Issue 22.2
Briefly Noted
This section contains a round-up of recent notable books in the field of international affairs.
The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin edited by George Crowder and Henry Hardy
This is a collection of 13 essays, all but two of which are newly commissioned, covering Berlin’s multifaceted oeuvre as much as a single book can. The authors are specialists in different fields who do not seem to have much in common except one belief: Berlin matters.
A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy by J. Timmons Roberts and Bradley C. Parks
Part of what makes Roberts and Parks’s argument unusual and original is not the end point—that ultimately we will all need to radically cut carbon output—but the causal role that they think fairness and talk of fairness play in getting there.
Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? edited by Thomas Pogge
All the contributors to this impressive volume agree that freedom from poverty is a basic human right, but they differ in how best to argue in its support. In general, there are two ways. One is to ground the right in a negative right, while the other is to ground it in a positive right.
Bioethics and Armed Conflict: Moral Dilemmas of Medicine and War by Michael L. Gross
This book is important as an analysis of some of the least-discussed dilemmas related to warfare. But its value extends beyond its novel subject matter to include its innovative methodology.
International Legitimacy and World Society by Ian Clark
Clark seems caught not just between two concepts—international and world society—but between his two goals: the historical goal of recovering the politics of world society, and the analytical goal of specifying the concept.
Expanding the Boundaries of Transitional Justice
This essay examines “Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies,” Alexander Mayer-Rieckh and Pablo de Greiff eds., and “What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations,” Ruth Rubio-Marin, ed.
Immigration Policy and “Immanent Critique”
Carens’s use of ‘immanent critique’ to ground his moral prescriptions on the not yet realized normative purposes of the immigration policies of liberal democratic states meets with only partial success.
