CURRENT ISSUE
Winter 2021 (35.4)
The editors of Ethics & International Affairs are pleased to present the Winter 2021 issue of the journal! The highlight of this issue is a book symposium organized by Michael Blake on Anna Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty, featuring contributions by Adom Getachew; Christopher Heath Wellman; and Michael Blake, with a reply by Anna Stilz. Additionally, the issue includes a feature article by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Allen Buchanan, Shuk Ying Chan, Cécile Fabre, Daniel Halliday, R. J. Leland, Florencia Luna, Matthew S. McCoy, Ole F. Norheim, G. Owen Schaefer, Kok-Chor Tan, and Christopher Heath Wellman on the ethics of vaccine nationalism and the case for the fair priority for residents (FPR) framework. The issue also contains a review essay by Mollie Gerver on refugee policy, and book reviews by Jonathan Todres, Markus Fraundorfer, and Vivienne Jabri.
Book Reviews
A Magna Carta for Children? Rethinking Children’s Rights
Children’s rights present a unique challenge. On the one hand, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, with every country having ratified it except the United States. On the other hand, more than thirty years after the CRC was adopted, children’s rights continue to make many adults, from policymakers to parents, uneasy.
New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and Its Alternatives
Written for a general audience, Alex de Waal’s New Pandemics, Old Politics explores why in the twenty-first century responses to infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics continue to be guided by an outdated script.
Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities
The constitution of political community in the aftermath of colonialism was the foremost challenge for postcolonial leaders who had been shaped by anti-colonial struggles premised on the modern notion of political self-determination.
War by Agreement: A Contractarian Ethics of War
Since the 1970s, when the Vietnam War sparked massive opposition across the United States, philosophers and other academics have written a great deal about the theory of war. At the same time, there has been a parallel flourishing of writing on contractarianism in philosophy and political theory. But there has been no systematic or sustained work that combines both areas of inquiry—a contractarian treatment of the laws of war—until now.
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What We’ve Been Reading
Welcome to our roundup of news and current events related to ethics and international affairs! Here’s some of what we’ve been reading this past month.
Secretary-General selection process and the P5 stranglehold on power
On September 10, 2021, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 75-325. Behind the resolution, which concerns the selection process for the Secretary-General, were two months of intense negotiations between the Security Council (read: the five permanent members) and the General Assembly (read: the other 188 states). In particular, the hotly contested paragraph on a female Secretary-General shows that when push comes to shove, the P5 will choose power over gender equality.
Is a Bad Deal Better than no Deal?: A Perspective from Africa on the G7’s Agreement to Restructure International Corporate Taxation
On June 5, 2021, the G7 finance ministers reached a landmark agreement to restructure the global system of corporate taxation. While this has been widely hailed as a breakthrough toward a more equitable way of taxing the digital economy and a triumph of multilateralism in the first year of the post-Trump era, the truth is much more complicated than it seems, particularly for countries in Africa and the Global South.
