A basic premise of Confucianism rests in the intellectuals' responsibility to speak out against an oppressive government. This tradition continued well into the Maoist era, along with “the mandate from heaven,” which provided an additional fundamental right of the people to dispose of an unfair leadership. Why was it not until the mid-1980s that the intellectuals, the “democratic elite” of China, initiated a public dialogue on the necessity of “inalienable” rights in the Western sense? The reason may lie in the impact the events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had in inducing political reform in post-Mao China. The traditional Confucianist beliefs remained at the core of the emerging ideology. Despite Deng's crackdown in Tiananmen Square, the “sprouts” continue to reappear from time to time, and the author predicts that they will be stronger with each comeback.

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.

Brzezinski shapes his discussion around three “new dimensions” of human rights: the protection of human rights from the arbitrary power of the state, the institutionalization of democracy, and the need to confront the potential exploitation of human individuality by science. Brzezinski predicts that the interface between ethics and science will be the new frontier of politics, and it will place on the shoulders of democratic leaders, and ultimately on all those who are concerned with human rights, the obligation to be at least part-time scientists and philosophers.

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.

Since the late 1970s, an increasingly global coalition of churches and nongovernmental organizations has pressed for reduction if not outright cancellation of the foreign debt of highly indebted poor countries, because of its deleterious impact on poor people. The movement achieved limited yet substantial success in the Jubilee 2000 campaign. In it, the movement invoked a biblical prescription of periodic debt relief to urge the international community to mark the millennium by recognizing a period of “jubilee” for heavily indebted poor countries, in which government debts would be cancelled and freed up resources used to alleviate poverty. The Catholic Church made a crucial contribution to the movement, through the involvement of its personnel, justice and peace offices, social service agencies, academic and research institutions, national bishops’ conferences, Vatican agencies, and Pope John Paul II. The essay traces the moral arguments the church made for debt relief, with a particular focus on two influential statements: those of the Vatican's Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission in 1987, and the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference in 1989. By stimulating discussion of the ethics of debt among senior policymakers, the church's efforts strengthened the legitimacy of the claim that excessive debt servicing was unjust. Zambia is offered as a case study of church and coalition efforts to press not only for debt cancellation, but also for measures to ensure that freed-up resources be used effectively for poverty reduction, and that debtor governments contract new debt in a transparent manner.

This essay suggests that the accountability trends explored by Stian Øby Johansen and Gisela Hirschmann in their respective monographs should be viewed as indicating the emergence of a right to justification in global governance. Both Johansen and Hirschmann seek to advance the interdisciplinary conversation about the accountability of international organizations—Johansen by developing a normative framework assessing the quality of IO accountability mechanisms, and Hirschmann by seeking to identify the variables that shape the evolution of what she calls pluralist accountability. Building upon their analyses, I put forward a set of hypotheses about the procedural and substantive dimensions of the right to justification as well as the conditions for its consolidation in global governance.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in 1945 invites us to look back at the achievement of creating this new organization even before the guns had fallen silent in World War II. It also prompts us to ask: Where is the organization today? How well has it fulfilled and is it still fulfilling the high ideals of its Charter? Even more importantly, how confident can we be that what has grown into the complex UN system will not just survive but also provide its member states and the peoples of the world with the organizational structures, resources, and tools needed to address twenty-first century challenges?

Initially portrayed as the “great equalizer,” the COVID-19 pandemic has proved anything but. This essay recounts the sobering social disparities and vulnerabilities that the pandemic has exposed, especially when it comes to the inequalities that are baked into existing membership regimes, before turning to narratives of hope and democratic renewal. My discussion shines a spotlight on the relationship between borders, (im)mobility, and struggles for recognition and inclusion that have long been central to the practice of citizenship. Focusing on pathways to the acquisition of full membership status for those who are currently denied it, I will deploy logics and policies that have already begun to take shape in different parts of the world, with the goal of amplifying their effects and multiplying their scale. I identify three possible trajectories for postpandemic recovery, two of which offer ways to enhance equality of status and public standing by enlarging the circle of membership: first, through contribution (or what I will term “jus contribuere”), and second, by highlighting what we might call “solidarity in place.” The third reaction, which we might call the “stratification of membership,” pulls in the opposite direction by sharply redrawing the lines—legal, economic, social—that have distinguished insiders from outsiders, and exacerbated patterns of stratification and inequality of status and opportunity that predate the pandemic.