Review Essays
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.
Shifting International Security Norms
In this review essay, Denise Garcia draws on two recent books to argue that new technology can reinforce security norms just as easily as it can undermine them. Additionally, she shows that contestation is a natural part of the process by which norms are reformed or replaced, and that this leads to ethical progress over the long term.
Immigration Ethics and the Context of Justice
This review essay by Linda Bosniak engages David Miller’s recent book Strangers in our Midst. Specifically, Bosniak highlights the tensions inherent in Miller’s contextualist political theory of immigration.
The Lessons of Effective Altruism
In this essay, Rubenstein examines two recent books by Peter Singer and William MacAskill on the philosophy and philanthropic movement known as Effective Altruism (EA). She addresses both the promise and limitations of EA—whose proponents seek to do the “most good”—arguing that a “hidden curriculum” underlies its teachings.
