British intelligence from Fenian Dynamite to the Docklands bomb,by way of two world wars,one cold war,and a jungle full of snakes

Michael Smith, New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain's Spies Came In From The Cold (London: Gollancz, 1996) Pp.276, 4 illus., 24 photos. £20. ISBN 0–575–06150–2.     

Citizenship and preemptive war: The lesson from Iraq

This paper argues that citizens should be wary of a policy of Reformed Preemption such as is found in the National Security Strategy of the United States. This policy is too permissive with regard to the use of force and it suffers from epistemological difficulties. The war in Iraq is examined in an effort to see how the new policy of Reformed Preemption will be employed in practice. This case shows us two risks of the new policy: it permits wars even when the threats are vague and merely potential; and it allows for disproportionate use of force.     

The war on poverty: between economics and politics

A wealth of solutions to poverty have been proposed, with little understanding of the forces required to turn a sound idea into an implementable program. A system approach is suggested to overcome this deficiency. This implies analyzing the effects of antipoverty measures on other elements of a society and a polity and the feedback effects of changes in these other elements on the new programs which are being introduced. Such an approach is seen overcoming the limitations of fragmented views of the issue—such as the purely economic one—as well as the lack of systematic analysis of a progam's costs, benefits, sources of funds, and nonfinancial resources. Consequently, a challenge is also offered to those who formulate programs without taking into account dominant values (e.g., questions of consensus) and other political considerations (e.g., which groups would benefit or suffer from the program). This is seen as leading to undemocratic action or, most frequently, to inaction due to resistance. The article concludes with a brief review of the recent Nixon-Moynihan proposal in terms of the societal-system approach here advocated, and adds a cautionary note on the limits of planning.In revising this article, I benefited from comments by Daniel Bell, Carolyn O. Atkinson, and Sarajane Heidt.     

The war novel and human rights

The war novel, a distinct genre of fiction, has typically been read as a type of humanitarian narrative. This article explains how the war novel participates in humanitarian discourse but also has another role to play that addresses human rights more specifically. In the effort to identify accountability, war novels explore complex historical events and offer us important insights on the challenges of historical narration more broadly. Furthermore, in offering explanations for “who?” and “why?,” war novels model how we can approach the complex history of conflict for human rights. To illustrate how accountability is a central theme of war fiction, the essay turns to examples of novels about the Vietnam War.     

The legitimacy of occupation authority: beyond just war theory

ABSTRACT

So far, most of the philosophical literature on occupations has tried to assess the legitimacy of military rule in the aftermath of armed conflicts by exclusively employing the theoretical resources of just war theory. In this paper, I argue that this approach is mistaken. Occupations occur during or in the aftermath of wars but they are fundamentally a specific type of rule over persons. Thus, theories of political legitimacy should be at least as relevant as just war theory for the moral evaluation of occupations. This paper, therefore, draws on both traditions and argues that just war theory plays a limited role in identifying the purposes and appropriate agents of occupation authority, but that theories of legitimacy are necessary for explaining why and under which conditions foreign actors have the right to rule in the aftermath of armed conflicts.     

Fragmenting parchment and the winds of war: The Constitution of the United States, 1860–2004

The tension between Hobbesian and Lockeian perspectives on the origins and functions of the state was resolved decisively at Philadelphia in favor of the latter. Fourscore and seven years on from 1787, however, Abraham Lincoln’s resolve to save the Union rather than to preserve the Constitution launched a series of attacks by the executive and legislative branches, sustained by a complaisant judiciary, on the parchment so carefully crafted by the republic’s Founders. This essay documents the federal government’s exploitation of security threats, from the Civil War to the War on Terror, to dismantle constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.