Review Essays
How Not to Do Things with International Law
In this review essay, Anne Peters considers Ian Hurd’s recent book How to Do Things with International Law. Peters argues that, although the book is provocative and compelling, it may unwittingly reinforce the realist stance that international law is simply power politics in disguise.
Human Rights Under Attack: What Comes Next?
Micheline Ishay laments the recent onslaught against the human rights movement even from professed supporters, taking Samuel Moyn’s recent book Not Enough as indicative of the trend. Rather than piling on more critiques, Ishay writes, what we really need are strategies and solutions.
Reconstructing Globalization in an Illiberal Era
George F. DeMartino examines recent books from Dani Rodrick and Joseph Stiglitz, both of whom press the case for a reconstructed globalization that generates benefits for all and not just for corporate and financial elites, but offer diverging prescriptions for how to achieve it.
The Irony of Just War
This review essay examines a series of benchmark books on the ethics of war published over the past year. All three grapple with the hard facts of modern violent conflict, and they all skillfully bring diverse traditions of just war thinking into conversation with one another.
Toward a Global Water Ethic: Learning from Indigenous Communities
This review essay draws on three important new contributions to the water governance literature to suggest that insights from indigenous communities’ more holistic and long-term relationship with water could help advance the adoption of a new global water ethic.
How Should We Combat Corruption? Lessons from Theory and Practice
In this review essay, Gillian Brock surveys four recent books on corruption, all of which offer important insights.
Poverty Alleviation, Global Justice, and the Real World
For nearly half a century, political theorists have wrestled with the problem of global social justice, producing ever more elaborate and analytically-sophisticated models, but without engaging significantly with, or materially influencing, real-world politics. In this review essay, Chris Brown considers one of the latest contributions to this literature.
The Ethics of Insurgency
In this review essay, James Turner Johnson considers two recent books on the ethics of insurgency warfare. He draws on the deep history of moral and legal thought on the subject to forcefully defend many of the standards laid out in the classical just war tradition and enshrined in international law.
