This essay formulates eight goals that have emerged from worldwide moral deliberation on “transitional justice” and that may serve as a useful framework when particular societies consider how they should reckon with violations of internationally recognized human rights. These goals include: truth, a public platform for victims, accountability and punishment, the rule of law, compensation to victims, institutional reform and long-term development, reconciliation, and public deliberation.

These eight goals are used to identify and clarify (1) the variety of ethical issues that emerge in reckoning with past wrongs, (2) widespread agreements about initial steps for resolving each issue, (3) leading options for more robust solutions of each issue, and (4) ways to weight or trade off the norms when they conflict. The aim is to show that there are crucial moral aspects in reckoning with the past and to clarify, criticize, revise, apply, and diffuse eight moral norms. These goals are not a “one-size-fits-all” blueprint but rather a framework by which societies confronting past atrocities can decide–through cross-cultural and critical dialogue–what is most important to accomplish and the morally best ways to do so.

In 2015, the world's first self-defined feminist government was formed in Sweden with the explicit ambition of pursuing a feminist foreign policy. This essay seeks to unpack and highlight some of the substance and plausible future directions of a feminist foreign policy. The overarching ambition is three-fold: (1) to probe the normative contents of feminist foreign policy in theory and in practice; (2) to identify a number of potential challenges and ethical dilemmas that are detrimental to gender-sensitive global politics; and (3) to advance a research agenda that can deepen the normative and ethical notions of a feminist foreign policy. Sweden's feminist foreign policy is still in the making. Its conduct is mostly incremental and focused on international agenda setting and normative entrepreneurship, which is guided by an ethically informed framework of cosmopolitanism and human rights. Yet, this essay argues that this reorientation is distinct for two reasons: First, by adopting the “F-word” it elevates politics from a broadly consensual orientation of gender mainstreaming towards more controversial politics, which explicitly seeks to renegotiate and challenge power hierarchies and gendered institutions that hitherto defined global institutions and foreign and security policies. Second, it contains a normative reorientation of foreign policy, which is guided by an ethically informed framework based on broad cosmopolitan norms of global justice and peace. The article concludes by advancing a research agenda that draws upon feminist IR theory and enhances the ethical and transformative contents of the English School by making it more gender-sensitive and appropriate for the study of feminist foreign policy.

This article describes and evaluates the different strategies that have been employed by international human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in attempting to influence the behavior of multinational corporations (MNCs). Within the NGO world, there is a basic divide on tactics for dealing with corporations: Engagers try to draw corporations into dialogue in order to persuade them by means of ethical and prudential arguments to adopt voluntary codes of conduct, while confronters believe that corporations will act only when their financial interests are threatened, and therefore take a more adversarial stance toward them. Confrontational NGOs tend to employ moral stigmatization, or “naming and shaming,” as their primary tactic, while NGOs that favor engagement offer dialogue and limited forms of cooperation with willing MNCs.

The article explains the evolving relationship between NGOs and MNCs in relation to human rights issues and defines eight strategies along the engagement/confrontation spectrum used by NGOs in their dealings with MNCs. The potential benefits and risks of various forms of engagement between NGOs and MNCs are analyzed and it is argued that the dynamic created by NGOs pursuing these different strategies can be productive in moving some companies to embrace their social responsibilities. Yet, in order for these changes to be sustainable, national governments will need to enact enforceable international legal standards for corporate social accountability.

The crisis of the American-led international order would seem to open up new opportunities for rising states—led by China, India, and other non-Western developing countries—to reshape the global order. As their capacities and influence grow, will these states rise up and integrate into the existing order or will they seek to overturn and reorganize it? The realist hegemonic perspective expects today's power transition to lead to growing struggles between the West and the “rest” over global rules and institutions. In contrast, this essay argues that although America's hegemonic position may be declining, the liberal international characteristics of order—openness, rules, and multilateralism—are deeply rooted and likely to persist. And even as China seeks in various ways to build rival regional institutions, there are stubborn limits on what it can do.

A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge's pathbreaking World Poverty and Human Rights is that the global political and economic order harms people in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them but to rectify injustice. But does the global order harm the poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted. In this essay, however, I seek to show that the global order not only does not harm the poor but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false.

This article considers the question of what legal rights should be possessed by those who reside and work in a democratic state without the legal authorization of the state, given the background assumption that the state is morally entitled to exclude such migrants. I argue that irregular migrants are morally entitled to a wide range of legal rights, including basic human and civil rights, but also rights to wages, workplace protections, and even rights to public education for their children. In order for these rights to be realized in practice, I argue, states ought to create a firewall between those charged with protecting and enforcing these rights and those charged with enforcing immigration laws.

Reconciliation is being urged upon people who have been bitter and murderous enemies, upon victims and perpetrators of terrible human rights abuses, and upon groups of individuals whose very self-conceptions have been structured in terms of historical and often state-sanctioned relations of dominance and submission. The rhetoric of reconciliation is particularly common in situations where traditional judicial responses to past wrongdoing are unavailable because of corruption in the legal system, staggeringly large numbers of offenders, or anxiety about the political consequences of trials and punishment.

But what is reconciliation? How is reconciliation to be achieved? And under what conditions should it be sought? The notable lack of answers to these questions prompts the worry that talk of reconciliation is merely a ruse to disguise the fact that a “purer” type of justice cannot be realized–that, in being asked to focus on reconciliation rather than on punishment, victims of past wrongdoing are having to settle for the morally second best. By mining our pretheoretical understandings of reconciliation, the essay arrives at a core concept of reconciliation as narrative incorporation that at the same time suggests a way in which reconciliation might be pursued and grounds a response to moral qualms provoked by the use of an unanalyzed conception of reconciliation.

Chopra and Weiss address perhaps the fundamental issue in international relations today: the sacrosanct sets of sovereignty. The word “sovereignty” explains why the international community has difficulty countering human rights violations. The authors address questions such as “Is there a line between a state's sovereignty and the international community?”, and “Can there be laws to guide states and collections of states in determining when this line can or should be violated?” by studying recent cases where human rights came into conflict with intervention.

Determining who, or indeed what, is to respond to prescriptions for action in cases of international crisis is a critical endeavor. Without such an allocation of responsibilities, calls to action–whether to protect the environment or to rescue distant strangers–lack specified agents, and, therefore, any meaningful indication of how they might be met. A fundamental step in arriving at this distribution of duties is identifying moral agents in international relations, or, in other words, identifying those bodies that can deliberate and act and thereby respond to ethical guidelines. Often, the most effective and relevant moral agents in international relations are not individuals but institutions. However, it is necessary to qualify any claim that institutions can bear duties in international relations. Not only must they possess capacities for decision-making and purposive action, they must also enjoy the conditions under which specific duties can be discharged. The importance of this latter stipulation can be usefully illustrated by examining the disparate circumstances within which states–those that exercise positive sovereignty and those that are sovereign only in name–are expected to act.

Most work in medical ethics across the last twenty-five years has centered on the ethics of clinical medicine. Even work on health and justice has, in the main, been concerned with the just distribution of (access to) clinical care for individual patients. By contrast, the ethics of public health has been widely neglected. This neglect is surprising, given that public health interventions are often the most effective (and most cost-effective) means of improving health in rich and poor societies alike.

In this essay I explore two sources of contemporary neglect of public health ethics. One source of neglect is that contemporary medical ethics has been preoccupied—in my view damagingly preoccupied—with the autonomy of individual patients. Yet individual autonomy can hardly be a guiding ethical principle for public health measures, since many of them must be uniform and compulsory if they are to be effective. A second source of neglect is that contemporary political philosophy has been preoccupied—in my view damagingly preoccupied—with the requirements for justice within states or societies, and (until very recently) has hardly discussed justice across borders. Yet public health problems often cross borders, and public health interventions have to measure up to the problems they address.

Sadly, there are few restraints on the endings of wars. There has never been an international treaty to regulate war's final phase, and there are sharp disagreements regarding the nature of a just peace treaty. There are, by contrast, restraints aplenty on starting wars, and on conduct during war. These restraints include: political pressure from allies and enemies; the logistics of raising and deploying force; the United Nations, its Charter and Security Council; and international laws like the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Indeed, in just war theory—which frames moral principles to regulate wartime actions—there is a robust set of rules for resorting to war (jus ad bellum) and for conduct during war (jus in bello) but not for the termination phase of war.

This article explores normative questions about what legal rights settled immigrants should have in liberal democratic states. It argues that liberal democratic justice, properly understood, greatly constrains the distinctions that can be made between citizens and residents. The longer people stay in a society, the stronger their moral claims become, and after a while they pass a threshold that entitles them to virtually the same legal status as citizens and eventually easy access to citizenship itself.

The Right to Relocation: Disappearing Island Nations and Common Ownership of the Earth

Mathias Risse

In recent work I have tried to revitalize the standpoint of humanity's commonly owning the earth. This standpoint has implications for a range of problems that have recently preoccupied us at the global level, including immigration, obligations to future generations, climate change, and human rights. In particular, this approach helps illuminate what moral claims to international aid small island nations whose existence is threatened by global climate change have. A recent proposal for relocating his people across different nations by President Tong of Kiribati is a case in point. My approach vindicates President Tong's proposal.

Increasingly, the United States has come to rely on the use of drones to counter the threat posed by terrorists. Drones have arguably enjoyed significant successes in denying terrorists safe haven while limiting civilian casualties and protecting U.S. soldiers, but their use has raised ethical concerns. The aim of this article is to explore some of the ethical issues raised by the use of drones using the just war tradition as a foundation. We argue that drones offer the capacity to extend the threshold of last resort for large-scale wars by allowing a leader to act more proportionately on just cause. However, they may be seen as a level of force short of war to which the principle of last resort does not apply; and their increased usage may ultimately raise jus in bello concerns. While drones are technically capable of improving adherence to jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality, concerns regarding transparency and the potentially indiscriminate nature of drone strikes, especially those conduced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as opposed to the military, may undermine the probability of success in combating terrorism.

Western moral and political theorists have recently devoted considerable attention to the perceived victimization of women by Non-western cultures. In this paper, I argue that conceiving injustice to poor women in poor countries primarily as a matter of their oppression by illiberal cultures presents an understanding of their situation that is crucially incomplete. This incomplete understanding distorts Western theorists comprehension of our moral relationship to women elsewhere in the world and so of our theoretical task. It also impoverishes our assumptions about the intercultural dialogue necessary to promote global justice for women.

Economic sanctions are emerging as one of the major tools of international governance in the post-Cold War era. Sanctions have long been seen as a form of political intervention that does not cause serious human damage, and therefore does not raise pressing ethical questions. However, the nature of sanctions is that they effectively target the most vulnerable and least political sectors of society, and for this reason they must be subject to ethical scrutiny.

This essay looks at sanctions in the context of three ethical frameworks: just war doctrine, deontological ethics, and utilitarianism. It argues that sanctions are inconsistent with the principle of discrimination from just war doctrine; that sanctions reduce individuals to nothing more than means to an end by using the suffering of innocents as a means of persuasion, thereby violating the Kantian principle that human beings are “ends in themselves”; and that sanctions are unacceptable from a utilitarian perspective because their economic effectiveness necessarily entails considerable human damage, while their likelihood of achieving political objectives is low.

On September 25, 2015, the world's leaders adopted a new suite of development goals—the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—that are to guide policymakers for the next decade and a half. On first inspection, the declaration is breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Constituted by a list of 17 goals and 169 targets, it is arguably the most comprehensive global agenda adopted since the UN Charter in 1945. Its thematic repertoire ranges from poverty, health, education, and inequality, to energy, infrastructure, climate change, marine resources, peace, security, and good governance. The UN Secretary-General welcomed the SDGs by praising their “universal, transformative, and integrated agenda” that heralded a “historic turning point for our world.”

One of the recurrent criticisms of the project of cosmopolitan democracy has been that it has not examined the political, economic and social agents that might have an interest in pursuing this programme. This criticism is addressed directly in this article. It shows that there are a variety of paths that, in their own right, could lead to more democratic global governance, and that there are a diversity of political, economic and social agents that have an interest in the pursuit of these. Cosmopolitan democracy is an open-ended project that aims to increase the accountability, transparency and legitimacy of global governance, and the battery of agents and initiatives outlined highlight the direction and politics required to make it possible.

Targeted sanctions—often referred to as “smart sanctions”—began in large measure as a response to the UN Security Council sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 and 1991, after its invasion of Kuwait. By 1991 it was clear that the sanctions on Iraq, initially welcomed by antiwar activists as a peaceful alternative to military action, were different from any sanctions seen before. Combined with the destruction from the bombing campaign of the Gulf War, they were devastating to the Iraq economy and infrastructure, resulting in widespread malnutrition, epidemics of water-borne diseases, and the collapse of every system necessary to ensure human well-being in a modern society. As the sanctions seemed to have no end in sight, there was considerable “sanctions fatigue” within the United Nations, as well as a growing body of literature that questioned whether sanctions were effective at obtaining compliance by the target state, even when there was considerable impact on its economy.

In the wake of these concerns, there were efforts in many venues to design sanctions that would not have the humanitarian impact of broad trade sanctions, and that would also be more effective by putting direct pressure on individual national policy-makers. These targeted sanctions included arms embargoes, financial sanctions on the assets of individuals and companies, travel restrictions on the leaders of a sanctioned state, and trade sanctions on particular goods. Many viewed targeted sanctions as an especially promising tool for foreign policy and international governance, and many still see targeted sanctions as a natural and obvious solution to a broad array of difficult situations. But there are considerable difficulties with each type of targeted sanction, with regard to implementation, humanitarian impact, and, in some cases, due process rights. Some of these difficulties may be resolved as these measures continue to be refined. Others are rooted in fundamental conflicts between competing interests or intractable logistical challenges.

Humanitarian intervention has always been more popular in theory than in practice. In the face of unspeakable acts, the desire to do something, anything, is understandable. States have tended to be reluctant to act on such desires, however, leading to the present situation in which there are scores of books and countless articles articulating the contours of a right—or even an obligation—of humanitarian intervention, while the number of cases that might be cited as models of what is being advocated can be counted on one hand.