While the United States is now an international leader in the fight against genocide and human rights abuses, it only recently ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide– forty years after the convention's unanimous adoption by the UN General Assembly. Korey provides a description of the long struggle for ratification of the Genocide Convention, detailing decades of work by a committee of fifty-two nongovernmental organizations lobbying the Senate and the American Bar Association, the treaty's key opponent. Despite the public support for the United Nations and human rights by the United States, failure to ratify the Genocide Convention stemmed primarily from the fear that international covenants were threats to U.S. sovereignty. The United States finally overcame this fear with the ratification of the Genocide Convention in 1988, which opened the door for U.S. leadership.

In 1985, forty years after the adoption of the U.N. charter, a reform process was begun that addressed the changes in international relations over the past 40 years and sought to improve budgetary problems that interfered with the U.N. service of “creating a ‘better’ world.” Choudhury, elected president of the General Assembly in 1986, reviews the changes within the UN and reasserts its enduring role as a global instrument of peace.

This article compares reflections from four sources on the state of the American democracy in the international community (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, by Paul Kennedy; 1999: Victory Without War, by Richard Nixon; “Communism at Bay,”The Economist; Long Cycles in World Politics, by George Modelski) within the framework of the 1980s, which was portrayed by leaders as “an era of good feelings.” Yet drastically different positions on American rise or decline are propounded by historians and officeholders, former presidents and scholars, journalists and aspiring candidates for political office. These four writings reveal the complexity of the analysis of the American decline. Yet, it is crucial for leaders to maintain public devotion to their nation, not through passion, but rather, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, through “the solid quarry of sober reason,”. America's capacity to preserve a strong and healthy resilience, the author concludes, is the exceptional value it continues to offer the world.

Korea became known as the Hermit Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century when it had withdrawn into itself under the threats of its neighbors-China, Russia, and Japan. This characterization has endured through this century even despite Korea's internal war and the involvement of the international community in that conflict. The election of Roh Tae Woo marked the beginning of a new stage in Korean politics: “the period of Korean-style democracy.” Robert Myers follows the historical eras and events leading up to this change and predicts a less threatening, less Confucian politics for the Korea of the future.

Building on an earlier argument that isolationism may well be America's natural state, Schlesinger explains how the apparent rejection of isolationism during the long standoff with the Soviet Union during the Cold War was nothing more than a reaction to what was perceived as a direct and urgent threat to the security of the United States. In the wake of the Cold War's end, the incompatibility between collective international action and conceptions of national interest has highlighted the difficulties of democracies in sending their armies to war, especially those that do not directly threaten national security. While much more can and should be done to enhance the effectiveness of global organizations already in place, what is needed, Schlesinger argues, is both a reexamination of the Wilsonian doctrine of collective security and a greater concentration on preventive diplomacy.

Whence does international law derive its normative force as law in a world that remains, in many respects, one where legitimate politics is practiced primarily at the national level? As with domestically focused legal theories, one standard answer is positivistic: the law's authority is based on its origin in agreed procedures of consent. This is certainly plausible with respect to treaty obligations and commitments that derive from the United Nations Charter, but it leaves customary international law vulnerable to legitimacy critiques—of which there is no shortage among international law skeptics. Even with respect to conventional international norms, such as treaty provisions, there is often a sense that such consent is democratically thinner than the public consent to domestic law, particularly fundamental domestic law, constitutional norms, and derivative principles of legitimate governance. State consent in international law, in this view, is often a very imperfect proxy for democratic consent to international legal norms. While it is obvious to international lawyers why (as a matter of positive law doctrine) state consent should make international norms prevail over domestic norms to which there is arguably deeper democratic consent, persistent critics of international law have questioned whether this should be so as a matter of legitimacy.

One relatively straightforward way in which academics could have a positive impact on global poverty is by putting people in a position to make better decisions about issues relevant to such poverty. Academics could do this by conducting appropriate kinds of research on those issues, and sharing what they have learned in accessible ways.

But aren't academics already doing this? In the case of many of those issues, I think the appropriate answer would be “Yes, to some extent, but they could do so much better.” In this article, I first discuss the academic research relevant to one important decision about an issue concerning global poverty. I argue that this research has been seriously deficient both in terms of quality and of quantity. Building on this discussion, I then formulate two questions that can be applied to any such decision, answers to which would indicate the quality of the input academics are currently providing. In cases where that input is deficient, and the decision in question an important one, I suggest that academics organise themselves in ways that will improve that input. I finish by briefly discussing how Academics Stand Against Poverty might help them do so.

As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” this essay examines how the key decisions within the global system of food production are shaped by the organization of the global political economy. The understanding of the global political economy follows standard definitions that focus on the dominant market practices and the institutional structures within which those practices are embedded. I identify examples of market practices and institutional policies that structurally impair the ability of states to secure the human rights of their citizens, and explain specific issues of structural injustice raised by each example. The conclusion provides a survey of a range of alternative solutions for transforming the global political economy and creating the conditions for a more just and ecologically sustainable food system. Ultimately, our conception of human rights and the mechanisms for their protection and enforcement must change in order to address the scale and gravity of problems affecting the future of agriculture and our ability to feed the world.