Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

When Montezuma Met Cortes: The True History Of The Meetings That Changed History, Maria S. Arbeláez

International Dialogue

November 8 of 1519, Moctezuma II, Mexica Tlatoani, the “one who speaks,” leader and emperor, and Hernan Cortes, head of the invading Spanish military force, met on what currently is downtown Mexico City. A memorial plaque marks the site of the meeting alongside a colonial church and the remnants of a hospital. There is a tile picture with a representation of the event. The Spanish conquest of Mexico and the fall of Tenochtitlan is one of the most studied and controversial episodes in the history of Mexico and the Americas. It is a story never settled. Matthew Restall's book is …

The Morals Of The Market: Human Rights And The Rise Of Neoliberalism, Shane Darcy

International Dialogue

There are no doubt human rights advocates who would baulk at the claim that somehow human rights serves to advance the cause of neoliberalism. An important tool for protecting human dignity, advancing equality and supporting demands for justice cannot surely be complicit in the evident harms of neoliberal economic policies? Such harms are increasingly recognized by human rights practitioners, including non-governmental organizations and United Nations experts. To take a recent example, Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, described on a country visit to Spain in February 2020, how the country’s self-image as “a close family-based …

Trust, Ethnicity, And Political Approval In 21st Century South Africa, Alecia Anderson, Jonathan Bruce Santo

International Dialogue

Trust is a requirement for state legitimacy, however, the relationship between trust and political approval in South Africa is under-investigated, leaving the legitimacy of the South African state questionable. In this study, we use Afrobarometer data from 2004, 2008, and 2012 to investigate citizens’ perspectives on trust and political approval. Using structural equation modeling, we analyze the impact of ethnicity on the relationship between trust and political approval in South Africa. The results are clear that ethnic identity continues to influence the relationship between trust and approval of political offices and policies in South Africa.

For A Left Populism, Emma Murphy

International Dialogue

Chantal Mouffe’s brief work For a Left Populism sets out to tackle the issue of how left politics should respond to the global trend towards populism. While elections in recent years have ushered in populist leaders in states ranging from the Philippines to the United States, Mouffe focuses her analysis on Western European populism specifically. Her argument centres on the importance of recovering democracy in an increasingly “post-democratic” world; to successfully radicalise democracy, Mouffe argues, leftists must first reform existing political institutions. While Mouffe makes an original argument for a reclamation of the term ‘populism’ by a leftist audience, the …

The Other China Model: Daoism, Pluralism, And Political Liberalism, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

While scholars often portray Chinese political thought and tradition as standing in opposition to Western notions of political liberalism, little consideration has been given to compatibility between liberalism and Daoism, a prominent religion and long-standing alternative school of thought among Chinese peoples. Addressing this gap in the literature, this study in comparative political thought compares Laozi’s Dao De Jing with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to illustrate certain core political ideas in the Dao De Jing and their treatment in Mill’s landmark text on political liberalism. Although the two texts diverge in terms of advocacy of popular representation, public contestation, …

Social Contract Theory And Transitional Justice: A Philosophical Approach To A Problem Of Global Importance, Brendan Moriarty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I seek to bring together two areas of scholarly work to see how each can inform the other: social contract theory and transitional justice. The social contract, as it exists and as it was theorized about by Rousseau, was born from the world-historic forces that spread capitalism across the globe, stirring up nationalism everywhere it went. In its wake, there was vast inequality and new legal regimes which protected the hoarded wealth of the capitalist class by enshrining the right of private property along with life and liberty. To examine the intricacies of transitional justice and its …

2020 Mlk Keynote Address: Michelle Alexander Presentation, Center For Social Equity & Inclusion, Michelle Alexander, Rosanne Somerson, Matthew Shenoda

Martin Luther King, Jr. Series

2020 MLK Series Keynote Michelle Alexander brings audiences profoundly necessary and meaningful insights on the practice of mass incarceration that plagues the US justice system, as well as eye-opening conversation on how we can end racial caste in America. Lecture Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 5:30pm, RISD Auditorium, 17 Canal Walk, Providence, RI.

In her acclaimed bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander peels back the curtain on systemic racism in the US prison system in a work that the New York Review of Books describes as "striking in the intelligence of her …

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Table of Contents for Volume 2

Institutionalized Violence In The History Of Mind/Body Dualism And The Contemporary Reality Of Slavery And Torture: Reflections On Elaine Scarry And The Body In Pain, Wendy Lynne Lee

International Dialogue

Wendy Lynne Lee argues that the dualistic impulse Bibi Bakare-Yusef identifies in Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the experience of pain has its roots at least as far back as Aristotle’s hylomorphism, and that a clear view of contemporary structural inequality requires a grasp of how “mind” and “body” continue to inform even anti-dualist social theory. Lee argues that insofar as this impulse informs Scarry’s The Body in Pain, it distorts Scarry’s analysis of the experience of pain in ways that elide important aspects of that experience. Understanding the nature of this distortion, however, sheds light on some forms of violence …

Using Bourdieu To Answer Spivak: On The Study Of Historical Subaltern Religious Practices, Curtis Hutt

International Dialogue

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 1988 publication “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” famously challenges the ability of scholars—educated and operating within the dominating power structures of oftentimes European colonizing transnational political and religious movements—to ever grasp subaltern religion. This skepticism logically extends to the work of historians investigating the obscured religious traditions of past cultures that have been overlooked, overwhelmed, and suppressed. In this paper, I lay out a restrained strategy inspired in part by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and based upon my own historical work for circumventing some forms of historical blindness that conceal subaltern pasts. In conclusion, a …

Rethinking Secularism: P. Harrison, É. Balibar, T. Asad: The Territories Of Science And Religion; Secularism And Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses On Religion And Politics; Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, And Calculative Reason, Sotiris Mitralexis

International Dialogue

I will discuss here three recent books that both directly and indirectly discuss religion and secularism, in different contexts and certainly from different perspectives; one by historian Peter Harrison, one by cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, and one by philosopher Étienne Balibar. All three authors have invested a sizable part of their scholarly career in studying religion/secularism, and the books reviewed are revised collections of relatively recent lectures and essays (rather than, for example, texts authored with the explicit purpose of comprising a monograph); this entails that each of these books is, so to speak, the distillate of a career in …

Genealogies Of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire, Wendy L. Lee

International Dialogue

In Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson takes on the ambitious project of providing a broadly Foucauldian genealogical account of the concept and practice of “terrorism.” While I am not quite sure she summits every mountain she attempts to climb, Erlenbusch-Anderson makes a valuable contribution to an under-developed literature and she offers some tantalizing points of departure for future explorations of an important and timely subject. Genealogies is an eminently worthwhile read; while some grounding in Foucault (among others) is sure to enhance the experience, Erlenbusch-Anderson’s introduction provides an able road map, making the ascent up through …

Technology, Science, And “Post-Humanity”: Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power In The Era Of Post-Human Capitalism, Edward Sandowski, Betty J. Harris

International Dialogue

In this book, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism, Slavoj Žižek mulls over issues about technology and science in the contemporary world. This is a world which he thinks, plausibly, is dominated by global capitalism, a condition which he wishes to go beyond, to something better. The nature and distribution of power must be changed. Changes in the status of “humanity” and the notion of “post-humanity” concern him. One aspect of his difficult text is that he explores how post-humanity might symbolize, not solely our degraded condition. Rather, humanity and post-humanity (and fears …

The Elephant In The Room: Against Democracy, Peter Stone

International Dialogue

Unfortunately, any discussion of Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy (2017), which seeks to make a case for epistocracy and against democracy, raises the “Don’t think of an elephant” problem (Lakoff 2004). If you tell people not to think of an elephant, they immediately think of an elephant. If you tell people not to think about epistocracy, they will immediately think about epistocracy. And this is a pity, because epistocracy is a terrible idea, and nothing Brennan says proves otherwise.

Revolution And War In Contemporary Ukraine: The Challenge Of Change, Emma Mateo

International Dialogue

This November marks six years since Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests. Sometimes referred to as the “Revolution of Dignity,” the events of winter 2013–14 had far-reaching consequences not only for Ukraine’s government and Ukrainian national identity, but also for global geopolitics. After the corrupt Yanukovych government fell, Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea and became involved in separatist conflict in Ukraine’s eastern regions, under the premise of “protecting Russian speakers.” This edited volume investigates the events of 2013–14 and their impact on culture, politics, society and identities.

Triadic Coercion: Israel’S Targeting Of States That Host Nonstate Actors, Richard English

International Dialogue

This scholarly, serious-minded book represents a valuable addition to the Columbia University Press series, Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare. Considering the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict, Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili address the issue of what they term “triadic coercion—in which a state directs military threats or strikes at another state to force it to take action against a nonstate actor to which it offers shelter or assistance” (242). This tactic has been common enough to be historically significant, and the Israeli case that is examined here offers a useful laboratory within which to offer systematic consideration of the phenomenon.

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces for Volume 9.

Political Realism In Apocalyptic Times, Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel

International Dialogue

Alison McQueen’s book is a significant contribution to political theory and to the use of the history of political thought as a source of categories for thinking about current problems. Her central thesis revolves around three assumptions. First, the existence of “political realism” understood as a particular approach to evaluating politics—characterized by a defense of its own autonomy,1 political agonism,2 the rejection of both utopia and moralization in politics, and the preeminence of order and stability over any other criterion, including justice, in political decisions (10–12). This definition of “political realism” allows the author to group other writers who, though …

Art As A Political Witness, Lenore Metrick-Chen

International Dialogue

Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller, the editors of this volume, raise a serious question: Can art increase political awareness either through witnessing itself or by creating witnesses in its audience? Wisely, the book does not attempt to provide a single, definitive answer to these questions; instead, the editors explain that they selected authors who examine aesthetic forms of expression, with the intention of an inquiry into an expanded idea of who is a witness. Beginning with the definition of witness from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles as someone “who is or was present, and is able to …

Panel Discussion: Are Reparations Possible? Lessons To The United States From South Africa, Richard Goldstone, Lewis Gordon, Alecia Anderson

International Dialogue

Introduction: On September 25, 2019, the Honorable Richard Goldstone joined Dr. Lewis Gordon f or a conversation about reparations at the University of Nebraska at Omaha ( The public discussion was offered as part of a series of events for Human Rights Week. It was co sponsored by the Goldstein Community Chair for Human Rights, the Schwalb Cent er for Israel and Jewish Studies, and the UNO Department of Black Studies. Goldstone and Gordon were brought to the University of Nebraska at Omaha by the Leonard and Shirley Goldstein Center for Human Rights.

The Honorable Richard Goldstone, Dr. Lewis Gordon, …

The Omnibus Homo Sacer; What Is Philosophy?, Sotiris Mitralexis

International Dialogue

The Omnibus Homo Sacer brings together in 1336 pages all volumes of the twenty-year Homo Sacer project by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, written between 1990 and 2015, starting with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and concluding with The Use of Bodies. In line with Agamben’s division of the project, the Omnibus edition is divided into four parts (Part 1: Homo Sacer; Part 2: State of Exception, Stasis, The Sacrament of Language, The Kingdom and the Glory & Opus Dei; Part 3: Remnants of Auschwitz; and Part 4: The Highest Poverty & The Use of Bodies). Since the volumes …

Restating Orientalism: A Critique Of Modern Knowledge, Katlin Marisol Sweeney

International Dialogue

Wael B. Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge interrogates what he proposes are canonized misconceptions of Orientalism by examining the trends in discourse that have emerged since the publication of Edward Said’s seminal work in 1978. It builds on Hallaq’s other contributions to the field on the topics of modernity, politics, and Islamic law over the last forty years, most notably Sharī’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2013). In the paratextual material, Hallaq advises readers to treat Sharī’a and The Impossible State as …

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

Humanitarian Negotiations & Humanitarian Principles: The Interaction Between Humanitarian Negotiations For Access And Organizations' Ability To Adhere To Humanitarian Principles, Gabriela Gil

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Aim: To examine how do humanitarian organizations apply, or fail to apply, the humanitarian principles through humanitarian negotiations in modern conflict settings.

Methods: A literature review identified relevant peer-reviewed and grey literature on international humanitarian norms and law, the landscape of modern conflict, and existing guidelines on humanitarian negotiations. Five semi-structured interviews were conducted with experts in humanitarian negotiations chosen on the basis of their relevant background. A coded analysis of these interviews was conducted to identify major themes and subthemes in responses.

Background: Multiple international mechanisms outline the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence and States, non-State …

The Nature Of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn About Legal Interpretation From Linguistics And Philosophy, Triantafyllos Gkouvas

International Dialogue

Brian G. Slocum’s The Nature of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn about Legal Interpretation from Linguistics and Philosophy is a formidable addition to an evolving trend in analytical jurisprudence that invites insights from jurisprudentially “extraneous” domains such as linguistics, philosophy of language and mind, metaethics and philosophy of action. A praiseworthy feature of this trend is the importance it attaches to keeping these insights as free as possible of prior translation in the occasionally cryptic or unnecessarily insular language of analytical jurisprudence and legal doctrine. It is precisely thanks to this feature that recent discussions on the relevance of …

Is There A Crisis Of Sustainable Development?, Edward Sandowski, Betty J. Harris

International Dialogue

This article argues that there is a crisis of sustainable development. Sustainable development may mean a value system, but also may mean a set of societal development processes, manifested in political economy and culture. One crisis of sustainable development in either meaning arises from a combination of elements under neoliberalism. We stress three. (1) Sustainable development includes complex demands about justice. These involve conflicts among neoliberal justice and rival more philosophically plausible concepts of justice. (2) Care for the environment (basic to sustainable development) is complex, and generates multiple sometimes, conflicting demands on decision-making. (3)

The Roots Of Ethnic Cleansing In Europe, Andy Aydin-Aitchison

International Dialogue

H. Zeynep Bulutgil’s monograph, available now in paperback, has already received high praise and recognition, winning the American Political Science Association European Politics and Society Section book award in 2017. In this review, I set out what the book offers in terms of argument and evidence, and so outline its contribution to understanding ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing. In the spirit of cross-disciplinary dialogue, I consider how Bulutgil’s approach and insights can contribute to developments in the criminology of atrocity. Taken together the political science approach exemplified by Bulutgil, and criminological approaches characterized by disciplinary openness, complement each other in …

Citizenship, Insurrection, And Recognition: European Critical Theory Before The Biopolitical Threshold: Citizenship; Violence And Civility: On The Limits Of Political Philosophy; Recognition Or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter On The Politics Of Freedom, Equality, And Identify, Miguel Vatter

International Dialogue

Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth are representative figures of a generation of political theorists who stand under the shooting star of May 1968, the high season of insurrectionary politics in the last half century. The books under review offer a welcome opportunity to consider the lessons they draw from this event and its aftermath at the twilight of their careers. However, taken as a whole these books also reveal the limits of this style of radical democratic theory that only in a very approximate way has registered the passing of the baton, which occurred roughly during the same …

The Iranian Metaphysicals, Elise K. Burton

International Dialogue

Anthropologist Alireza Doostdar’s first book, The Iranian Metaphysicals, is a well-written and theoretically sophisticated contribution to scholarship on modern Iranian history and society. Combining vividly portrayed ethnography with archival research and textual analysis, he offers an unprecedented account of Iranians’ experiences with and beliefs about the supernatural. The term ‘metaphysical’ emerges directly from his Iranian interlocutors, who use the Persian equivalents metafiziki or mavara’i to describe paranormal practices and phenomena ranging from sorcery and traditional occult sciences, to spirit possession and séances, to clairvoyance and teleportation. Although many elite Iranians, secularist and orthodox Shi‘i alike, have condemned interest in the …

Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination, Eric A. Heinze

International Dialogue

Alexander Brown writes as an inter-disciplinary scholar at the intersections of law, ethics, philosophy, and politics. With Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination he justly claims to have explored “numerous principled arguments for and against hate speech law by articulating a collection of key normative principles” (316). This ambitious book identifies and organizes conflicting values within the hate speech controversies. It aims to synthesize deeper questions about core concepts of liberalism, democracy, personhood, dignity, and tolerance with policy concerns about pragmatics and effectiveness. The most seasoned free speech scholars will find points and angles they had not previously considered.