Ethics & International Affairs is pleased to announce the publication of its fall 2013 issue. This issue features an essay by Richard Schiffman on poverty, food security, and the land grab in Africa; a policy brief by Frances Moore Lappé, Jennifer Clapp, Molly Anderson, Robin Broad, Ellen Messer, Thomas Pogge, and Timothy Wise on why how we count poverty matters; a special centennial roundtable on nonproliferation in the 21st century, with contributions from J. Bryan Hehir, Jacques E. C. Hymans, Nina Tannenwald, and Ward Wilson; a feature article by Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka on the nuclear nonproliferation complex; and book reviews by Ralph Steinhardt, Joia S. Mukherjee, and Alyssa R. Bernstein.
ESSAY
Hunger, Food Security, and the African Land Grab [Full Text]
Richard Schiffman
Many global analysts predict that the biggest security threats in the 21st century may center on disputes over water and the food that Earth's dwindling water supply is able to produce.
POLICY BRIEF
How We Count Hunger Matters
Frances Moore Lappé, Jennifer Clapp, Molly Anderson, Robin Broad, Ellen Messer, Thomas Pogge, and Timothy Wise
In 2010, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organizaiton (FAO) reported that the number of people experiencing hunger worldwide since 2005–2007 had increased by 150 million, rising above 1 billion in 2009. However, in its State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012, the FAO presented new estimates, having revamped its methods and reinterpreted its hunger data back to 1990. The writers suggest that a wide range of specific government policies that were either underemphasized or completely omitted in SOFI 12 have proven successful in reducing hunger.
ROUNDTABLE: NONPROLIFERATION IN THE 21st CENTURY
Nonproliferation: A Global Issue for a Global Ethic [Full Text]
J. Bryan Hehir
This essay, focused on the continuing moral challenge of nuclear weapons, recalls the intellectual and moral lessons of the last century and identifies three leading issues in nuclear ethics today: post-cold war challenges to nonproliferation and deterrence, the new challenges posed by the terrorist threat, and recent proposals for Going to Zero.
The Threat of Nuclear Proliferation: Perception and Reality
Jacques E. C. Hymans
The United States is right to be vigilant against the threat of nuclear proliferation. But such vigilance can all too easily lend itself to exaggeration and overreaction, as the 2003 invasion of Iraq painfully demonstrates. In this essay, Hymans critiques two intellectual assumptions that have contributed mightily to Washington's puffed-up perceptions of the proliferation threat. He then spells out the policy implications of a more appropriate analysis of that threat.
Justice and Fairness in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime
Nina Tannenwald
This essay focuses on two key questions: First, how do the issues of justice and fairness affect the stability, durability, and effectiveness of the nuclear nonproliferation regime? Second, what is the relationship of equity issues to conceptions of national security and "interests"?
The Gordian Knot: Moral Debate and Nuclear Weapons
Ward Wilson
Nuclear weapons are not awe-inspiring, epochal, or war-winning, nor are they certain instruments of doom. They are clumsy, muscle-bound, expensive, unhandy weapons with little use except as totems of status. They are very difficult to win a war with—even if you have a monopoly on their use. As a result, what we already know about nuclear weapons is sufficient. We simply have to ask ourselves if it is right to kill innocents unnecessarily. The answer to this question will provide all the guidance we need.
FEATURE
The Nonproliferation Complex
Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka
In this essay, Craig and Ruzicka trace the history of the rise of the nuclear nonproliferation complex during and immediately after the Cold War. They show how nonproliferation and disarmament organizations and advocates turned toward ameliorative approaches in the face of great-power refusal to accept more substantial change, or indeed defended an international order favoring the status quo.
REVIEWS [Full Text]
Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights by John Gerard Ruggie
Review by Ralph Steinhardt
This book offers an insider's account of how the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights came into being. Although readers may sometimes strain at its mix of heroic memoir and sober argument, Just Business contributes profoundly to the next iteration of an ethical lex mercatoria.
The Human Right to Health by Jonathan Wolff
Review by Joia S. Mukherjee
This book will provoke the reader to think about how to bring the public sector, civil society, industry, patents, health financing, and human resources together in order to achieve the more rapid, progressive realization of the right to health in the decades to come.
Kant and the End of War: A Critique of Just War Theory by Howard Williams; and Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship by Pauline Kleingeld
Review by Alyssa R. Bernstein
These new books, by two of the foremost contemporary scholars of Kant's political philosophy, deal extensively with the theme of international peace.
