The Basic Structure as Object: Institutions and Humanitarian Concern (draft)

[FIRST PARAGRAPHS] One third of the human species is infested with worms. The World Health Organization estimates that worms account for 40 percent of the global disease burden from tropical diseases excluding malaria. Worms cause a lot of misery. In this article I will focus on one particular type of infestation, which is hookworm. Approximately 740 million people suffer from hookworm infection in areas of rural poverty: more than one human in ten, a total greater than 23 times the population of Canada or twice the population of the United States. The greatest numbers of cases occur in China, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa—that is, mostly in the places in the world where poverty is most severe

Accountability in International Development Aid

Contemporary movements for the reform of global institutions advocate greater transparency, greater democracy, and greater accountability. Of these three, accountability is the master value. Transparency is valuable as means to accountability: more transparent institutions reveal whether officials have performed their duties. Democracy is valuable as a mechanism of accountability: elections enable the people peacefully to remove officials who have not done what it is their responsibility to do. “Accountability,” it has been said, “is the central issue of our time.” The focus of this paper is accountability in international development aid: that range of efforts sponsored by the world’s rich aimed at permanently bettering the conditions of the world’s poor. We begin by surveying some of the difficulties in international development work that have raised concerns that development agencies are not accountable enough for producing positive results in alleviating poverty. We then examine the concept of accountability, and survey the general state of accountability in development agencies. A high-altitude map of the main proposals for greater accountability in international development follows, and the paper concludes by exploring one specific proposal for increasing accountability in development aid

The concept of property and the takings clause

Leif Wenar examines the impact on takings scholarship of the redefinition of "property" early in the twentieth century. He argues that the Hohfeldian characterization of property as rights (instead of as tangible things) forced major scholars such as Michelman, Sax, and Epstein into extreme interpretations of the Takings Clause. This extremism is unnecessary, however, since the original objections to the idea that "property is things" are mistaken

Responsibility and Severe Poverty (draft)

[FIRST PARAGRAPHS] Human rights define the most fundamental responsibilities of those who hold power. In the case of the Nazi officials, or those who ordered the Rwandan massacres, we do not need a theory to tell us who was responsible for human rights being violated. The violators were those who authorized and carried out the atrocities, who failed monumentally in their duties toward their victims. The subject of this volume presents a more troubling question: Who, if anyone, is morally responsible for acting to alleviate severe poverty? Here our convictions are much less steady. Are impoverished people responsible for improving their own condition? Or are the leaders of their countries also responsible, or the members of the international community, or we ourselves as individuals? When considering this question we tend to have the kinds of reactions—avoidance of the topic, brief enthusiasm, nagging guilt—that indicate that we perceive several strong and conflicting moral factors, but are unsure how to order these factors so as to reach a firm conclusion. Here is where a philosophical account of responsibility might help. What we want to know is how to determine who, if anyone, has moral responsibility for ensuring that each person’s human human right to an adequate standard of living is secured. What we seek is a general theory that will tell us how to locate responsibility for averting this kind of threat to individuals’ basic well-being

Fighting the Resource Curse: The Rights of Citizens Over Natural Resources

Respect for the rights of peoples over natural resources is crucial for the flourishing of communities and states. This article confirms that international law ascribes robust resource rights both to indigenous peoples and to citizens of independent states. These resource rights include indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent and citizens’ rights that resource revenues are never used corruptly but are used first to secure their means of subsistence. Resource rights are human rights, respect for which requires substantial reforms in the practices of corporations and investors as well as in the laws of resource-importing and resource-exporting states

Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence and the Rules that Run the World

Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West -- and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the gas station and the mall. By our own deepest principles, more than half of the world's traded oil is stolen. But now the West can lead a peaceful global revolution by finally ending its dependence on authoritarian oil, conflict minerals and other stolen resources. Upgrading world trade will make us more secure at home, more trusted abroad, and better able to solve urgent problems like climate change. Citizens, consumers and leaders can act today to dissolve tomorrow's crises -- and how we can together create a more united human future.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent web page, Streaming video, Event photo