Explore the vast range of titles available.

Against Massacre looks at the rise of humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon to the First World War. Examining the concept from a historical perspective, Davide Rodogno explores the understudied cases of European interventions and noninterventions in the Ottoman Empire and brings a new view to this international practice for the contemporary era. While it is commonly believed that humanitarian interventions are a fairly recent development, Rodogno demonstrates that almost two centuries ago an international community, under the aegis of certain European powers, claimed a moral and political right to intervene in other states' affairs to save strangers from massacre, atrocity, or extermination. On some occasions, these powers acted to protect fellow Christians when allegedly \"uncivilized\" states, like the Ottoman Empire, violated a \"right to life.\" Exploring the political, legal, and moral status, as well as European perceptions, of the Ottoman Empire, Rodogno investigates the reasons that were put forward to exclude the Ottomans from the so-called Family of Nations. He considers the claims and mixed motives of intervening states for aiding humanity, the relationship between public outcry and state action or inaction, and the bias and selectiveness of governments and campaigners. An original account of humanitarian interventions some two centuries ago, Against Massacre investigates the varied consequences of European involvement in the Ottoman Empire and the lessons that can be learned for similar actions today.

The United Nations is grounded on the Westphalian state system. Throughout the de-colonizationperiod, the Organization ceased to be peculiar to the West only, and soon became the prevalent model in theentire globe. The Cold War also solidified and institutionalized the Westphalian State as the fundamentalprinciple in international relations. The end of the Cold War, however, along with the collapse of theEastern bloc, the challenges of peace and security in Africa, and the failure of the states in coping withhumanitarian crises increasingly made the three fundamental principles of Westphalian state, namely the“non-interventionism”, “sovereign-equality” and “territoriality” disputable among political scientists. Newapproaches and arguments on the end of the Classical Westphalian state and the emergence of a so-called“New Medieval Age” have widely been circulated. This paper alternatively suggests that, since the end of thecold war, the world politics has gradually and decisively been evolving into a system of states that could becalled Neo-Westphalian.

The meaning of RtoP (responsibility to protect) is self-explanatory, it shows what the international community (or at least some part of it) considers unacceptable in today’s world: genocide, ethnic cleansing and barbarous acts against civilians. However, the same international community stood silent when Rwanda and Srebrenica happened. Yet precisely because of the guilt and shame associated with its previous failures, the same international community managed to launch an initiative, ”responsibility to protect” (RtoP/R2P), in 2001. We insist on calling RtoP an “initiative”, not as a derogatory term, but as a counter-rhetoric argument to the so-called “RtoP emerging norm”. According to international law theory, a norm can be either customary (derogatory), either peremptory (jus cogens), there is no in-between option, particularly when interpreting the UN Charter provisions in relation with to the broad-spectrum of the principle of non-intervention as opposed to human rights (the area where RtoP tries to overstep the Charter’s authority). The main aspects of RtoP are, (1) on one count, the infringement on state-sovereignty (the “functional sovereignty” theory), particularly on the quality of the so-called “Westphalia-style” sovereignty, (2) the other being the clear purpose of the ICISS, above and beyond of ending mass-atrocities, which is the process of legalizing humanitarian intervention. After the 1999 Kosovo Intervention and during the early phases of the War on Terror, humanitarian intervention became seriously de-legitimised, this is why something novel was needed, which where RtoP stepped-in, riding on the hopes of many.

What authority does international law really have for the United States? When and to what extent should the United States participate in the international legal system? This forcefully argued book by legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin provides an insightful new look at this important and much-debated question. Americans have long asked whether the United States should join forces with institutions such as the International Criminal Court and sign on to agreements like the Kyoto Protocol. Rabkin argues that the value of international agreements in such circumstances must be weighed against the threat they pose to liberties protected by strong national authority and institutions. He maintains that the protection of these liberties could be fatally weakened if we go too far in ceding authority to international institutions that might not be zealous in protecting the rights Americans deem important. Similarly, any cessation of authority might leave Americans far less attached to the resulting hybrid legal system than they now are to laws they can regard as their own. Law without Nations? traces the traditional American wariness of international law to the basic principles of American thought and the broader traditions of liberal political thought on which the American Founders drew: only a sovereign state can make and enforce law in a reliable way, so only a sovereign state can reliably protect the rights of its citizens. It then contrasts the American experience with that of the European Union, showing the difficulties that can arise from efforts to merge national legal systems with supranational schemes. In practice, international human rights law generates a cloud of rhetoric that does little to secure human rights, and in fact, is at odds with American principles, Rabkin concludes. A challenging and important contribution to the current debates about the meaning of multilateralism and international law, Law without Nations? will appeal to a broad cross-section of scholars in both the legal and political science arenas.

This article has two core objectives: first to challenge the conventional understanding of liberal international theory (which we do by focussing specifically on classical liberalism) and second, to develop much further postcolonialism’s conception of Eurocentrism. These twin objectives come together insofar as we argue that classical liberalism does not always stand for anti-imperialism/non-interventionism given that significant parts of it were Eurocentric and pro-imperialist. But we also argue that in those cases where liberals rejected imperialism they did so not out of a commitment to cultural pluralism, as we are conventionally told, but as a function of either a specific Eurocentric or a scientific racist stance. This, in turn, means that Eurocentrism can be reduced neither to scientific racism nor to imperialism. Thus while we draw on postcolonialism and its critique of liberalism as Eurocentric, we find its conception of Eurocentrism (and hence its vision of liberalism) to be overly reductive. Instead we differentiate four variants of ‘polymorphous Eurocentrism’ while revealing how two of these rejected imperialism and two supported it. And by revealing how classical liberalism was embedded within these variants of Eurocentrism so we recast the conventional interpretation. In doing so, we bring to light the ‘protean career of polymorphous liberalism’ as it crystallizes in either imperialist or anti-imperialist forms as a function of the different variants of Eurocentrism within which it is embedded. Finally, because two of these variants underpin modern liberalism (as discussed in the Conclusions) so we challenge international relations scholars to rethink their conventional understanding of both classical- and modern-liberalism, as much as we challenge postcolonialists to rethink their conception of Eurocentrism.

This article analyses the seemingly well known terms internationalism and isolationism. Both have a long history of use in the study of American foreign relations, but there are problems with both that limit their descriptive and analytical utility. Their limitations have been addressed before, yet they are still commonly used and remain popular among scholars and the wider public, partly due to the ease with which the history of American foreign relations can be simplistically defined as an ongoing struggle between the forces of isolationism and internationalism. Through an analysis of both terms, as well as a consideration of their use by historians and political scientists and with due respect to the transatlantic focus of this journal, this article looks to salvage the meaning of these terms, and more importantly, to move beyond them and find more accurate expressions.

For much of the twentieth century, Confucianism was condemned by Westerners and East Asians alike as antithetical to modernity. Internationally renowned philosophers, historians, and social scientists argue otherwise in Confucian Political Ethics. They show how classical Confucian theory--with its emphasis on family ties, self-improvement, education, and the social good--is highly relevant to the most pressing dilemmas confronting us today. Drawing upon in-depth, cross-cultural dialogues, the contributors delve into the relationship of Confucian political ethics to contemporary social issues, exploring Confucian perspectives on civil society, government, territorial boundaries and boundaries of the human body and body politic, and ethical pluralism. They examine how Confucianism, often dismissed as backwardly patriarchal, can in fact find common ground with a range of contemporary feminist values and need not hinder gender equality. And they show how Confucian theories about war and peace were formulated in a context not so different from today's international system, and how they can help us achieve a more peaceful global community. This thought-provoking volume affirms the enduring relevance of Confucian moral and political thinking, and will stimulate important debate among policymakers, researchers, and students of politics, philosophy, applied ethics, and East Asian studies. The contributors are Daniel A. Bell, Joseph Chan, Sin Yee Chan, Chenyang Li, Richard Madsen, Ni Lexiong, Peter Nosco, Michael Nylan, Henry Rosemont, Jr., and Lee H. Yearley.

Armed interventions in Libya, Haiti, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea challenged the US president and Congress with a core question of constitutional interpretation: does the president, or Congress, have constitutional authority to take the country to war? War Powers argues that the Constitution doesn't offer a single legal answer to that question. But its structure and values indicate a vision of a well-functioning constitutional politics, one that enables the branches of government themselves to generate good answers to this question for the circumstances of their own times. Mariah Zeisberg shows that what matters is not that the branches enact the same constitutional settlement for all conditions, but instead how well they bring their distinctive governing capacities to bear on their interpretive work in context. Because the branches legitimately approach constitutional questions in different ways, interpretive conflicts between them can sometimes indicate a successful rather than deficient interpretive politics. Zeisberg argues for a set of distinctive constitutional standards for evaluating the branches and their relationship to one another, and she demonstrates how observers and officials can use those standards to evaluate the branches' constitutional politics. With cases ranging from the Mexican War and World War II to the Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, and Iran-Contra scandal, War Powers reinterprets central controversies of war powers scholarship and advances a new way of evaluating the constitutional behavior of officials outside of the judiciary.

Hard Line traces the history of Republican Party foreign policy since World War II by focusing on the conservative leaders who shaped it. Colin Dueck closely examines the political careers and foreign-policy legacies of Robert Taft, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He shows how Republicans shifted away from isolationism in the years leading up to World War II and oscillated between realism and idealism during and after the cold war. Yet despite these changes, Dueck argues, conservative foreign policy has been characterized by a hawkish and intense American nationalism, and presidential leadership has been the driving force behind it.

\"This is a most timely, intelligent, well-written, and absorbing essay on a central and painful social and political problem of out time.\"—Sir Isaiah Berlin \"The major achievement of this remarkable book is a critical theory of nationalism, worked through historical and contemporary examples, explaining the value of national commitments and defining their moral limits. Tamir explores a set of problems that philosophers have been notably reluctant to take on, and leaves us all in her debt.\"—Michael Walzer In this provocative work, Yael Tamir urges liberals not to surrender the concept of nationalism to conservative, chauvinist, or racist ideologies. In her view, liberalism, with its respect for personal autonomy, reflection, and choice, and nationalism, with its emphasis on belonging, loyalty, and solidarity are not irreconcilable. Here she offers a new theory, \"liberal nationalism,\" which allows each set of values to accommodate the other. Tamir sees nationalism as an affirmation of communal and cultural memberships and as a quest for recognition and self-respect. Persuasively she argues that national groups can enjoy these benefits through political arrangements other than the nation-state. While acknowledging that nationalism places members of national minorities at a disadvantage, the author offers guidelines for alleviating the problems involved using examples from currents conflicts in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe. Liberal Nationalismis an impressive attempt to tie together a wide range of issues often kept apart: personal autonomy, cultural membership, political obligations, particularity versus impartiality in moral duties, and global justice. Drawing on material from disparate fields—including political philosophy, ethics, law, and sociology—Tamir brings out important and previously unnoticed interconnections between them, offering a new perspective on the influence of nationalism on modern political philosophy.