Rise Of The Drones: Unmanned Systems And The Future Of War, Kenneth Anderson
Jan 2011
Rise Of The Drones: Unmanned Systems And The Future Of War, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This document is written testimony submitted to the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, for a hearing under the general title of "Rise of the Drones: Unmanned Systems and the Future of War." The hearing covered military, strategic, technological, and economic issues related to unmanned aerial vehicles in military, intelligence, and civilian commercial use. This written testimony addressed certain international law and legal policy issues raised by the use of drones as a means of projecting force. It is primarily addressed to the question of the CIA campaign of drone attacks in Pakistan and beyond, rather than the use …
What Ngo Accountability Means - And Does Not Mean, Kenneth Anderson
Dec 2008
What Ngo Accountability Means - And Does Not Mean, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This essay offers a review (4000 words) of "NGO Accountability: Politics, Principles and Innovations," Lisa Jordan and Peter van Tuijl, eds. (London: Earthscan 2006). International and transnational NGOs have been under criticism for alleged lack of accountability since they emerged into prominence in the 1990s. In recent years, the debate over NGOs has shifted from legitimacy and "representativeness" to accountability in the narrower senses of internal governance, fiduciary responsibility, relationships with national governmental authorities, and similar issues. The volume under review seeks to cover both aspects of the debate, with emphasis on the latter, narrower issues. The review essay argues …
Law And Terror, Kenneth Anderson
Sep 2006
Law And Terror, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This short policy article argues that both the Bush administration, in its final two years in office, and Congress have an obligation and interest in taking US counterterrorism policy beyond the current "war on terror" operated on the basis of executive power and discretion, to comprehensively institutionalize it for the long term through Congressional legislation. It argues that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is mistakenly aimed merely at satisfying the narrow requirements of the Hamdan decision, and is far from the comprehensive legislation that institutionalizing counterterrorism policy requires in order both to have democratic legitimacy with the American people …
Doomed Internationalist, Kenneth Anderson
Sep 2006
Doomed Internationalist, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
Introduction. The neoconservative influence on American foreign policy has not had an enthusiastic response outside the United States. Its failure to bring peace and democracy to Iraq has now resulted in a spate of critiques in America itself, even from within the policy establishment. The highest-level defection has been that of Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992), the paean to the triumph of capitalism that became a canonical neoconservative text of the 1990's, articulating the transition from the Clinton administration to that of George W. Bush. In his new book, After the Neocons, …
Foreign Law And The U.S. Constitution, Kenneth Anderson
Jun 2005
Foreign Law And The U.S. Constitution, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
The use of foreign law and unratified international treaty law by U.S. courts in U.S. constitutional adjudication has emerged as a major debate among justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for a majority approving the practice in the March 2005 decision of Roper v. Simmons, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer undertaking an unusual public discussion of the practice in January 2005 at American University law school. This article examines the arguments made by Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Breyer for and against the practice, setting them in the broader context of constitutional theory. It …
An American Gulag? Human Rights Groups Test The Limits Of Moral Equivalency, Kenneth Anderson
Jun 2005
An American Gulag? Human Rights Groups Test The Limits Of Moral Equivalency, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This 2005 article from the Weekly Standard criticizes the 2005 Amnesty International report and associated press releases and press conferences referring to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as an American gulag. It more broadly criticizes the human rights movement for wanting it both ways - on the one hand, using extraordinarily inflammatory rhetoric such as raising the spectre of Soviet death camps, while on the other hand, calling for that very same, apparently deeply criminal regime, the Bush administration, to perform the tasks of human rights enforcement that the human rights movement would like to see performed elsewhere in the …
Squaring The Circle? Reconciling Sovereignty And Global Governance Through Global Government Networks (Review Of Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order), Kenneth Anderson
Dec 2004
Squaring The Circle? Reconciling Sovereignty And Global Governance Through Global Government Networks (Review Of Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order), Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This book review summarizes and critiques A New World Order, offering both an internal critique of the argument's consistency as well as an outside critique of the argument from the standpoint of the value of democratic sovereignty. The review locates Slaughter's argument within the debate over international relations realism and idealism, and further locates it within a continuum of seven idealized positions in the debate between global governance and sovereignty, with pure sovereignty at one extreme and world government at the other, with the most relevant positions of democratic sovereignty and liberal internationalism located in the middle. The article concludes …
To Finish The Work We Are In: Abraham Lincoln's Speeches, From Lawyer's Briefs To Moral Manifesto (Review Essay), Kenneth Anderson
May 2003
To Finish The Work We Are In: Abraham Lincoln's Speeches, From Lawyer's Briefs To Moral Manifesto (Review Essay), Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This essay from the Times Literary Supplement (23 May 2003) reviews books on Lincoln's speeches and writings, particularly the Second Inaugural Address. It examines the transition from the First Inaugural Address to the Second Inaugural Address, finally focusing on how Lincoln seeks to steer between moral relativism about the war - each side does as it sees right - and moral absolutism.
The Reading Wars: Understanding The Debate Over How Best To Teach Children To Read, Kenneth Anderson
Jun 2000
The Reading Wars: Understanding The Debate Over How Best To Teach Children To Read, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This 2000 review essay from the Los Angeles Times Book Review examines the perennial debate over teaching reading to children - phonics or whole language.
Guest Editor's Introduction To The Symposium: War And The United States Military, Kenneth Anderson
Dec 1999
Guest Editor's Introduction To The Symposium: War And The United States Military, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
Millennia come and millennia go, and the fact of war remains unchanged. People still fight for territory, the land of their fathers, Lebensraum, control of the seas, gold, silver and diamonds, oil, water, pillage and the spoils of war, resources of all kinds, the glorification of leaders, gods of many faiths, politics, ideology, conquest, the establishment, peace and stability of empires, the right to be left alone, and sometimes, so we are told, justice, resistance to aggression, and the preservation of peace. Measured in millennial time, very little about war has changed, and, further, nothing distinguished the passage from 1999 …
The Erotics Of Virtue (Obituary Essay On Dominique Aury/Pauline Reage, Author Of Story Of O), Kenneth Anderson
Jun 1999
The Erotics Of Virtue (Obituary Essay On Dominique Aury/Pauline Reage, Author Of Story Of O), Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This essay originally appeared in the LA Times book review as an obituary essay on Dominique Aury, author (under the name Pauline Reage) of the pornographic classic Story of O. The essay argues that Story of O is a fairy tale in which the heroine, O, seeks to escape from modernity's enforced virtues of equality, freedom, and choice into a world of the virtues of hierarchy - the eroticized analogues of religious submission. The novel is driven forward by a downward spiral in which O seeks to surrender herself to her masters and so escape from modernity's insistence on liberty …
Where No Man Has Gone Before: Star Trek And The Death Of Cultural Relativism In America, Kenneth Anderson
Jan 1997
Where No Man Has Gone Before: Star Trek And The Death Of Cultural Relativism In America, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This 1997 Times Literary Supplement (London) essay reviews the 1996 Star Trek (Next Generation) film First Contact, along with a book of essays in cultural studies about Star Trek (Taylor Harrison, et al., Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek). Of greatest long term interest in the moral and political philosophy of Star Trek is the so-called Prime Directive - non interference in local culture on local planets. This Vietnam era ethic of cultural relativism was prominent in the original 1960s Star Trek series as much for its assertion as for being regularly violated by Captain Kirk and his crew. …
The Remoteness That Betrays Desire, Kenneth Anderson
Dec 1996
The Remoteness That Betrays Desire, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This 1997 review in the Times Literary Supplement covered the then, as now, incendiary issue of the nude photography of children and adolescents. It reviewed photobooks by two leading photographers of children in the nude, Jock Sturges and David Hamilton. Sturges, an American, photographed mainly on nude beaches in France and Europe, often following the same families and children for years on end; he had been indicted on child pornography charges in the 1908s, although the jury took only a few minutes to find for him. Hamilton, British, has photographed in France and in various islands. The photography of child …
Children Going West (Review Essay Of Hillary Clinton, It Takes A Village), Kenneth Anderson
Jul 1996
Children Going West (Review Essay Of Hillary Clinton, It Takes A Village), Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This Times Literary Supplement (London) review essay from 1996 takes up Hillary Rodham Clinton's It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us, and Emmy E. Werner's, Pioneer Children on the Journey West. The review takes a tough line against the therapeutic yet simultaneously authoritarian ethic of Clinton's book; it argues that Clinton has essentially conflated a set of local community institutions - places of identity - with state institutions of therapeutic and social control - bureaucratic loci of state management of deracinated, passive individuals. It sets this against the ethic of responsibility evoked in the diaries of girls …
A New Class Of Lawyers: The Therapeutic As Rights Talk, Kenneth Anderson
Apr 1996
A New Class Of Lawyers: The Therapeutic As Rights Talk, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This 1996 essay reviews three books: Anthony T. Kronman, 'The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession' (Belknap 1993); Steven Brint, 'In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life' (Princeton 1994); and Christopher Lasch, 'The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy' (WW Norton 1995). The review essay argues that lawyers in the United States should be seen as part of the professional New Class who use the law as a monopoly in the management by elites of the rest of society. The review examines the history of New Class …
Heartless World Revisited: Christopher Lasch's Parting Polemic Against The New Class, Kenneth Anderson
Sep 1995
Heartless World Revisited: Christopher Lasch's Parting Polemic Against The New Class, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This obituary essay on the final book by the cultural critic Christopher Lasch appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995. The essay examines Lasch's final work, The Revolt of the Elites, against the rest of his body of writing. In particular, it examines Lasch's populism and stance against the increasingly transnatonal elites loosely characterized as the New Class. It discusses Lasch's emphasis on the family as the locus of what remained a significantly Freudian cultural discourse, and examines the ways in which Lasch saw the family as being taken apart and then reassembled according to the mores of the …
Our Natural Selves (Review Of Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, And Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology And Postmodernity), Kenneth Anderson
Sep 1995
Our Natural Selves (Review Of Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, And Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology And Postmodernity), Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This 1995 Times Literary Supplement essay examines two books on the underlying philosophies of the ecology and environmentalism movements. The first, by Sorbonne professor and lately French Minister of Culture Luc Ferry, offers a critique of ecological philosophies that seek to de-privilege humanity in favor of a larger conception of nature. Ferry writes in a breezy, witty style which has at its aim reasserting liberal humanism and its human-centered ethic as against any ethic that treats human beings as merely species or merely thing within nature. The review argues that Ferry goes over the top in making his case, however, …
The Magi Of The Great Salt Lake, Kenneth Anderson
Mar 1995
The Magi Of The Great Salt Lake, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This 1995 Times Literary Supplement (London) review examines John L. Brooke's impressive The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology 1644-1844. Brooke argues against long prevailing scholarship that, on the one hand, views Mormon theology as genuinely American and, on the other hand, understands it purely functionally - without regard for its theological content, but instead as a function of social pressures on impoverished populations in upstate New York from whence came Joseph Smith. The former view is incorrect, Brooke says, because the roots of Mormon theology lie in Europe in gnostic and splinters of the "radical reformation" that lay …
The United Nations Response To The Crisis Of Landmines In The Developing World, Kenneth Anderson
Dec 1994
The United Nations Response To The Crisis Of Landmines In The Developing World, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
Introduction. Although the United Nations has frequently been criticized for responding too slowly to problems in the developing world, it can take pride in having been among the first to recognize the crisis of antipersonnel landmines. Ever since the issue was first raised in 1992 by the International Committee of the Red Cross, key actors at the United Nations-including the Secretary General and other senior executives in the departments of Peacekeeping, Humanitarian Affairs, the High Commissioner on Refugees, and UNICEF-have been forthright on the need to take action against this problem.' The brief but specific mention of landmines in the …
Sensibility At Nuremberg: A Review Essay On Telford Taylor's The Anatomy Of The Nuremburg Trials, Kenneth Anderson
Dec 1993
Sensibility At Nuremberg: A Review Essay On Telford Taylor's The Anatomy Of The Nuremburg Trials, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
Justice Robert H. Jackson's opening statement at the Nuremberg trial has justly been characterized as one of the greatest orations in modern juristic literature. Yet behind its rhetorical power lies a fervent anxiety: a desire to silence the skeptical voices whispering that the Nuremberg trials were just the tarted-up revenge to which Camus alludes.
Illiberal Tolerance: An Essay On The Fall Of Yugoslavia And The Rise Of Multiculturalism In The United States, Kenneth Anderson
Dec 1992
Illiberal Tolerance: An Essay On The Fall Of Yugoslavia And The Rise Of Multiculturalism In The United States, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
Introduction. Journalistic and scholarly accounts of the breakup of Yugoslavia contain, taken together, a curious contradiction. On the one hand, it is said, Yugoslavia was never anything more than a "bad dream,"' a flawed attempt to unify "from above" peoples who have historically hated one another. The immediate causes of the conflict are therefore simply centuries-old ethnic hatreds. The veneer of Yugoslav federal unity was nothing more than a myth, a cosmetic surface stripped away in a trifling by deeper and darker enmities. There are old scores to settle whether dating from the Second World War or from the fourteenth …
Action Specific Human Rights Legislation For El Salvador, Kenneth Anderson
Dec 1984
Action Specific Human Rights Legislation For El Salvador, Kenneth Anderson
Kenneth Anderson
This law journal note dating from the Central American civil wars of the 1980's discusses ways in which the US Congress could impose detailed action requirements related to human rights as a condition of continuing US military assistance to the government of El Salvador.
