Chris Brown

This unique collection presents texts in international relations from Ancient Greece to the First World War. Major writers such as Thucydides, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and John Stuart Mill are represented by extracts of their key works; less well-known international theorists including John of Paris, Cornelius van Bynkershoek and Friedrich List are also included. Fifty writers are anthologised in what is the largest such collection currently available. The texts, most of which are substantial extracts, are organised into broadly chronological sections, each of which is headed by an introduction that places the work in its historical and philosophical context. Ideal for both students and scholars, the volume also includes biographies and guides to further reading.

Notions such as ‘guilt’ and ‘forgiveness’ can be defined in objective terms, but more normally have an emotional dimension that cannot be experienced by the institutions examined in this collection of articles. Nevertheless, analogs to these emotions can be discerned in the behaviour of states — and exploring these reveals important insights into what are more (and less) effective ways of responding to, and making amends for, institutional failure. In the 1990s the Western powers were engaged in dealing with a sequence of crises which appeared to call for some kind of intervention — Bosnia 1991/95, Somalia 1992/3, Haiti, 1993/4, Rwanda 1994, Kosovo 1998/9 — and this essay explores the extent to which it can be said that action/inaction in one case can be related back to moral judgements of behaviour in earlier cases. What emerges is not a single narrative of guilt and rectificatory action, but two narratives focusing on different referent objects: obligations towards one's own citizens and toward the putative common good. The picture is complex, yet some significant lessons can be drawn from this analysis. One is the counter-intuitive point that a ‘guilty conscience’ may actually be more effective when the guilt in question is not attributable to the individual whose behaviour is affected, but rather is seen to be borne by the institution that he or she represents. Assuming that guilt is generated by ignorance rather than ill-will, another, more general, lesson is that better intelligence in the broadest sense of the term — including intelligence of the past moral failures of institutions — may be of more value than a (probably difficult to achieve) theory of institutional guilt.

Given Kant's exceptionless moral prohibition on lying, one might suspect that he is committed to a similar prohibition on withholding diagnostic and prognostic information from patients. I confirm this suspicion by adapting arguments against therapeutic privilege from his arguments against lying. However, I show that all these arguments are importantly flawed and submit that they should be rejected. A more compelling Kantian take on informed consent and therapeutic privilege is achievable, I argue, by focusing on Kant's duty of beneficence, which requires us to aim at furthering others’ ends. But I show that there are some cases in which furthering a patient's ends requires withholding material medical information from her. Although I concede that these cases are probably quite rare, I conclude that the best Kantian thinking agrees with that of therapeutic privilege's advocates

The modern literature on responding to global poverty is over fifty years old and has attracted the attention of some of the most prominent analytical political theorists of the age, including Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, and Peter Singer. Yet in spite of this extraordinary concentration of brainpower, the problem of global poverty has quite clearly not been solved or, indeed, adequately defined. We are therefore entitled to ask two questions of any new contribution to this literature: first, what does it have to offer that past work does not; and second, what reason is there to think that, this time, it will truly make a difference. These questions will be posed below, but before undertaking this task it may be useful to offer an overview of the field, with particular attention to why the problem of global poverty seems so intractable.

International Political Theory focuses on the point where two fields of study meet - International Relations and Political Theory. It takes from the former a central concern with the 'international' broadly defined; from the latter it takes a broadly normative identity. IPT studies the 'ought' questions that have been ignored or side-lined by the modern study of International Relations and the 'international' dimension that Political Theory has in the past neglected. A central proposition of IPT is that the 'domestic' and the 'international' cannot be treated as self-contained spheres, although this does not preclude states and the states-system from being regarded by some practitioners of IPT as central points of reference. This Handbook provides an authoritative account of the issues, debates, and perspectives in the field, guided by two basic questions concerning its purposes and methods of inquiry. First, how does IPT connect with real world politics? In particular, how does it engage with real world problems, and position itself in relation to the practices of real world politics? And second, following on from this, what is the relationship between IPT and empirical research in international relations? This Handbook showcases the distinctive and valuable contribution of normative inquiry not just for its own sake but also in addressing real world problems. The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a twelve-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-fields of International Relations. The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-Smith of the University of Queensland and Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford, with each volume edited by a distinguished pair of specialists in their respective fields. The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and reshapes it, pushing each sub-field in challenging new directions. Following the example of the original Reus-Smit and Snidal The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each volume is organized around a strong central thematic by a pair of scholars drawn from alternative perspectives, reading its sub-field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in challenging new directions.

A distinguished selection of contributors provide the theoretical background to the restructuring of Europe that is currently underway. It attempts to situate the ethical debates in a historical, legal and constitutional context, considering important and topical issues such as the rights to seccession and self-determination of minorities in Eastern Europe, and the question of whether national movements are justified in using force to achieve their ends. The authors number legal and constitutional scholars, political philosophers and international relations theorists. There are contributions from Poland and Croatia.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. A burgeoning human rights movement followed, yielding many treaties and new international institutions and shaping the constitutions and laws of many states. Yet human rights continue to be contested politically and legally and there is substantial philosophical and theoretical debate over their foundations and implications. In this volume distinguished philosophers, political scientists, international lawyers, environmentalists and anthropologists discuss some of the most difficult questions of human rights theory and practice: What do human rights require of the global economy? Does it make sense to secure them by force? What do they require in jus post bello contexts of transitional justice? Is global climate change a human rights issue? Is there a human right to democracy? Does the human rights movement constitute moral progress? For students of political philosophy, human rights, peace studies, and international relations.