with some thoughts about the implications my theory has for understanding other schools of thought in IR theory as well as peacebuilding policy and practice.

Chapter 16 examines Israeli foreign policy towards the Middle East in the wake of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. The chapter focuses on the key events during the remainder of the Olmert government including Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian legislative elections and the ensuing forceful takeover of the Gaza Strip; the destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor by Israel; the resumption of the Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations through Turkish mediation; the unprecedented peace offer made by Olmert to the Palestinians; and Operation Cast Lead. The chapter provides the first analysis of the Olmert government in the context of Israel’s foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. It exposes the reasons why Israel’s offensive foreign policy towards Syria succeeded while its attempt to reinvigorate its foreign policy of engagement failed. The chapter highlights the cleavages within Israel’s leading decisions-makers and the waning domestic support for engagement.

The opening chapter lays out the conceptual groundwork for respective historical, practical and theoretical case studies across three governance areas in which responsibility has become a core focal point of policymaking over the course of the last three decades: security, environmental, and business governance. Researching the rise of responsibility requires engaging with the simultaneity of formal and informal accountability mechanisms, questions of morality and ethics, and the relations that this practice establishes between a variety of actors in global politics. The general framework of the book holds that moral agency is socially embedded, which paves the way for inquiring into how the normativity of policies plays out in interaction on the ground, particularly in so-termed communities of responsibility. Three results of the case studies stand out: first, there are parallel developments between governance fields, especially the increased formalisation of responsibility in multilateral treaties; second, the observation that responsibility often constituted a compromise in negotiations between states and non-state actors; and third, reliance on human rights as a common point of reference.

In recent decades, the international community has increasingly sought to regulate and in some cases prohibit weapons systems including anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, and small arms and light weapons. Yet constraints on the employment of armed violence strike at the very heart of state authority and for this reason, international disarmament efforts have proven controversial and feature enduring debates concerning the content of responsible conduct and the subjects to which such claims can be applied. I contend that there are two fundamentally competing visions of responsible behaviour concerning conventional weapons in contemporary international society, what I term the ‘privilege’ or regulatory approach and the ‘forbearance’ or prohibitionary approach. I employ a case study of the global movement to ban anti-personnel mines to illustrate these dynamics and suggest that, in this case at least, there has been a decisive shift towards a more restrictive conception of responsibility emphasising the elimination of once pervasive weapons.

In this essay, Iaddress some preliminary considerations surrounding different notions of “peace” and peacebuilding and the appropriate methodologies to study the same.I place emphasis on the adoption of a moral epistemology that is overtly value-oriented and normatively ambitious without being oblivious to the structural characteristics of collective political behavior that tend to privilege the self at the expense of the other, such as that used by the World Order Models Project (WOMP). Rather than relying on one standard definition of “cosmopolitanism,” I advocate for a pluralistic conception that acknowledges different cosmopolitanisms. I provide a framework for peacebuilding assessment that frames inquiry around different “horizons” of aspirations (feasibility, necessity, desperation, desire), and I lay out my version of cosmopolitanism, which centers on the importance of peacebuilding objectives that are necessary and desirable. In so doing, I compare my perspective toother paradigmatic perspectives, concluding that cosmopolitanismis concerned with reconciling unity with difference, through mutual understanding of otherness.

There has been widespread support for the idea that the so-called international community has a remedial moral responsibility to protect vulnerable populations from mass atrocities when their own governments fail to do so. But, where exactly is this responsibility located?In other words, which body or bodies can be expected to discharge a duty to safeguard those who lack the protection of – or, indeed, come under threat from – their own government?The question becomes particularly pressing when the United Nations is unwilling or unable to act and there is no one state to fill the breach.

In this chapter, I examine ‘coalitions of the willing’ as one (likely provocative) answer to this question, and explore how the informal nature of such associations should inform the judgements of moral responsibility that we make in relation to them.Perhaps most controversially, I propose that, under certain circumstances, states and other institutional agents have a duty to contribute to forming such an ad hoc association, and then to participate in a collective endeavour – and that these circumstances may include cases of military intervention in response to mass atrocity without UN Security Council authorisation.

Chapter 4 exposes the growing contradiction in Israel’s engagement foreign policy stance, which, in certain respects, was advancing. By September 1995, Israel and the PLO had concluded the Oslo II interim agreement; Israel’s emerging ties with Arab countries in the Gulf and the Maghreb were continuing; and negotiations with Syria at an ambassadorial level and between the respective countries’ militaries’ chiefs of staff were maintained. At the same time, the domestic challenges to Israel’s policy of engagement intensified, prompting a flawed response from the Rabin government. Amid deteriorating security, Israel deployed coercive measures against the Palestinians, undermining the political standing of the Palestinian leadership, economy, and public support for negotiations with Israel. Nonetheless, terrorist attacks against Israelis continued, weakening the domestic legitimacy of engagement in Israel and fueling domestic opposition. Shifting the lens to Syria, the government attempted to sway domestic opposition to negotiations via public diplomacy with Syria’s obstinate and hostile President al-Assad, which backfired as al-Assad rejected all Israeli overtures. The chapter ends by uncovering how the failure to produce a breakthrough with Syria influenced Israel’s Iran policy, highlighting that Israel’s foreign policy of engagement remained vulnerable and incomplete.