Issue 27.3
Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights by John Gerard Ruggie
This book offers an insider’s account of how the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights came into being. Although readers may sometimes strain at its mix of heroic memoir and sober argument, Just Business contributes profoundly to the next iteration of an ethical lex mercatoria.
Fall 2013 (Issue 27.3)
This issue features an essay by Richard Schiffman on poverty, food security, and the land grab in Africa; a policy brief by Frances Moore Lappé, Jennifer Clapp, Molly Anderson, Robin Broad, Ellen Messer, Thomas Pogge, and Timothy Wise on why how we count poverty matters; a special centennial roundtable on nonproliferation in the twenty-first century, with contributions from J. Bryan Hehir, Jacques E. C. Hymans, Nina Tannenwald, and Ward Wilson; a feature article by Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka on the nuclear nonproliferation complex; and book reviews by Ralph Steinhardt, Joia S. Mukherjee, and Alyssa R. Bernstein.
How We Count Hunger Matters
In 2010 the FAO reported that in the wake of the 2007–2008 food-price spikes and global economic crisis, the number of people experiencing hunger worldwide since 2005–2007 had increased by 150 million, rising above 1 billion in 2009. However, in its State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (SOFI 12) the FAO presented new estimates, having revamped its methods and reinterpreted its hunger data back to 1990. We suggest that a wide range of specific government policies that were either underemphasized or completely omitted in SOFI 12 have proven successful in reducing hunger—especially those that promote more equitable access to productive resources, the right to food, a more supportive international economic and trade system, and ecological approaches to production.
The Gordian Knot: Moral Debate and Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear weapons are not awe-inspiring, epochal, or war-winning, nor are they certain instruments of doom. They are clumsy, muscle-bound, expensive, unhandy weapons with little use except as totems of status. They are very difficult to win a war with—even if you have a monopoly on their use. As a result, what we already know about nuclear weapons is sufficient. We simply have to ask ourselves if it is right to kill innocents unnecessarily. The answer to this question will provide all the guidance we need.
The Threat of Nuclear Proliferation: Perception and Reality
The United States is right to be vigilant against the threat of nuclear proliferation. But such vigilance can all too easily lend itself to exaggeration and overreaction, as the 2003 invasion of Iraq painfully demonstrates. In this essay, I critique two intellectual assumptions that have contributed mightily to Washington’s puffed-up perceptions of the proliferation threat. I then spell out the policy implications of a more appropriate analysis of that threat.
The Nonproliferation Complex
In this essay, we trace the history of the rise of the nuclear nonproliferation complex during and immediately after the cold war. We show how nonproliferation and disarmament organizations and advocates turned toward ameliorative approaches in the face of great-power refusal to accept more substantial change, or indeed defended an international order favoring the status quo.
The Human Right to Health by Jonathan Wolff
This book will provoke the reader to think about how to bring the public sector, civil society, industry, patents, health financing, and human resources together in order to achieve the more rapid, progressive realization of the right to health in the decades to come.
Justice and Fairness in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime
This essay focuses on two key questions: First, how do the issues of justice and fairness affect the stability, durability, and effectiveness of the nuclear nonproliferation regime? Second, what is the relationship of equity issues to conceptions of national security and “interests”?
