Popular opposition to immigration is rooted in many factors. In this essay, we focus on one specific issue that has become prominent in recent debates—namely, the fear that the welfare state is being undermined by the impact of increasing ethnic and racial diversity. There are actually two concerns here: first, that ethnic and racial diversity as such makes it more difficult to sustain redistributive social policies because it is difficult to generate feelings of national solidarity and trust across ethnic and racial lines, and second, that the “multiculturalism” policies adopted to recognize or accommodate immigrant groups tend to further undermine national solidarity and trust. If either of these hypotheses were true, the very idea of a “multicultural welfare state,” a welfare state that respects and accommodates diversity, would be almost a contradiction in terms. We review the existing evidence and suggest that both hypotheses are overstated. The evidence to date suggests that there is no inherent tendency for either immigrant ethnic diversity or multiculturalism policies to erode the welfare state. We conclude with some speculation about the implications of this evidence for debates about the rights of noncitizens.

We articulate a global public standard for the normative legitimacy of global governance institutions. This standard can provide the basis for principled criticism of global governance institutions and guide reform efforts in circumstances in which people disagree deeply about the demands of global justice and the role that global governance institutions should play in meeting them. We stake out a middle ground between an increasingly discredited conception of legitimacy that conflates legitimacy with international legality understood as state consent, on the one hand, and the unrealistic view that legitimacy for these institutions requires the same democratic standards that are now applied to states, on the other.

At the 2005 World Summit, the world‘s leaders committed themselves to the “responsibility to protect”, recognizing both that all states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and that the UN should help states to discharge this responsibility using either peaceful means or enforcement action. This declaration ostensibly marks an important milestone in the relationship between sovereignty and human rights but its critics argue that it will make little difference in practice to the world’s most threatened people. The purpose of this article is to ask how consensus was reached on the responsibility to protect, given continuing hostility to humanitarian intervention expressed by many (if not most) of the world‘s states and whether the consensus will contribute to avoiding future Kosovos (cases where the Security Council is deadlocked in the face of a humanitarian crises) and future Rwandas (cases where states lack the political will to intervene). It suggests that four key factors contributed to the consensus: pressure from proponents of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, its adoption by Kofi Annan and the UN’s High Level Panel, an emerging consensus in the African Union, and the American position. Whilst these four factors contributed to consensus, each altered the meaning of the responsibility to protect in important ways, creating a doctrine that many states can sign up to but that does little to prevent future Kosovos and Rwandas and may actually inhibit attempts to build a consensus around intervention in future cases.

Concerns over aid effectiveness have led to calls for greater accountability in international development aid. This article examines the state of accountability within and between international development agencies: aid NGOs, the international financial institutions, and government aid ministries. The investigation finds that there is very little accountability in these agencies, and that the accountability that there is often works against poverty relief. Increasing accountability, however, is not always the solution: increased accountability may just amplify the complexities of development efforts. Only those reforms with real promise to make aid more effective in reducing poverty should be encouraged. One such proposal is set out here.

It is widely held that, in order for a resort to war or military force to be morally justified, it must, in addition to having a cause that is just, be proportionate. In this essay I argue for the need to use a counterfactual baseline when making the proportionality evaluation. Specifically, I argue that the relevant counterfactual baseline must contain a moral qualifier. In defending my proposal, I also contend that the relevant goods and harms that are weighed in the proportionality evaluation are not as open-ended as is sometimes presumed.

The critics of the ICC in the Bush administration and its supporters within the human rights community have one thing in common: they assume that the ICC can evolve into a powerful institution independent of states, either to constrain American power or to act on a duty to prosecute to end impunity for perpetrators. Both overestimate the ability of the court to pursue a legalism divorced from power realities. The former attribute to the court powers it is unlikely to exercise, particularly if the United States remains outside the treaty. This is due, in part, to the safeguards within the Rome Statute, but more importantly, to the court's dependence on sovereign cooperation, which will lead it to place a high premium on cultivating the good will of the most powerful states. The latter overestimate the degree to which courts by themselves can deter atrocities. The ICC's effectiveness in any particular case will therefore be dependent on the political consensus of those actors capable of wielding power in that area. They also underestimate the need to compromise justice – at least, prosecutorial justice – in cases in which bargaining and compromise are the central means of facilitating transitions from armed conflict or dictatorship, and in cases in which the strength of the perpetrators and the limits of one's power would make legal proceedings either futile or counterproductive to other interests and values. Hence, decisions to prosecute must first be subjected to a test of political prudence, and then take place according to due process and the rule of law.

Many developing countries are experiencing high rates of emigration of their highly skilled citizens. This essay asks if a cosmopolitan—who we take to be generally supportive of freer international migration—should worry about the adverse effects on those remaining behind in poor countries. We document the extent of skilled outflows, discuss the causes and consequences of those outflows, and offer principles to guide a cosmopolitan policy response. We argue that skilled emigration harms long-run institutional development. The right response, however, is not to shut down the one reasonably liberal element of the international migration regime but to look for ways to make international migration work better for development.

Although international security studies tend to focus on the nature of armed conflict and how nations fare in the face of such conflicts, our attention has been drawn to the challenge of managing the peace. Specifically, given the enormity of the damage caused by state-sponsored violence, both in terms of property and in terms of human damage, how can the people of a nation that has served as a battleground be assisted in their recovery from the devastation caused by conflict? Ongoing trauma from armed conflict has peculiarly gendered dimensions and requires solutions that are attentive to those dimensions. Here, we focus on remedies that shift from perpetrator-centered tribunals to victim-centered compensation commissions. Using the United Nations Compensation Commission established to provide restitution to Kuwaiti citizens following the Iraqi invasion as an example, we argue that the restitution model is a more humane and ethical option for managing the aftermath of conflict than war crimes tribunals, which employ a retributive philosophy. Using the limited evidence available on compensation and rebuilding, we make concrete recommendations for an approach to post-conflict adjudication that makes the well-being of victims its top priority.

This article outlines the two central theories in the ethics of secession and examines whether or under what conditions these normative theories would be satisfied in a post-invasion Iraq. I argue that the two dominant normative theories of secession focus on the secessionist group, which national self-determination theories conceive as a nation holding a right to self-determination, and just-cause theories conceive as having a remedial right to secession as a victim of injustice. The Iraq case suggests that this is a flawed way of thinking about the issue. I argue that secession is more legitimate when fair multinational arrangements are not on offer; and that the fairness requirement involves examining constitutional arrangements from the point of view of all groups.

A riddle in the ethics of war concerns whether lethal defensive force may be justifiably used against aggressing soldiers who are morally innocent. In this essay I argue that although there might be reasons for excusing soldiers as individuals, one may be justified in using defensive force against them provided that they have initiated threatening behavior and that our interpretation of that behavior as threatening is reasonable. I go on to investigate various implications of being in conflict with aggressing soldiers who are morally innocent, arguing that different restrictions apply to the use of defensive force when the aggressors cannot be held morally responsible for being aggressors.

My argument has important practical implications both for deciding whether to go to war and for deciding how to fight a just defensive war. Concerning the ongoing Iraq war, for example, it suggests that if it were only a matter of killing culpable members of the Republican Guard, invasion could perhaps have been justified. Since any attack would involve killing innocent conscripted soldiers as well as innocent civilians, however, there were good reasons to wait to see whether options other than intervening militarily would become available. If we are engaged in a just defensive war, my argument implies that we must accept a higher level of risk and more harm if we can assume that the aggressors are innocent rather than morally responsible for their harmful or threatening behavior.

Child labor evokes deep emotions and is cause for growing international concern. Most recent global estimates show that 186 million children are engaged in full time economic activity. This paper discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of Western policies that seek to curb child labor abroad. Since such policies aim to combat practices in other societies, policy-makers should be aware of the many relevant differences between developing and developed countries. We discuss three issues that are central to this debate: different conceptions of childhood and the dominance of the Western conception in these debates; the distinction between child work and child labor; and socioeconomic causes of child labor. We then evaluate the implications of these investigations for direct and indirect policy options against child labor abroad.

In recent years, states have increasingly exploited their traditional discretion over matters of citizenship to carve out significant exceptions to the universality of human rights protection. This primarily occurs in two ways: through denial and deprivation of citizenship and through the imposition of illegitimate distinctions between citizens and noncitizens. The results of such actions may be physical expulsion, disenfranchisement, exclusion from access to public benefits, and acts of violence and discrimination. The potential for abuse is heightened for racial and ethnic minorities. Racial discrimination is a major cause of denationalization and restrictive access to citizenship. And citizenship status is often used as a proxy for racial grounds in justifying denial of other human rights. The treatment of noncitizens compellingly tests societies' commitments to the rule of law. This essay explores how human rights norms—particularly the body of law that forbids discrimination on grounds of racial or ethnic origin—can be deployed to combat the worst effects of citizenship denial and ill-treatment of non-citizens. It recommends that the problem be addressed through three principal activities: documentation and public education; clarification and distillation of legal standards related to citizenship; and enforcement of existing norms, including those prohibiting racial discrimination.

For at least the past several decades, judges around the world have been looking beyond their own states' jurisprudence to international law and the decisions of foreign courts in order to apply domestic law. This widespread practice is part of a phenomenon that Anne-Marie Slaughter calls “judicial globalization.” The American judiciary, however, has exhibited a distinct diffidence toward the use of comparative and international law to decide domestic cases, a diffidence that extends to many elected officials as well… .

Various defenses of the Supreme Court's reliance on international and comparative sources have been made, not least by some of the Supreme Court justices themselves. None of the defenses, however, have met the democratic objections head-on. Instead, justifications have mainly defended the general utility of referencing additional sources rather than the specific legitimacy of referencing sources from outside the U.S. legal system. The defenses to date fall short for at least two sets of reasons. They fail to grapple with legitimate concerns about the practice. In consequence, they offer no reasons for those opposed to this practice to reconsider their resistance.

This article explores issues concerning accountability and global governance by looking at three cases involving Iraq: the economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council; the operation of the Oil for Food Program; and the US-led occupation authority and its management of Iraqi funds. In all three cases the problems that emerge are rooted only in part in criminal acts or failures to meet legal responsibilities. The failures of accountability that took place in these cases included also abuses of power and forms of corruption that had been legitimated within legal institutional structures. An examination of these cases helps to illustrate what accountability can demand, as well as the kinds of diverse institutional arrangements that can undermine it. In the Oil for Food Program, there was corruption despite elaborate structures of oversight. In the case of the US-led occupation authority's management of Iraqi funds, the corruption was tied to systematic procedures that eliminated structures of oversight. I argue that the abuses that occurred in these cases were not due to a lack of understanding about what might bring greater integrity to the processes involved. Rather, they illustrate how well the structures of accountability and integrity were already understood, as evidenced in the systematic efforts to evade and compromise those structures.

One of the most important challenges for the occupation of Iraq has been making decisions about the status of people who were either responsible for or who passively benefited from the regime's past injustices. But how should such people—in this case, members of the Baath Party—be dealt with? And how have they been dealt with under the U.S. occupation? Although lustration is just one of many institutions of jus post bellum, it is arguably one of the most important. The pursuit of administrative justice affects the reconstitution of the public sphere—literally and figuratively—in more fundamental ways than most other institutions of transitional justice. Yet our understanding of the ethics of occupation in the twenty-first century continues to be incomplete, and ethical principles are needed for guiding and clarifying how occupations may justly be carried out and for establishing a legitimate role for international morals in the conduct of peace. This article develops three such principles for guiding the practice of lustration, and argues that they have been widely flouted during the occupation of Iraq. This is problematic from the perspective of jus post bellum, for to paraphrase Michael Walzer's argument in Just and Unjust Wars, the restraint of peace is the beginning of peace.