Ethical dilemmas of international relations have led to two distinct principles of thought, as presented in this article. The Western tradition has generally advocated the distinct differences between politics and morality, though asserting that the former is grounded on the latter. The “normative prudence” school of Aristotle, Aquinas, Burke, and Niebuhr interlink a nation's morality and politics in an ethical and pragmatic statecraft of nations. Realists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, on the other hand, divorce the two, maintaining that “prudence” is the most vital element in the political realm. Realists argue that politics supersedes morality and is upheld through self-interest as the pure search for the truly good. Both views spotlight the individual citizen as the center of moral society yet differ on the importance of the means and ends of statecraft and political adroitness of leaders. Adhering to Aristotelian views, Coll clearly advocates the notion that “moral principles are ultimately realized only in specific acts which human beings choose to carry out.” The author cites Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill as examples of leaders whose moral wisdom in political reasoning led to remarkable statecraft explicitly derived from prudence.

What does world peace mean? Peace is more than the absence and prevention of war, whether international or civil, yet most of our ways of conceptualizing and measuring peace amount to just that definition. In this essay, as part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” I argue that any vision of world peace must grapple not only with war but with the continuums of violence and peace emphasized by feminists: running from the home and community to the public spaces of international relations. Breaking free of the constraints of the last century's intellectual boundaries, I suggest that war and peace are not a dichotomy but rather are intimately related. Yet the dearth of feminist perspectives in global debates prevents us from seeing how violence and harm are exacerbated in households and through the global economy under conditions of both “war” and “peace.” To understand the possibilities for world peace, we must understand these varieties of violence and harm that threaten peace. And to sustain peace we must address the harmful gendered identities, ideologies, and social dynamics that support violence in every society. A narrow understanding of peace as merely the absence of organized violence does not engender the kind of nuanced and rich understanding of human history and human relations needed to bring an end to the structural and physical violence that remains pervasive worldwide.

The use of private military companies (PMCs) has become increasingly prevalent, with such firms as Blackwater, MPRI, and DynCorp taking over a growing number of roles traditionally performed by the regular military. This article uses the framework of just war theory (JWT) to consider the central normative issues raised by this privatization of military force. In particular, I first examine the claim that private contractors are inappropriate actors to wage war because they contravene the JWT principle of right intention. The next section asserts that the use of PMCs is largely consistent with the application of the principle of legitimate authority but undermines two of its central rationales. In the third section, I apply the jus in bello principle of discrimination to PMC personnel. Overall, I argue that JWT needs to be updated and extended to respond to the issues raised by the privatization of military force.

Just as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes became etched into the minds of international relations scholars as the oracles of realpolitik during the Cold War, Immanuel Kant appears to be well on his way to becoming the prophet of “progressive international reform” in the post—Cold War era. Not only has Kant's thought provided the underpinnings of one of the major traditions of international law, but there is a groundswell of interest among international relations scholars today in the question of whether contemporary events, particularly the proliferation of republican states and attempts to create them, signal the march forward to the Kantian ideal of republican peace. Yet, prior to asking what contemporary events signify for the attainment of the Kantian ideal, we should analyze the conflicting interpretions fo Kantian political thought so as to understand the meaning and implications of the ideal itself. Such a task is not merely pedantie—it is necessary to determine the utility of political philosophy for providing understanding and guidance in the real world.

A recent front-page story in the New York Times—“Study Says Haiti Sanctions Kill Up to a 1,000 Children a Month”—draws attention to a vexing ethical problem: Under what circumstances can it be morally justifiable for the international community to apply economic sanctions that wreak serious hardship on civilians in the target state? Even though follow-up reports suggested that the headline might have to overstated the damage actually attributable to the Haitian sanctions, there can be little doubt that current sanctions programs entail at least the potential for a severe degree of civilian harm, to the point of triggering difficult moral issues.

Since the early 1990s, a variety of African and Western governments alike have often suggested that finding “African solutions to African problems” represents the best approach to keeping the peace in Africa. Not only does the empirical evidence from post-Cold War Africa suggest that there are some fundamental problems with this approach, it also rests upon some problematic normative commitments. Specifically in relation to the problem of armed conflict, the “African solutions” logic would have at least three negative consequences: it would undermine the UN; it would provide a convenient excuse for powerful Western states that wished to avoid sending their own soldiers to peace operations in Africa; and it would help African autocrats fend off international, especially Western, criticism of their policies. After providing an overview of the constituent elements of the “African solutions” approach, this article sets out in general terms the central problems with it before turning to a specific illustration of how these problems affected the international responses to the ongoing war in Darfur, Sudan. Instead of searching for “African solutions”, policymakers should focus on developing effective solutions for the complex challenges raised by the issue of armed conflict in Africa. To this end, Western states in general and the P-3 in particular should give greater support to conflict management activities undertaken by the United Nations, develop clearer guidelines for how these should relate to regional initiatives, and facilitate the efforts of civic associations to build the foundations for stable peace in the continent's war zones.

When I think of the challenges facing international society in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, two images come to mind. The first, a work of postcard art, depicts a screenprint of the Statue of Liberty, with a twist. In the place of her striking face and radiating crown appears a decidedly masculine image: that of a helmeted marine, grim and tight-jawed, a cigarette poking insolently from his lips. The caption reads, in bold white capitals on black, “PEACE,” and beneath it another phrase, asterisked: “conditions apply.” The second is a newspaper photograph of a young woman in New York taken during the global demonstrations against the war in February 2003. She has been called out of the march by the photographer and stands, at once defiant and bewildered, against a row of mounted police. Rugged up against the winter cold, she holds a placard upon which she has written a question: “Perpetual war for perpetual peace?”

To adequately estimate the beneficial and harmful effects of artificial intelligence (AI), we must first have a clear understanding of what AI is and what it is not. We need to draw important conceptual and definitional boundaries to ensure we accurately estimate and measure the impacts of AI from both empirical and normative standpoints. This essay argues that we should not conflate AI with automation or autonomy but keep them conceptually separate. Moreover, it suggests that once we have a broad understanding of what constitutes AI, we will see that it can be applied to all sectors of the economy and in warfare. However, it cautions that we must be careful where we apply AI, for in some cases there are serious epistemological concerns about whether we have an appropriate level of knowledge to create such systems. Opening the aperture to include such questions allows us to further see that while AI systems will be deployed in a myriad of forms, with greater or lesser cognitive abilities, these systems ought never to be considered moral agents. They cannot possess rights, and they do not have any duties.

Tesón critiques a recent article by John Rawls in which Rawls extends his acclaimed political theory to include international relations. Tesón first summarizes Rawls' theory and then presents a critique. With this essay, Rawls joins an already vigorous scholarly reaction against traditional state-centered models of international law and relations. When measured against such models, Rawls' theory of international law moves in the right direction in assigning a role, albeit a modest one, to human rights and political legitimacy. However, to the extent that Rawls' effort purports to be a rational reconstruction of international law for our new era (as he certainly intends it to be), it fails to capture central moral features of the international order. His proposal is still too forgiving of serious forms of oppression in the name of liberal tolerance. The theory thus falls short of matching the considered moral judgments prevailing in today's international community. Moreover, it fails Rawls' own test of epistemic adequacy.

The Bush administration's arguments in favor of a preemptive doctrine rest on the view that warfare has been transformed. As Colin Powell argues, “It's a different world … it's a new kind of threat.” And in several important respects, war has changed along the lines the administration suggests, although that transformation has been under way for at least the last ten to fifteen years. Unconventional adversaries prepared to wage unconventional war can conceal their movements, weapons, and immediate intentions and conduct devastating surprise attacks. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, though not widely dispersed, are more readily available than they were in the recent past. And the everyday infrastructure of the United States can be turned against it as were the planes the terrorists hijacked on September 11, 2001. Further, the administration argues that we face enemies who “reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands.” Although vulnerability could certainly be reduced in many ways, it is impossible to achieve complete invulnerability.

Many intergovernmental organizations (IOs) have recently established offices of internal oversight. Yet scandals such as the one surrounding the Oil-for-Food Program in the United Nations have revealed serious flaws in the design of these institutions, especially their lack of independence from top administrators of the bureaucracies that they are supposed to oversee. This study argues that this is due, in great part, to the initial use of an imperfect domestic model. It shows that, in addition to using a flawed model as a starting point for negotiations, states and IO officials intentionally weakened oversight offices even more. The study argues that member-states need to quickly give such offices increased independence in order to make them more effective and to avoid the continued erosion of the legitimacy of IOs.

This leadoff piece examines the ethics of intervention in light of recent policy and academic debates on the subject. It proceeds from an examination of the reasons for intervention today to an assessment of the moral and legal traditions governing intervention and also provides a review of selected cases of intervention recently confronting U.S. foreign policy.

Joy Gordon has made a major contribution to both the ethical analysis and the policy evaluation of economic sanctions. But her claims against sanctions should be understood as critique rather than condemnation and rejection of sanctions on ethical grounds.

Through a series of arguments and examples, this response points out that Gordon may be too narrow in defining sanctions' success, and that, where sanctions have gone awry, it is because they were unimaginatively formulated and poorly implemented, not because sanctions are categorically unethical. Multilateral sanctions in the late 1990s are simply more finely tuned than a few years ago. As a technique of coercive diplomacy, sanctions are meant to change dramatically the costs and benefits that leaders of a nation calculate operate in their favor as they pursue policies that the majority of the international community have declared abhorrent. We can, with the help of Gordon's critical claims, accomplish this goal in a more ethical manner, and by so doing, increase the likely success of sanctions in the future.

The international regulation of whaling has been a tremendous success. It has reduced whale hunting dramatically from its peak in the 1960s and brought almost all species of whales out of danger of extinction. Today, whaling conservation stands as a—or perhaps the—paradigm of a successful international regime. Yet the international organization responsible for this success is itself in such crisis that it may not survive.

The three ethical positions Laberge outlines are: (1) “Rawlsian ethics,” which are distinct from the ethics of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls himself; (2) the position of Michael Walzer adapted from J. S. Mill; and (3) the position most recently articulated by the Canadian philosopher Howard Adelman on the “Anglo-American” debate, which developed out of Walzer's position. These three positions, Laberge writes, are “an ethics of human rights, ethics of the right to a historical community, and an ethics of peace

Pasic and Weiss examine the limitations and the ethical dilemmas of the humanitarian impulse in light of the recent surge in humanitarian intervention. The authors use the experience of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the former Yugoslavia as an example of the way in which politics and humanitarianism are inextricably intertwined. They describe a spectrum of intervention, from rescue to restorative to revolutionary efforts. Rescue efforts often fail to address the underlying political problems, but for a rescuing nation to commit to “revolutionary” intervention and sustained support raises the issue of state sovereignty. Asserting that humanitarian intervention is a highly ambiguous principle, the authors warn of the dangers of politically driven rescues that often force trade-offs between the pursuit of rescue and political order.

Since November 2000, Israel has been implementing an assassination policy in the occupied territories. The Israeli policy is both illegal and immoral. The legal questions are much more complicated than would appear from David's argument. Although individual killings may be lawful in specific cases, this debate concerns a policy providing systematic justification for such acts. Neither international nor Israeli law ensures any backing for this policy. Armed Palestinians are not combatants according to any known legal definition. They are civilians–which is the only legal alternative–and can only be attacked for as long as they actively participate in hostilities.

The argument that this policy affords the public a sense of revenge and retribution could serve to justify acts both illegal and immoral. Clearly, lawbreakers ought to be punished. Yet, no matter how horrific their deeds, as the targeting of Israeli civilians indeed is, they should be punished according to the law. David's arguments could, in principle, justify the abolition of formal legal systems altogether.

The Israeli government has not endorsed the minor changes of policy that David suggests, and for a reason. Israel's initial refusal to acknowledge the very existence of this policy and even its later hesitant admission suggest it is aware of the problems the policy entails and of the difficulties of dismissing them. Assassinations have been part of Israel's security policy for many years, and Israel is currently the only democratic country that regards such measures as legitimate. The Palestinian violations of international law, however, cannot be used to grant legal and/or moral legitimation to these violations when perpetrated by others.

In Joseph Heller's comic war novel, Catch-22, the catch-22 of the title refers to a supposed military regulation that allowed one to be relieved of military service if one was insane, but further provided that no one who realized he would be better off out of military service could possibly be insane. Humanity's so far leaderless approach to dealing with rapidly accelerating climate change embodies a similar, but profoundly tragic, catch-22 that has, among other twists and contradictions, transmuted justice into paralysis.