This essay seeks to extend the already controversial debate about humanitarian intervention by exploring the morality, legality, and legitimacy of ecological intervention and its corollary, ecological defense. If the legacy of the Holocaust was acceptance of a new category of “crimes against humanity” and an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention, then should the willful or reckless perpetration of mass extinctions and massive ecosystem destruction be regarded as “crimes against nature” or “ecocide” such as to ground a new norm of ecological intervention or ecological defense? The essay shows that the minimalist argument for ecological intervention—multilateral intervention in the case of environmental emergencies with major transboundary spillover effects—is the strongest and may be defended as ecological self-defense. “Eco-humanitarian intervention” to prevent ecocide involving serious human rights violations has the same precarious status as humanitarian intervention, however, and is unlikely to garner the support of developing countries. The most challenging case of all—the military rescue of nonhuman species—finds moral support in environmental philosophy but conflicts with deeply entrenched international legal and political norms concerning state territorial rights.

This essay characterizes the main actors and how they operate during a buildup of government foreign debt and after a default on payments. These actors are the borrowing governments, domestic and foreign commercial banks, purchasers of government bonds, other governments lending to the debtor, and multilateral institutions (the International Monetary Fund and development banks). As there is no international sovereign analog to national court-supervised bankruptcy in the case of countries, the workout from crises, mainly hitting poorer economies, occurs without legislated rules or an enforcement mechanism, although the IMF (sometimes with the World Bank) serves as an informal umpire for the global financial community.

Present arrangements governing the accumulation and discharge of debt by states are difficult to justify fully on the basis of underlying normative considerations. States are different from individuals in important respects, and the deontological justifications that explain why individuals have a strong burden to abide by promises to repay do not straightforwardly apply to countries. Consequentialist considerations must play a central role in determining what norms should govern the accumulation and discharge of sovereign debt. Modified background norms for the accumulation and discharge of international debt which permit countries’ repayments to be made formally contingent on specific circumstances and the reasons that these circumstances have arisen are more likely to be morally justifiable than the existing rules, which in general require countries to repay their debts according to an inflexible schedule. Modified rules for the accumulation and discharge of international sovereign debt can codify the moral and legal basis for existing ad hoc deviations and present a justifiable framework within which international lending and borrowing can take place.

Poverty eradication has been identified as the largest challenge facing international society in its quest for a peaceful, prosperous, and just world. I respond to this challenge by proposing a global poverty eradication principle. Grounded in John Rawls's account of human rights and assistance for the law of peoples, the global poverty eradication principle applies regardless of causal patterns that may obtain in a given case. The relationship between persons affected by poverty and their governments has implications only for the selection of the appropriate means of poverty eradication, but never undermines the goal of poverty eradication itself. The duties of human rights and assistance that establish the global poverty eradication principle apply even to societies that may reject them, because they are institutional reaffirmations of the natural duties of persons in the context of international society, without whose affirmation no domestic society can be considered well-ordered. I conclude by pointing out some of the challenges that are likely to arise in the application of the global poverty eradication principle. While I cannot hope to settle these practical problems philosophically, flagging them helps to clarify the scope of application of the global poverty eradication principle and gives a sense of the concrete targets and measures that could be adopted in working toward its fulfillment in practice, especially for the elimination of certain types of severe deprivation at a minimum.

The International Criminal Court‘s intervention into the ongoing civil war in northern Uganda evoked a chorus of confident predictions as to its capacity to bring peace and justice to the war-torn region. This optimism is unwarranted, however. The article analyzes the consequences for peace and justice of the ICC's intervention, dividing them into two categories: those resulting from the political instrumentalization of the ICC by the Ugandan government, and those resulting from the discourse and practice of the ICC as an institution of global law enforcement.

As to the first, the article argues that the Ugandan government referred the conflict to the ICC in order to obtain international support for its militarization and to entrench, not resolve, the war; the ICC, in accepting the referral and prosecuting only the Lord‘s Resistance Army, has in effect chosen to pursue a politically pragmatic case even though doing so contravenes the interests of peace, justice, and the rule of law. As to the second, the article reveals the harmful effects that ICC intervention can have on the capacity for autonomous political organization and action among civilian victims of violence, specifically how it leads to depoliticization by promoting a political dependency mediated by international law. The article draws from this analysis disturbing implications about ICC interventions generally, and concludes by asking whether ICC practice may be reformed so as to avoid these negative consequences.