In this chapter, Daniel Layman argues that there is not one Lockean conception of IR but rather (at least) two mutually incompatible conceptions: one a Ciceronian moral cosmopolitanism and the other a colonialism centered on British interests. Opposing Locke’s philosophical writings with his economic works, Layman’s reading acknowledges the contradictions and incoherence present in Locke’s IR theory.

This response suggests that in writing the history of ethics, it is important to take seriously what the principals wrote and believed, distinguishing it carefully from our own responses to their writings, or from subsequent uses to which their writings may have been put. For example, when reading Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Vitoria on just war against non‐Christian peoples, forcible conversion and conquest are clearly condemned. Whatever the attitudes of their contemporaries, not to mention later thinkers up to the (...) present, there is no foundation in Aquinas and Vitoria for holy war or “exceptionalism,” American or otherwise. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between understandings of Indigenous government and the development of early-modern European, and especially British, political thought. It will be argued that a range of British political thinkers represented Indigenous peoples as being in want of effective government and regular conduct due to the absence of sufficiently developed property relations among them. In particular, British political thinkers framed the ‘deficiencies’ of Indigenous people by ideas of civilization in which key assumptions connected ‘property’, ‘government’, and ‘society’ as (...) the attainments of civilized polities and societies. Accordingly, Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere were perceived to live in associations (rather than ‘societies’) bound by custom and tradition (rather than ‘government’). The paper will thus identify conceptual connections made between property, polity, and sovereignty in European and British political thought, and argue that such understandings provide a useful resource for understanding colonial attitudes to Indigenous people in Australia down to the present day. (shrink)

In this article, I explore recent work on realist political theory and international politics. I discuss how scholarship on the topic emanates from two different fields—International Relations and political philosophy—and argue that there is a good case for greater engagement between them. I open by delineating various kinds of realism, showing that the term covers a wide variety of methodological and political approaches. In particular, I suggest, it is important to recognize the difference between liberal and radical approaches. The remainder (...) of the essay examines assorted examples of realist international political theorizing, work that ranges from attempts to rewrite the canon of 20th century political thought to contributions to the vibrant global justice debates. (shrink)

What is the relationship between human rights and the rights of states? Roughly, while cosmopolitans insist that international morality must regard as basic the interests of individuals, statists maintain that the state is of fundamental moral significance. This article defends a relational version of statism. Human rights are ultimately grounded in a relational norm of reciprocal independence and set limits to the exercise of public authority, but, contra the cosmopolitan, the state is of fundamental moral significance. A relational account promises (...) to justify a limited conception of state sovereignty while avoiding the familiar cosmopolitan criticisms of statist accounts. (shrink)

Research Articles Craig Yirush, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

Libertarians often rely on arguments that subordinate the principle of liberty to the value of its economic consequences. This invites the question of what a pure libertarian theory of justice—one that takes liberty as its overriding concern—would look like. Grotius's political theory provides a template for such a libertarianism, but it also entails uncomfortable commitments that can be avoided only by compromising the principle of liberty. According to Grotius, each person should be free to decide how to act as long (...) as her actions do not violate the equal liberty of others. According to this principle, however, people are free to enter any contract and alienate any rights, permitting even contracts of slavery or the alienation of rights of bodily integrity. Libertarians can escape this commitment to absolute freedom of contract only by adopting ad-hoc amendments to the principle of liberty. (shrink)

Critics of climate collapse and colonization in the Americas rightly identify the origin of these twin crises in early modern political theologies. They seek to combat these crises with new political theologies of nature that pay greater reverence to “native” peoples’ ecological knowledge. But in doing so, these critics subtly, perhaps unwittingly, recall elements of the colonial power they criticize. I explain why this is the case, examining Bartolomé de Las Casas’s use of naturales in his critiques of Spanish Conquest, (...) and Thomas Harriot’s use of naturall inhabitants in his writing on English colonization to describe “native” Americans. Both authors aimed to promote politico-theological reverence for “native” peoples and their relationships with “nature.” This set into motion a productive form of power operating in modern political theologies. This power works by legitimizing the European-Christian presence in the Americas through their ability to recognize, respect, and protect “native” relationships with “nature.”. (shrink)

This introduction gives a rough sketch of the context of Mare liberum's publication and the main arguments Grotius made in this pamphlet. It touches briefly on some of the latest arguments on Mare liberum and provides a survey of the contributions to this Commemmorative Issue. Moreover, it sets the stage for the contributions which elaborate on the fate of Grotian concepts - not so much by historically tracing these ideas over the past 400 years, but by offering an analysis of (...) how similar concepts are used in international law today. (shrink)

Europe's position in the world is analyzed in relation to a specification of globalization into five global processes, whereby Europe stands out as the central node of global flows of trade and capital and as the region of uniquely high transnational entanglements, as an area of transnational normativity. The historical background and inter-relation of foreign trade and trans-polity law within Europe, both in early modern social theory and in post-Second World War institution-building, are highlighted, as well as the spread of (...) European law to other continents. The concepts of position, role, and identity should be distinguished. This historical and current position of Europe in the world is little expressed in the roles that contemporary European leaders want to play and in contemporary formulations of European heritage and identity. This is due partly to a nostalgic misjudgment by former great power politicians, but largely because of the delimited position of conventional trade and law in Europe, and of the actual but untheorized transformation of trading traditions into socially embedded trade and of the legal tradition into democratic international normativity. It is finally argued that these European practices of trade and law in fact correspond to many current critical views on global trade and global governance. (shrink)

Abstract. The article discusses the importance of three extra-legal sources—divine inspiration, natural law, and morality—for a full understanding and effective application of law. Each source is seen as vital due to its ability to compensate for the shortcomings of the other two sources. No source, including belief, is seen as necessarily incompatible with the doctrinal pluralism characteristic of modern societies.

This article explores the relationship between utility and justice in the ancient Epicurean tradition, and as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries following the revival of Epicureanism in the writings of Pierre Gassendi. It focuses on the significance of various allusions to a line from Horace, ‘utilitas, justi prope mater et aequi’, which appeared in writings of Hugo Grotius, David Hume, and Jeremy Bentham, and was used to give utility a prominence in modern hought that it had not (...) hitherto received. The article attempts to provide the context for Hume’s belief in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals that the foundation of justice was utility and for Bentham placing utility at the foundation of his system. (shrink)

This essay makes three claims about preventive war, which is demarcated from preemptive war and is part of a broader class of ?anticipatory? wars. Anticipatory wars, but especially preventive war, are ?hard cases? for traditional Just War theory; other puzzles for this tradition include nuclear deterrence, humanitarian intervention, and provability a priori of the success of Tit-for-Tat. First, and despite strong assertions to the contrary, it is far from clear that preventive war is absolutely prohibited in traditional Just War Theory, (...) and it is also dubious that it is in all cases ?clearly illegal?. Second, the morality of both preemptive and preventive wars is shown to turn on epistemological considerations: on what degree and kind of justification the primary metaphysical facts of threat can be reasonably believed. Third, an argument is made that whatever epistemic threshold is held to be necessary, some preventive wars will exceed it, and that this is more likely with advancing technologies of information acquisition. Finally, the common argument that allowing all nations to follow policies of preventive war would result in more wars than barring such policies is shown to be mistaken by simulations in game theory. Suggestions are made about the derivation of traditional Just War criteria from more basic moral principles, and about their subtle failures as jointly necessary conditions for the morality of war. (shrink)

Gregory Reichberg’s argument against my reading of the classical just war theorists falsely assumes that if just cause is unilateral, then there is no moral equality of combatants. This assumption is plausible if we assume an individualist framework. However, the classical theorists accepted quasi-Aristotelian, communitarian social ontologies and theories of justice. For them, the political community is ontologically and morally prior to the private individual. The classical just war theorists build their theories within this framework. They argue that just war (...) is only waged by supra-individual political communities for irreducibly social ends. War by private individuals for private ends is always unjust. The ends sought in just war presuppose the justice of a hierarchy of authority over war such that the soldier is obligated to serve in war upon the command of his legitimate authority. In this way, the classical theorists accept a unilateral theory of just cause and a division of authority over war that entails the possibility of the moral equality of combatants. (shrink)

Conventional modern just war theory is fundamentally incoherent. On the one hand, the theory contains a theory of public war wherein ethical responsibility for the justice of war belongs uniquely to political sovereigns while subjects, including soldiers, are obligated to serve in war upon the sovereign’s command. On the other hand, the theory contains a theory of discrimination which presupposes that participants in war, including soldiers, are responsible for the justice of the wars they fight. Moreover, these two components are (...) derived from two inconsistent visions of political justice. The theory of public war, it turns out, is derived from a theory of justice that places the value of political society conceived of as a supra-individual communal entity above the value of the private individual. The theory of discrimination, however, is derived from a theory of justice that places the value of the private individual above that of political society. This inconsistency is revealed by analyzing the theories of Vitoria, Grotius, and Walzer. Appreciating this problem also helps situate the recent revisionist critiques of conventional just war theory. (shrink)

This article reviews Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’sHow the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism(2015). It argues that the book offers a stimulating and ambitious approach to solving the problems of Eurocentrism and the origins of capitalism in growing critical scholarship in historical sociology and International Relations. However, by focusing on the ‘problem of the international’ and proposing a ‘single unified theory’ based on uneven and combined development, the authors present a history of international relations that trades (...) off methodological openness and legal complexity for a structural and exclusive consequentialism driven by anti-Eurocentrism. By misrepresenting the concept of social-property relations in terms of the internal/external fallacy, and by confusing different types of ‘internalism’ required by early-modern jurisdictional struggles, the book problematically conflates histories of international law and capitalism. These methodological problems are contextualised by examples from the Spanish, French and British empires’ conceptions of sovereignty and jurisdiction and their significant legal actors and processes. (shrink)

The historical problem about the origins of the language of rights derives its importance from the conceptual problem: of "two fundamentally different ways of thinking about justice," which is basic? Is justice unitary or plural? This in turn opens up a problem about the moral status of human nature. A narrative of the origins of "rights" is an account of how and when a plural concept of justice comes to the fore, and will be based on the occurrence of definite (...) speech-forms—the occurrence of the plural noun in the sense of "legal properties." The history of this development is currently held to begin with the twelfth-century canonists. Later significant thresholds may be found in the fourteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Wolterstorff's attempt to find the implicit recognition of rights in the Scriptures depends very heavily on what he takes to be implied rather than on what is stated, and at best can establish a pre- history of rights-language. (shrink)

This introduction gives a rough sketch of the context of Mare liberum's publication and the main arguments Grotius made in this pamphlet. It touches briefly on some of the latest arguments on Mare liberum and provides a survey of the contributions to this Commemmorative Issue. Moreover, it sets the stage for the contributions which elaborate on the fate of Grotian concepts - not so much by historically tracing these ideas over the past 400 years, but by offering an analysis of (...) how similar concepts are used in international law today. (shrink)

Nardin examines the moral principles underlying the idea of humanitarian intervention from the perspective of international law and from that of the natural law tradition.

This book addresses the question of why governments sometimes follow the law and other times choose to evade the law. The traditional answer of jurists has been that laws have an autonomous causal efficacy: law rules when actions follow anterior norms; the relation between laws and actions is one of obedience, obligation, or compliance. Contrary to this conception, the authors defend a positive interpretation where the rule of law results from the strategic choices of relevant actors. Rule of law is (...) just one possible outcome in which political actors process their conflicts using whatever resources they can muster: only when these actors seek to resolve their conflicts by recourse to law, does law rule. What distinguishes 'rule-of-law' as an institutional equilibrium from 'rule-by-law' is the distribution of power. The former emerges when no one group is strong enough to dominate the others and when the many use institutions to promote their interest. (shrink)

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally.

What did Rousseau's readers mean when they called him an ‘Epicurean’? A seemingly simple question with complex implications. This article attempts to answer it by reconstructing Rousseau's contemporary reception as an Epicurean thinker. First, it surveys the earliest and most widely read critics of the second Discourse: Prussian Astronomer Royal Jean de Castillon, Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel, and Hanoverian biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These readers branded Rousseau an Epicurean primarily to highlight his atheism, his anti-providential and materialist natural (...) philosophy. Then, it discusses Genevan pastor Jacob Vernet's positive assessment of Rousseau as a critic of ‘fashionable’ Epicureanism, before reconstructing Rousseau's critique of the reception of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man as an Epicurean text. These sources elucidate Rousseau's engagement with a range of ideas and argumentative positions that would inform his later self-identification as a ‘refined’ Epicurean. In particular, they highlight his interest in how a sentimental awareness of beauty might mitigate the potentially vicious effects of hedonism. The article concludes with novelist Mme. de Genlis’ critique of Rousseau's Wise Materialism, using his thoughts on the imagination to suggest some of the ways the neglected aesthetic dimensions of Rousseau's reception of Epicureanism might be developed. (shrink)

Hedley Bull, in the passage in The Anarchical Society which introduces the ‘three competing traditions of thought’ associated with the articulation of the modern states-system, cited Otto von Gierke as the originator of this influential way of organising international theory. This article examines Gierke's work in order to assess the extent of the influence on the English School that can be ascribed to him. It argues that in fact Gierke's version of the three traditions bears little resemblance to that of (...) Bull, and that by ‘international society’ Gierke was referring to confederal structures of political power. Through an analysis of a significant strand of American revolutionary thought, the paper seeks to demonstrate the potential that further attention to the Gierkean understanding of international society could have for advancing the English School's research programme and building on its achievements. (shrink)

Scholarly discussion has treated the account of the state of nature which Locke presents in his Second Treatise as neither an hypothesis nor a description but rather as a fiction. John Dunn, for example, claims that it is a `theoretical analysis of the fundamental relations of right and duty which obtain between human beings, relations which are logically prior to the particular historical situations in which all actual human beings always in fact find themselves'. Here Dunn presents a misleading account (...) of Locke's argument, presumably, as the title of his paper suggests, in order to mount an argument of his own about the `political relevance' of Locke's work to a time when no one takes seriously the early modern idea of the state of nature. However, this article also has a more serious concern. I argue that the representation of the state of nature as a merely imaginary, `theoretical analysis' of social relations obscures the significance of the early modern idea of a state of nature, not only for the work of Locke and his near contemporaries, but also, more importantly, for the broader development of western social and political thought. The idea of an original condition of freedom and equality played a central role in Locke's argument, serving as a means both to undermine the view that humans were born into a natural condition of subjection to the rule of others and to justify European expropriation of land in the Americas. It also represented one end of a developmental continuum, running from the original, most primitive, condition of humanity through to the societies of contemporary western Europe, which was thought to encompass all sections of humanity. While the idea of an original asocial condition on which this continuum was based was later brought into question, a closely related developmental framework nevertheless informed later movements in history and the social sciences. After being abandoned in its original form, this category was finally revived in 20th-century political theory, this time precisely in the form that Dunn mistakenly ascribes to Locke. The article concludes by speculating on the relationship between these normative and empirical perspectives on the state of nature. (shrink)

This article explores the extent to which the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 coheres with the normative precepts of liberalism as an international political theory. Beginning with a Lockean liberal theory of the state, this article first examines the evolution of international liberalism in order to identify the fundamental normative postulates of liberal theory as it pertains to international relations, especially regarding the use of military force. The article then advances two interrelated arguments: First, that the underpinnings of the (...) decision to invade Iraq embodied in the Bush Doctrine draw heavily from the liberal tradition, though still depart from it in important ways. Second, that the Bush Doctrine as manifested in the Iraq war reflects in many ways the liberal thinking that prevailed during the interwar years and is therefore susceptible to a similar charge of ‘utopianism’ that was leveled against interwar liberalism by E. H. Carr in his Twenty Years' Crisis. (shrink)

Los derechos de conquista, descubrimiento y ocupación, y la libertad de los mares: una genealogía de la injusticia sobre los recursos naturales Este artículo analiza los orígenes coloniales de tres principios del derecho internacional: el derecho de conquista, el derecho de descubrimiento y ocupación, y la libertad de los mares. Argumento que cada uno de estos derechos se estableció como principio jurídico internacional para facilitar la colonización de pueblos lejanos, sus territorios y tierras, y con el fin de acumular sus (...) recursos naturales. El artículo analiza cómo se justificaron estos derechos, qué conjunto de facultades e inmunidades exclusivas conferían, y cómo están vinculados a tres regímenes jurídicos modernos distintos de derechos sobre el espacio natural y sus recursos: la soberanía territorial, los derechos de propiedad privada sobre tierras extranjeras y los bienes marítimos comunes mundiales. En tanto expongo los orígenes moralmente arbitrarios de cada uno de estos principios de derecho internacional, que reflejan las condiciones y los objetivos específicos de determinados proyectos coloniales, también sostengo que los regímenes de derechos sobre los recursos naturales que estos institucionalizaron son convergentes en el sentido de que permitieron una apropiación y una explotación distintivamente injustas de los recursos naturales. El artículo también señala las formas en que la lógica y el funcionamiento de estos regímenes siguen dando forma al uso injusto de los recursos naturales hasta el día de hoy. (shrink)

This essay responds to Esther Reed's recent critique of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle in this journal. It argues that Reed fundamentally misunderstands and misrepresents R2P. Her critique of R2P would have served well as a critique of the earlier concept of humanitarian intervention had it been penned in the late 1990s. But most of the problems and dangers that Reed identifies are in reality the very problems and dangers that R2P seeks to overcome, and I suggest that it (...) does overcome them quite successfully. R2P does not impose Western ideals on the rest of the world, weaken the legal restrictions on the use of force, or promote abusive interventionism. Rather, it offers a bold but carefully constructed framework that holds the promise of promoting the protection of vulnerable populations from mass atrocities. (shrink)

This article expounds the role played by Hugo Grotius in marginalizing positive duties for the protection of vulnerable people beyond the sovereign state. In the sixteenth century, theorists writing within a range of traditions had posited solemn and demanding duties to assist and rescue vulnerable subjects of other rulers from tyranny and persecution. In the early seventeenth century, Grotius explicitly subordinated such duties to the duty to seek the preservation and advantage of one’s own state. He claimed that, while the (...) care of the vulnerable subjects of others was praiseworthy, it was not obligatory. No state was bound to accept trouble or inconvenience for the sake of vulnerable outsiders. Grotius turns out to be less of an exemplar for present day notions of the Responsibility to Protect and other international duties of human protection than he is often said to be. (shrink)

The primary instrument of dispute management in political liberalism is a form of political thinking and talking that tries to reconcile opposed positions with an impartial settlement based on fair arrangements and mutual respect, one that is careful to treat rival views equitably, and reasoned through from start to finish with open methods that lead to a public justification understandable to the disputants. But this model of reasoning is notoriously deficient in resolving disputes among radically different communities. A more effective (...) form of political reasoning for these disputes that yet respects the background values of liberalism is found in the languages of state depicted in realist accounts of international relations. These languages avoid liberal appeals to be reasonable, reciprocity controlled by moral criteria, and the quest for common reasons. They represent a deliberative search for an accord that will meet the interests of the disputing parties as they define these interests and understand the settlements, and in this sense are welcome models to manage divisive issues in pluralist democracies. A complete version of political reasoning would contain both liberal and realpolitik models and a mechanism to adjudicate the appropriate uses of each model. (shrink)

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith observed that we live in a fundamentally conflictual world. Although he held that we are creatures who sympathize, he also observed that our sympathy seems to be constrained by geographical limits. Accordingly, traditional theories of cosmopolitanism were implausible; yet, as a moral philosopher, Smith attempted to reconcile his bleak description of the world with his eagerness for international peace. Smith believed that commercial intercourse among self‐interested nations would emulate sympathy on a global (...) scale, balancing national wealth and international peace without a coercive apparatus to enforce compliance with international law. (shrink)

This Insight examines the stance the EU should adopt towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the basis of the political thought of Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, and Niccolò Machiavelli. Taking as its starting point Josep Borrell’s comment that “we are too much Kantians and not enough Hobbesians” at the 2022 EU Ambassadors’ Conference, this Insight offers a revisionist interpretation of both Kant and Hobbes while suggesting Machiavelli as a third possible inspiration for EU external action. Although he is often (...) portrayed as a proto-“realist” intent on increasing state power, Hobbes in reality favours stability above all else and would therefore presumably not support a more “aggressive” foreign policy. Kant, on the other hand, has traditionally been seen as more of a philosophical idealist, but his political philosophy in fact supports a more assertive conduct by states in their external relations. Both of these philosophers are thus quite different from how Borrell portrays them. The Insight also introduces the perspective of a third thinker, Machiavelli, whose philosophy suggests that the EU should adopt a pragmatic diplomatic strategy, forging alliances, supplying Ukraine with weapons, and maintaining strong ties with allies. (shrink)

1919 es un año clave en la trayectoria filosófica de Martin Heidegger. Recién designado como docente asistente de Husserl en la Universidad de Friburgo, Heidegger comienza a trabajar en dos proyectos que se dan en paralelo: la "transformación hermenéutica de la fenomenología" y el desarrollo de una fenomenología de la religión, que, en un principio, está centrada en el estudio de la mística medieval. El diálogo de ida y vuelta entre ambos proyectos produce las más importantes ideas de la filosofía (...) heideggeriana temprana. Este artículo se propone sostener que la lectura de ciertos autores místicos fue determinante para su reinterpretación de la fenomenología. Heidegger se apropia de la Hingabe mística dándole un sentido técnico de extrema importancia en su metodología fenomenológica. 1919 is a key year in Martin Heidegger's philosophical path. Recently appointed as Husserl's assistant professor at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger begins to work on two projects that occur in parallel: the "hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology" and the development of a phenomenology of religion, which initially focuses on the study of medieval mysticism. The back and forth dialogue between the two projects produces the most important ideas of Heidegger's early philosophy. This article aims to argue that the reading of certain mystical authors was determinant for his reinterpretation of phenomenology. Heidegger appropriates the mystical Hingabe by giving it a technical sense of extreme importance in his phenomenological methodology. (shrink)

Tomando la interpretación de Richard Tuck como un ejemplo paradigmático de las (hiper)críticas realistas al pensamiento kantiano, en este artículo presento cuatro grupos de razones por las cuales resulta que la lectura que Tuck realiza de la filosofía política kantiana del derecho de gentes es errónea. In this article I put forward four series of reasons to rebut Richard Tuck's construction of Kant's political philosophy of the law of peoples. Tuck's interpretation is taken here as a paradigmatic model of the (...) realistic (hyper)criticism against Kant's thought. (shrink)

1. Among the most striking features of the political arrangements on this planet is its division into sovereign states.1 To be sure, in recent times, globalization has woven together the fates of communities and individuals in distant parts of the world in complex ways. It is partly for this reason that now hardly anyone champions a notion of sovereignty that would entirely discount a state’s liability the effects that its actions would have on foreign nationals. Still, state sovereignty persists as (...) a political fact. The number of states has increased enormously due to upheavals of the 20th century, and there is nothing in principle morally wrong with the existence of states - or so we will assume.2 What must be explored, then, are the limits of normatively plausible sovereignty. How bad does a government have to be for outsiders to be allowed to interfere? What responsibilities does a country incur because of its contribution to global warming? What obligations arise through trading? In this paper, we explore another pertinent question: to what extent is a country allowed to influence who lives on its territory by regulating immigration? The angle from which we approach this question continues to be neglected even now that questions of global justice are receiving much attention. Immigration amounts to a change in political relationships as immigrants alter their standing within one community and acquire a status elsewhere. Yet it also amounts to an alteration in physical relationship, since they acquire a relationship to a territory, making a life for themselves with the resources offered by a part of the earth.3 We base our exploration of.. (shrink)

Kant limits cosmopolitan right to a universal right of hospitality, condemning European imperial practices towards indigenous peoples, while allowing a right to visit foreign countries for the purpose of offering to engage in commerce. I argue that attempts by contemporary theorists such as Jeremy Waldron to expand and update Kant’s juridical category of cosmopolitan right would blunt or erase Kant’s own anti-colonial doctrine. Waldron’s use of Kant’s category of cosmopolitan right to criticize contemporary identity politics relies on premises that upset (...) Kant’s balanced right to hospitality. An over-extensive right to visit can invoke “Kantian” principles that Kant himself could not have consistently held, without weakening his condemnation of European settlement. I construct an alternative spirit of cosmopolitan right more favorable to the contemporary claims of indigenous peoples. Kant’s analysis suggests there are circumstances when indigenous peoples may choose whether to engage in extensive cultural interaction, and reasonably refuse the risks of subjecting their claims to debate in democratic politics in a unitary public. Cosmopolitan right accorded respect to peoples; any “domestic” adaptation of cosmopolitan right should respect indigenous peoples as peoples, absent a serious public explanation by a democratic state for why it has now become appropriate to treat indigenous peoples merely as individual citizens. (shrink)

La posición de Grocio respecto a la guerra es considerada en este artículo como un intento de mediación entre el realismo político y el moralismo pacifista. Aunque la guerra es una consecuencia inevitable del conflicto permanente en las relaciones humanas, puede ser ajustada a los principios y reglas del derecho natural común a los hombres y del derecho de gentes resultante del consenso entre los pueblos. En consecuencia, Grocio expone las condiciones de justificación de la guerra y propone reglas de (...) conducta en la guerra. Sin embargo, persiste una tensión insuperable entre las pretensiones normativas de la moral y el derecho, por un lado, y la lógica de la fuerza propia de la guerra, por otro. (shrink)

El artículo trata de la responsabilidad de proteger, que plantea un dilema entre el respeto a los principios de soberanía y no intervención y la necesidad de proteger a las poblaciones en peligro en casos de violaciones graves, masivas y sistemáticas de sus derechos humanos y/o del derecho internacional humanitario. En ese contexto, el propósito de este trabajo es analizar las posturas de América Latina sobre la RdP. Sin embargo, cualquier debate sobre esta cuestión debe empezar por considerar brevemente de (...) qué estamos hablando cuando decimos “responsabilidad de proteger”, a qué se refiere este principio, qué aspectos abarca y cuál es la situación actual, en relación con el contexto histórico y político que ha determinado muchas de las posturas adoptadas por los países de América Latina al momento de tener que aplicar decisiones de política exterior o fijar sus principios. (shrink)