Reflections on War, Diplomacy, Human Rights and Liberalism

Reflections on War, Diplomacy, Human Rights and Liberalism
Author: Adam Hughes Henry
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527563251

For most people, the idea that extremist ideologies glorify themselves through warfare, and commit crimes against humanity and genocide, is the natural extension of their moral and philosophical failings. As this volume outlines, liberal democracies such as Australia, and others, also glorify in war and they may also, at various times, engage in, support, or turn a blind eye to crimes against humanity or genocide. However, liberal democracies such as Australia, the US, and the UK, among others, routinely present themselves as arbiters of liberal values, defenders of human rights, and guardians of virtue. This book explores the obvious contradiction between the ideals of liberalism and how liberal democracies ignore, and at times even justify, their failure to uphold the principles they espouse.

Reflections on War, Diplomacy, Human Rights and Liberalism

Reflections on War, Diplomacy, Human Rights and Liberalism
Author: Adam Hughes Henry
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2020-09
Genre: Crimes against humanity
ISBN: 9781527553606

For most people, the idea that extremist ideologies glorify themselves through warfare, and commit crimes against humanity and genocide, is the natural extension of their moral and philosophical failings. As this volume outlines, liberal democracies such as Australia, and others, also glorify in war and they may also, at various times, engage in, support, or turn a blind eye to crimes against humanity or genocide. However, liberal democracies such as Australia, the US, and the UK, among others, routinely present themselves as arbiters of liberal values, defenders of human rights, and guardians of virtue. This book explores the obvious contradiction between the ideals of liberalism and how liberal democracies ignore, and at times even justify, their failure to uphold the principles they espouse.

Liberalism and War

Liberalism and War
Author: Andrew J. Williams
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2006
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0415359805

Military power is now the main vehicle for regime change. The US army has been used on more than 30 different occasions in the post-Cold War world compared with just 10 during the whole of the Cold War era. Leading scholar Andrew Williams tackles contemporary thinking on war with this detailed study on liberal thinking over the last century about how wars should be ended, using a vast range of historical archival material from diplomatic, other official and personal papers, which this study situates within the debates that have emerged in political theory. He examines the main strategies used at the end, and in the aftermath, of wars by liberal states to consolidate their liberal gains and to prevent the re-occurrence of wars with those states they have fought. This new study also explores how various strategies: reven≥ restitution; reparation; restra∫ retribution; reconciliation; and reconstruction, have been used by liberal states not only to defeat their enemies but also transform them. This is a major new contribution to contemporary thinking and action. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of politics, international relations and security studies.

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry
Author: Michael Ignatieff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2011-12-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400842840

Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this revolution has brought the world moral progress and broken the nation-state's monopoly on the conduct of international affairs. But it has also faced challenges. Ignatieff argues that human rights activists have rightly drawn criticism from Asia, the Islamic world, and within the West itself for being overambitious and unwilling to accept limits. It is now time, he writes, for activists to embrace a more modest agenda and to reestablish the balance between the rights of states and the rights of citizens. Ignatieff begins by examining the politics of human rights, assessing when it is appropriate to use the fact of human rights abuse to justify intervention in other countries. He then explores the ideas that underpin human rights, warning that human rights must not become an idolatry. In the spirit of Isaiah Berlin, he argues that human rights can command universal assent only if they are designed to protect and enhance the capacity of individuals to lead the lives they wish. By embracing this approach and recognizing that state sovereignty is the best guarantee against chaos, Ignatieff concludes, Western nations will have a better chance of extending the real progress of the past fifty years. Throughout, Ignatieff balances idealism with a sure sense of practical reality earned from his years of travel in zones of war and political turmoil around the globe. Based on the Tanner Lectures that Ignatieff delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2000, the book includes two chapters by Ignatieff, an introduction by Amy Gutmann, comments by four leading scholars--K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher--and a response by Ignatieff.

Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy
Author: Steve Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2008
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199215294

This major new textbook introduces students to the dynamic and evolving field of foreign policy. The book opens with a consideration of different theoretical and historical perspectives; it then focuses on a range of actors and the goals they seek to advance; and it ends with a series of case studies involving issues and crises relating to a wide range of different countries Foreign Policy: Theories, Actors, Cases is timely given the growing significance of foreign policyin the post-9/11 world. It will be essential reading for all students new to foreign policy.The book is accompanied by an Online Resource Centre.Student resources:TimelineWeb linksFlashcard glossaryInstructor resources:Three case studiesPowerPoint slides

Reflections on Rawls

Reflections on Rawls
Author: Shaun P. Young
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317069587

The late John Rawls was one of the most inspiring, provocative and influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. In this collection a panel of distinguished political philosophers critically explore the intellectual legacy of Rawls. The essays herein engage Rawls's political theorizing from his earliest published writings in the 1950s to his final publication in 2001, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement and explore a diversity of issues related to his arguments, such as the attractiveness of his methodology/methodologies, and the normative coherence and empirical validity of his claims. In turn, the effectiveness both of his arguments and those of various supporters and critics are evaluated from the perspective of a variety of analytical approaches, including cosmopolitanism, communitarianism, perfectionism, liberalism, and legal theory. This book is an edifying and engaging dialogue with ideas and arguments that have provided the theoretical framework for much of contemporary political philosophy, and a thoughtful assessment of their continuing significance and place within the pantheon of political philosophy.

The Last Utopia

The Last Utopia
Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2012-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674256522

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

The False Promise of Liberal Order

The False Promise of Liberal Order
Author: Patrick Porter
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-05-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509542132

In an age of demagogues, hostile great powers and trade wars, foreign policy traditionalists dream of restoring liberal international order. This order, they claim, ushered in seventy years of peace and prosperity and saw post-war America domesticate the world to its values. The False Promise of Liberal Order exposes the flaws in this nostalgic vision. The world shaped by America came about as a result of coercion and, sometimes brutal, compromise. Liberal projects – to spread capitalist democracy – led inadvertently to illiberal results. To make peace, America made bargains with authoritarian forces. Even in the Pax Americana, the gentlest order yet, ordering was rough work. As its power grew, Washington came to believe that its order was exceptional and even permanent – a mentality that has led to spiralling deficits, permanent war and Trump. Romanticizing the liberal order makes it harder to adjust to today’s global disorder. Only by confronting the false promise of liberal order and adapting to current realities can the United States survive as a constitutional republic in a plural world.

Liberty and Security

Liberty and Security
Author: Conor Gearty
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2013-04-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745669980

All aspire to liberty and security in their lives but few people truly enjoy them. This book explains why this is so. In what Conor Gearty calls our 'neo-democratic' world, the proclamation of universal liberty and security is mocked by facts on the ground: the vast inequalities in supposedly free societies, the authoritarian regimes with regular elections, and the terrible socio-economic deprivation camouflaged by cynically proclaimed commitments to human rights. Gearty's book offers an explanation of how this has come about, providing also a criticism of the present age which tolerates it. He then goes on to set out a manifesto for a better future, a place where liberty and security can be rich platforms for everyone's life. The book identifies neo-democracies as those places which play at democracy so as to disguise the injustice at their core. But it is not just the new 'democracies' that have turned 'neo', the so-called established democracies are also hurtling in the same direction, as is the United Nations. A new vision of universal freedom is urgently required. Drawing on scholarship in law, human rights and political science this book argues for just such a vision, one in which the great achievements of our democratic past are not jettisoned as easily as were the socialist ideals of the original democracy-makers.

An Introduction to International Relations

An Introduction to International Relations
Author: Richard Devetak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 593
Release: 2011-10-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139505602

Invaluable to students and those approaching the subject for the first time, An Introduction to International Relations, Second Edition provides a comprehensive and stimulating introduction to international relations, its traditions and its changing nature in an era of globalisation. Thoroughly revised and updated, it features chapters written by a range of experts from around the world. It presents a global perspective on the theories, history, developments and debates that shape this dynamic discipline and contemporary world politics. Now in full-colour and accompanied by a password-protected companion website featuring additional chapters and case studies, this is the indispensable guide to the study of international relations.