Booklist | A Critique of Human Rights

The idea of human rights is assumed to be universal. Not so fast, says a Yale prof. Samuel Moyn offers a sharp critique of human rights with a particular interest in economic inequality:

…[I]n “Not Enough,” he ex­am­ines how they have been an­swered by in­ternational lawyers, po­lit­i­cal philoso­phers and hu­man-rights ac­tivists since the end of World War II. He con­cludes that, while the hu­man rights move­ment has not de­lib­er­ately sup­ported the growth of ma­te­r­ial in­equal­ity dur­ing this pe­riod, it has also not done enough to com­bat it: “un­wit­tingly, the cur­rent hu­man rights move­ment ap­pears to be help­ing Croe­sus live out his plan,” Mr. Moyn writes. In gen­eral terms, Mr. Moyn’s book cov­ers much the same ground as his 2010 study, “The Last Utopia,” which also treated the mod­ern his­tory of hu­man rights. In­deed, Mr. Moyn de­scribes his new vol­ume as a “re­write” of the ear­lier one: “What can make the study of his­tory ex­cit­ing is that its in­fin­ity of sources and our change in per­spec­tive can al­low two books on the same topic by the same per­son to bear al­most no re­sem­blance to each other.” De­spite this dis­claimer, there is a ba­sic con­sis­tency in Mr. Moyn’s po­si­tion: In both books he writes as a critic of hu­man rights from the left.

Via WSJ, “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There,”www.wsj.com/articles/not-enough-review-dont-just-do-something-stand-there-1524170889

Booklist | Best Diplomacy Books of 2015

Add these 2105 books that focus on the history, practice, and key issues in diplomacy to your reading list:

Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy by David Milne – the most important rethinking of American foreign policy, dividing key thinkers between artistic and scientific approaches

Realpolitik: A History by John Bew – unraveling a German contribution and distinguishing it from the realist school of thought

The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire by Susan Pedersen – explores the first grand attempt at international governance and a failed attempt to outlaw war

The Deluge, by Adam Tooze – an original take on the interwar period as power gravitated from Europe to the US

ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger – the must-read book to understand the Middle East disruptor

King John: England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant by Stephen Church – commemorating the 800th anniversary of a foundational doc

Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson – making the case that he cannot be ignored as a major diplomatic strategist, an effort to “revise the revisionists”

Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin – on his institutionalizing failures, using intuition over facts, and forming the foundation for neoconservative missteps

Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy by Micah Zenko – avoiding groupthink by thinking like the other side

The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft by Hal Brands (Editor), Jeremi Suri (Editor) – what can policymakers really learn from history?

Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne – a longtime writer of military history isolates a key factor

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turtle – how technology makes it harder for us to be together, diminishing empathy

The New York Review Abroad edited by Robert B Silvers with introductory updates by Ian Buruma – around the world in 27 essays

 

Global Economics

Inequality: What Can be Done? by Anthony Atkinson – to follow up on Piketty’s big idea last year, how about a solution?

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth by Tom Burgis – revealing how Africa sits at the bottom on of the global industrial chain

Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin by Nathaniel Popper – from a global joke to a movement and new currency

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik – taking on the dismal science in the form of a defense

 

Country Focus

 

Global Rules: America, Britain, and a Disordered World by James E. Cronin

Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, by Dan Ephron – a murder that didn’t make peace inevitable or settle the big Israeli debate

Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by Oleg V. Khlevniuk, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day by Carrie Gibson

How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People
by Sudhir Hazareesingh

The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War by Arkady Ostrovsky

The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky

The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business by Alex de Waal

 

Finally, take a look and James Lindsay’s complication of ten American foreign policy influencers who died in 2015. Happy New Year!

Booklist | Fire and Ashes

A noted Harvard human rights specialist tries his hand at local politics in his native Canda, giving up his spot as an informed observer of global norms and theory for the rough and tumble world of electoral math. It doesn’t go wells or Michael Ignatieff. This is his story.

Politics, he argues, is necessarily about opportunism; a gifted politician knows when to strike and when to bide his time. This may reveal a lack of principle, he thinks, but it doesn’t have to, and a skillful politician knows how to avoid giving that impression. “A poor opportunist in politics is simply someone who looks, all too obviously, like he is exploiting an opportunity,” he says. “A skillful opportunist is someone who persuades the public that he has created the opportunity

Ignatieff also has some good tidbits on the skills required by politicos.

The need to give so many people his whole attention—a good politician won’t look at his watch or his smartphone while you’re talking to him—allowed him to cultivate the art of reading faces. “I would search every face for signs of support, learn to evaluate subtle cues of indecision, evasion, or outright rejection,” he writes. Over time, he says, the habit of putting himself always on display led to a feeling of hollowness: “I would say that some sense of hollowness, some sense of a divide between the face you present to the world and the face you reserve for the mirror, is a sign of sound mental health.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303309504579186260873957216

The Deep Resonance of Malala–and Why We Really Don’t Understand Af-Pak

The stereotypes that we carry in our mental maps of the Af-Pak region are inadequate, argues Wilkiam Dalyrimple.

The fact that all this history surprises us as much as it does is a measure of how far we have allowed the extremists to dominate our images of what it means to be a Muslim in general, and Pashtun in particular. It is certainly true that both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have been lacerated by violent extremism and misogyny — ever since the United States, the Saudis and Pakistan’s intelligence agency armed religious extremists in Peshawar in the 1980s to take on the Soviet Union. But it should be remembered that the main resistance to extremism has been the local Pashtuns themselves .

Via Before Malala

On the Fate of Migrants in Europe

Will Europe get serious about migration policy, with at least 20k people dying over the past 20 years trying to reach Europe?

The nations where migrants first arrive in the EU have for years wanted to send most of them to countries further inland, arguing that member states should share the burden based on the size of the member state. The concept—known in EU-speak as \”solidarity\”—isn\’t popular in richer European countries. It too wasn\’t mentioned in the draft communiqué.

Instead, EU leaders were set to say that migration will be revisited at a summit dedicated to the issue in June 2014. In the meantime, any action will come from recommendations expected in a December report from the European Commission, the EU\’s executive arm, and the European External Action Service, the EU\’s foreign-policy arm.

\”There\’s no appetite to look at this,\” an official familiar with the talks said. \”It\’s clear no one really wants a common [EU] policy\” on migration.

The official said that even the proposals put forward by Italy were timid and vague, failing to demand anything specific from the rest of the EU—a tacit acknowledgment that it didn\’t want to waste political capital for changes that were unlikely to win broad support.

via Amid U.S. Spying Charges, Plight of Migrants in Europe Eclipsed – WSJ.com.

Is Overpopulation a Dire Problem?

A new book makes the case oft-repeated. Does the evidence support his conclusions?

Niger has the world’s highest fertility rate (about seven births per woman), maintained in part by the persistence of human slavery. The Philippines have a glut of fishermen, but are running out of fish. Pakistan is set to become the world’s fourth-most-populous nation by 2050. “We’re praying that Pakistan only doubles,” the director of a Pakistani health organization says. “We are a crowded, underdeveloped nation — more a crowd than a nation. So we’ll have more illiterates, more youths without productive jobs and more chaos.”
The question mark that ends the book’s subtitle is as significant as what precedes it. If we dramatically reduce the planet’s human population, we might have a future here. Then again, it might already be too late. Weisman raises the example of the passenger pigeon. During the 19th century it was one of the most abundant birds on earth, with as many as five billion in America alone. The passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914, but it was doomed long before then, even as it still numbered in the millions, since its habitat and food supply had already dwindled beyond sustenance level. “Was it possible,” Weisman writes, “that my own species might also already be the living dead.” Earth Control, Review of Alan Weisman’s book, Countdown

The Failure of Legalizing Prostitution: Comparisons across Europe

The Netherlands is well known for a progressive social policy when it comes to prostitution, making it the Las Vegas of Europe.  But has this approach, based on a notion of Dutch pragmatism, reduced the negative social ills such as public health concerns, safety and security for sex workers, crime, as well as human trafficking? A four-part series in SPIEGEL Online traces the failures of this approach:

Pierrette Pape believes that there are consequences to the way prostitution is viewed in various countries. “Nowadays, a little boy in Sweden grows up with the fact that buying sex is a crime. A little boy in the Netherlands grows up with the knowledge that women sit in display windows and can be ordered like mass-produced goods.” Pape is the spokeswoman of the European Women’s Lobby in Brussels, an umbrella group for 2,000 European women’s organizations.

Pape finds it “surprising” that Germany is not seriously reviewing its policies related to human trafficking. “The debate has begun throughout Europe, and we hope that German politicians and aid organizations will pay more attention to human rights in the future than they have until now.”

Several European countries now follow the Swedish model. In Iceland, which has adopted similar legislation, politicians are even considering a ban on online pornography. Since 2009, Norway has also punished the customers of prostitutes. In Barcelona, it is illegal to employ the services of a street prostitute.

via Unprotected: Berlin’s Erroneous Approach – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

What’s Wrong with the UN Building? A Thoughtful Critique of Modernism

Meet a political scientist who looks like an anthropologist and believes himself to be an anarchist cum Marxist.  No, he won’t be smashing in Starbucks anytime soon–but he values such counter-cultural activities as jaywalking among others as means to control the all-expansive power of the state.  He shows what happens when we try to engineer all aspects of society, to paraphrase a quote by Francis Fukuyama, and thus inherits a unique space among libertarians, free marketeers, and even liberals for his incisive views on power, control, and governance.  His views have deep resonance for the consideration on how member states operate as well as the implications of a technocratic secretariat within international organizations.

His book, Seeing Like A State presents the power of local knowledge .  It has generated a fair amount of thoughtful discussion.

Mr. Scott’s book arrives at a moment when the Occupy movement has brought anarchist thought closer to the American political mainstream than it has been in decades (and, some on the left have argued, has come undone because of its fetishization of utopian principle at the expense of real-world politics). He says he admires the movement’s “spontaneity,” but not everyone in its ranks is returning the love.

The left-wing writer Malcolm Harris, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, blasted Mr. Scott as a closet liberal in “anarchish” clothing, espousing a vision that’s “one part Bush Administration ‘ownership society,’ one part Apple ‘think different.’ ” Fortune.com, on the other hand, praised him for offering lessons in power and subversion useful to “leaders or managers” bent on “creative destruction.”

via James C. Scott, Farmer and Scholar of Anarchism – NYTimes.com.

He has a chapter on Corbusier and touches on the ideals modernists shared–seen in the skyscrapers of New York as well as the Neimeyer-designed United Nations headquarters, disparaging the “high modernism” and view of “progress” as an ideology used by all sides of the political spectrum to bulk up the state and maintain control.

If you are as interested as I am, take a look at Cass Sunstein’s lengthy description and review of the book, the NYTBR (1998)–and may want to look at Joel Robbins review of Scott’s 2010 book, The Art of Not Being Governed or his lecture on it at Cornell, that cements his reputation for being the philosopher for nonconformists everywhere.  This interview on Theory Talks also expores how the agrarian is political and what students ought to read to better understand the world.

Global Trends and the Family

New “emerging commitment devices” aim to hold society together.  The notion that family structure–replaced through fertility, impacting demography, and influencing society–is a key aspect of global sustainability may seem trite (and tried as well as true) to many.  But David Brooks makes the case that untethered social freedoms have a downside:

My view is that the age of possibility is based on a misconception. People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They’re better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice — commitments to family, God, craft and country.

The surest way people bind themselves is through the family. As a practical matter, the traditional family is an effective way to induce people to care about others, become active in their communities and devote themselves to the long-term future of their nation and their kind. Therefore, our laws and attitudes should be biased toward family formation and fertility, including child tax credits, generous family leave policies and the like.

via The Age of Possibility – NYTimes.com.

This argument resonates with me because my first forays into global policy occurred in United Nations conference rooms where the issues embedded in Brooks’ op-ed were dissected and debated.  The issue was nowhere more articulately explained than by the former Democratic Senator, a giant among elected officials–and the type we rarely, if ever see today–was a first-rate scholar who translated deep knowledge into wise policy.  His report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” stated the problem in context of the US struggle with civil rights, urban poverty, and inequality.  (It made an impact, to be sure.)

The family issue are vitally important to a nation’s health and prosperity.  Consider Russia’s mad dash to increase fertility, Japan’s economic crisis resulting, in part, from declining population pyramids, and other arcane policy issues that shatter societies quietly but severely.

As the Kotkin report notes, the one cited by Brooks in his Op-Ed :

The team that composed this report — made up of people of various faiths, cultures, and outlooks — has concerns about the sustainability of a post-familial future. But we do not believe we can “turn back the clock” to the 1950s, as some social conservatives wish, or to some other imagined, idealised, time. Globalisation, urbanisation, the ascendancy of women, and changes in traditional sexual relations are with us, probably for the long run.

Seeking to secure a place for families requires us to move beyond nostalgia for a bygone era and focus on what is possible. Yet, in the end, we do not consider familialism to be doomed. Even in the midst of decreased fertility, we also see surprising, contradictory and hopeful trends. In Europe, Asia and America, most younger people still express the desire to have families, and often with more than one child. Amidst all the social change discussed above, there remains a basic desire for family that needs to be nurtured and supported by the wider society.

Our purpose here is not to judge people about their personal decision to forego marriage and children. Instead we seek to launch a discussion about how to carve out or maintain a place for families in the modern metropolis. In the process we must ask — with full comprehension of today’s prevailing trends — tough questions about our basic values and the nature of the cities we are now creating.

via The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity’s Future?

 

Killing of Student Further Sullies Kenyan Police – NYTimes.com

Life in the Nairobi slums may raise your appreciation for human rights standards.  It may just make you appreciate your life a little more, as well:

In the grittier parts of this city, where people inhabit tiny tin shacks and bloated dead animals float along garbage-strewn rivers, police officers are not known as heroes. Instead, many residents see them as a menace, prowling around in dark trench coats with AK-47s slung over their shoulders, extorting money from slum dwellers and killing alleged suspects — and sometimes not even suspects but simply poor people they come across.

“They kill for free,” said one young man in the Mukuru Kayaba slum, where Mr. Muthini was shot.

via Killing of Student Further Sullies Kenyan Police – NYTimes.com.