A Political Defence of Kant’s Aufklärung: An Essay

The aim of this essay is to analyse the potential for political emancipation that lies within Kant’s conception of Aufklärung, in critical dialogue with enlightenment critics and specialised Kantian literature. My thesis is that Kant’s concept of enlightenment is intrinsically political and so it must be studied from the point of view of his political philosophy, which was fully developed in the decade of the 1790s. From this standpoint, I propose we study the role and place of Aufklärung within Kant’s central political thesis, to wit: that only the united will of the people can be a legitimate authority.     

The Kantian Liberal Peace (Revisited)

Democratic peace studies have traditionally identified Kantian "republicanism" with procedural democracy and largely ignored liberalism and constitutionalism, which are even more fundamental for Kant's reasoning behind the liberal peace. A closer look into his major political works reveals that peaceful relations are expected from states with the protection of individual freedoms (liberalism), the rule of law and legal equality (constitutionalism), and representative government (democracy). Only when all three constitutive elements are jointly considered can we uncover the multifaceted nature of Kant's approach to the domestic sources of international peace. In this way, we not only find that monadic and dyadic expectations are consistent with Kant's theory, but also that both normative and interest-based explanations for international peace can equally draw on Kant as their theoretical precursor. We further demonstrate that it is plausible to infer that the Kantian legacy is related to civil peace as well. The propositions we derive from our theoretical reexamination of the Kantian legacy are strongly supported in our quantitative empirical test. Moreover, constitutional liberalism, rather than democracy, shows to be both more central for Kant's theory and empirically more robustly related to international as well as domestic peace.     

Kant and the critique of the ethics-first approach to politics

Abstract

Contemporary ‘realists’ attack the Kantian influence on political philosophy. A main charge is that Kantians fail to understand the specificity of politics and neglect to develop a ‘distinctively political thought’ that differs from moral philosophy. Instead, the critics say, Kantians are guilty of an ‘ethics-first approach to politics,’ in which political theory is a mere application of moral principles. But what does this ethics-first approach have to do with Kant himself? Very little. This article shows how Kant’s approach to political theory at a fundamental level includes political institutions, power, and coercion as well as disagreement, security, and coordination problems. In contrast to realists, Kant has a fundamental principle, which can explain why and guide how we ought to approach the political question, namely the norm of equal freedom. Yet, Kant’s theory does not take the form of a moralistic ought addressed to the isolated individual, but concerns a problem that we share as interdependent beings and that requires common institutions. The fruitfulness of the Kantian approach, then, is that it can take the political question seriously without being uncritical of actual politics and power, and that it can be normative without being moralistic.     

Libya’s conflict

With the battle for Tripoli, Libya’s civil war has entered a key stage. Powerful outside states are fuelling the conflict, and recent events have raised the prospect of more direct military intervention. No diplomatic solution is foreseeable while the United Nations Security Council’s permanent members support different factions. Moreover, each side in the conflict currently believes it can achieve more through fighting than through the necessary compromises of a peace settlement.     

Freedom,Equality and Fraternity in Kant’s Critique of Judgement*

At least during his critical period, all of Kant’s philosophical works have a secret political dimension. Among other things, following the analysis of Hannah Arendt, the Critique of Judgment – paragraph 40 in particular – became a main text of political philosophy. In looking at the Critique of Judgement from a political perspective, I shall refer not to paragraph 40 but to the Kantian discussion of pure aesthetic judgement. In my opinion, one can understand Kant’s remarks on aesthetic judgement, and especially transcendental anthropology, as meaning that Kant philosophically attributes the three political ideas of the French Revolution (liberty, fraternity and equality) to the whole human being as such, and not just to the intelligible man.     

Challenges of Local Ownership: Understanding the Outcomes of the International Community’s ‘Light Footprint’ Approach to the Nepal Peace Process

This article investigates whether a ‘light footprint’ approach to peacekeeping and peacebuilding by the international community more effectively addresses local drivers of conflict than the dominant model of large, multidimensional peace operations. It considers international engagement in the Nepalese peace process through the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), and argues that the international community’s approach to local ownership became more focused on non-imposition and therefore less politically engaged over time as a result of both local and international factors. This facilitated local elite ownership of the process, which fundamentally undermined the international community’s capacity to support peace consolidation as elites moved away from key transformational pledges of the peace settlement.     

Border Security and Drug Trafficking in Senegal: AIRCOP and global security assemblages

Transnational security governance initiatives in West Africa, operationalized through international statebuilding interventions, are altering the sub-region’s borders and border enforcement. The article employs a practice-oriented ‘global security assemblages’ approach to demonstrate how border security professionals compete over how, who, and where to secure the border from borderless threats like drug trafficking. The article demonstrates this theoretical position empirically through an analysis of struggles over a flagship drug control project implemented by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) at Senegal’s Leopold Sédar Senghor (LSS) airport—AIRCOP. Senegalese customs, police, and gendarmes simultaneously cooperate and compete with international actors, private actors based at the airport, and amongst themselves, over how to curb drug trafficking. Through these competitive struggles over who should be the border’s guardian and how it should be guarded, it can be seen how new security practices and understandings are devised, as well as how borders become (re)constituted within the connected spaces of global security assemblages.     

Peace and Justice through a Feminist Lens: Gender Justice and the Women’s Court for the Former Yugoslavia

ABSTRACT

Post-conflict interventions to ‘deal with’ violent pasts have moved from exception to global norm. Early efforts to achieve peace and justice were critiqued as ‘gender-blind’—for failing to address sexual and gender-based violence, and neglecting the gender-specific interests and needs of women in transitional settings. The advent of UN Security Council resolutions on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ provided a key policy framework for integrating both women and gender issues into transitional justice processes and mechanisms. Despite this, gender justice and equality in (post-)conflict settings remain largely unachieved. This article explores efforts to attain gender-just peace in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It critically examines the significance of a recent ‘bottom-up’ truth-telling project—the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia—as a locally engaged approach to achieving justice and redress for women impacted by armed conflict. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with women activists, the article evaluates the successes and shortcomings of responding to gendered forms of wartime violence through truth-telling. Extending Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the article advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognizing women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialize before, during, and after conflict.     

The UN system's contribution to Asia-Pacific security architecture

Although it has been the major states of China, the former Soviet Union and especially the United States that have made the major contributions to shaping the security architecture of the Asia-Pacific region since 1945, the UN system has played a useful, adjunct role. This is especially the case in the post-Cold War era when its principal bodies, together with its various specialized agencies, have provided vital support in moving warring societies into a period of relative peace and stability. The UN peace-building operations in Cambodia and East Timor were some of the most demanding ever undertaken by this universal institution. But beyond these particular examples, the United Nations has been influential in the region in other, more indirect, ways. It has set standards, its charter has been a powerful source of ideas when it comes to composing parallel documents at the state or regional levels, and it has helped with the negotiation of global arms control treaties, making up to some degree for the absence of such arrangements at the regional level. The UN has also had a legitimating function, providing an arena where Asia-Pacific states can publicize their grievances, and receive approval or reprimand for their behaviour. It has played a valuable role, too, as third-party mediator. However, the UN's political structure constrains the contribution it can make to the security order since it is reliant on major state agreement before it can act. Veto power - not its actual use but simply its anticipated use - gives China, Russia and the United States a controlling function with respect to a potential UN role in the management of conflict. Beijing and Washington would work, and have worked, to exclude the United Nations from major involvement in conflicts in which they have direct security interests: the Taiwan and Korean issues being the two most obvious in this regard. Thus, the United Nations is a useful buttress but not a central pillar of the region's security architecture.     

Current challenges to multinational federalism in India

India’s multinational federation has experienced multiple challenges in the last 25 years, relating to the rise of coalition politics and the process of economic liberalization, both of which have increased the power of some of the states of the federation at the expense of others. The internal borders of India continue to be restructured, with the latest state, Telangana, created in 2014. India is often seen as a successful multinational federation, but it is important to recognize the limitations of this success, as well as the areas where the rise of an aggressive Hindu nationalism poses a powerful threat to India’s multinational federal democracy.     

UNSC Resolution 1325 national action plans in Liberia and Sierra Leone: An analysis of gendered power relations in hybrid peacebuilding

This paper considers how the use of ‘hybridity’ in the peacebuilding literature overlooks the gendered dimensions of hybrid interactions. It does so by examining the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 national action plans (NAPs) for Liberia and Sierra Leone. By asking the gendered questions of ‘who participates?’ and ‘how do they participate?’ it draws from Mac Ginty’s conception of hybridity and traces the compliance and incentivizing power in hybridized peace, as well as the ability of local actors to resist and provide alternatives. However, Mac Ginty’s model is found to be inadequate because of its inattention to the gendered nature of power. It is found that with a gendered approach to hybridity, it is easier to trace the processes of hybridization of NAPs in post-conflict states where their implementation is limited. In asking the questions of ‘who’ and ‘how’, three conclusions about the gendered nature of hybrid peacebuilding are drawn: international intervention relies upon the ‘feminization’ of local actors; issues framed within the realm of the ‘masculine’ are more likely to get attention; and the Resolution 1325 agenda in post-conflict states can be subverted by framing it as a ‘soft’ issue.     

Antinomies of race: diversity and destiny in Kant

ABSTRACT

Larrimore's essay reads Kant's pioneering work in the theory of race in the context of his thought as a whole. Kant wrote on race for most of his career; at different stages of his thinking, race assured meaning in human diversity, confirmed the value of a practical-reason-informed understanding of human destiny, and provided a model for the ‘pragmatic’ knowledge of what ‘man can and should make of himself’. ‘Race’ was invented in 1775 as an advertisement for the new disciplines of geography and anthropology that Kant inaugurated and promoted throughout his career. Giving new meaning to a foreign (French) term associated with animal husbandry, Kant presented the (supposedly) exceptionlessly hereditary traits of race as the first fruit of a truly scientific ‘natural history’ of humanity. His concerns were not merely classificatory; his four-race schema, modeled on the temperaments, allowed a special status for Whites as at once a race and the transcendence of race (Kant invented ‘whiteness’ as well as ‘race’). The notion of ‘race’ was refined in essays Kant published in the 1780s, in the same journal as his celebrated essays on Enlightenment and the philosophy of history. It was given a new status, rather than displaced, by the critical turn. Granted a sanction ‘similar’ to the postulates of pure practical reason, its empirical verification would confirm Kant's whole critical system. Kant's theory of race came into its own in the 1790s, gaining wide acceptance. He relied on familiarity with it (and its lingering association with animal husbandry) in explaining the larger project of the ‘pragmatic anthropology’ without which he thought human progress impossible. Understanding how the concept of race contributed to Kant's more familiar and still appealing intellectual and practical concerns, we gain a better sense of its fateful and enduring attractiveness in subsequent eras.     

No right to unilaterally claim your territory: on the consistency of Kantian statism

The paper examines the consistency of recent Kantian justifications of state authority through reflection on the normative implications of states’ territorial nature. I claim that their conceptual structure leaves these accounts unable to close the justificatory gap that emerges at the transition from legitimate authority simpliciter, to legitimate state authority. None of the strategies Kantian statists have come up with in order to solve this problem – based on the proximity, occupancy and permissive principles – provides the needed grounds on which to carve up the earth’s surface into jurisdictional domains. Yet, I conclude that this does not require Kantians to cede statist grounds altogether but to take a distinctly ‘global perspective’ on states.     

国际社会反腐败的新进展:以《联合国反腐败公约》及其实施评估为视角(下)

三、深化反腐败的国际司法和执法合作正如李昌道所指出的那样,《联合国反腐败公约》是联合国历史上第一部指导国际社会反腐败的法律文件,标志着国际社会进入通过国际合作打击腐败的新阶段,被称为"21世纪国际合作的里程碑"。《公约》在促进、便利和支持反腐败国际合作方面的主要成就如下:     

Towards a Kantian Moral Psychology or the Practical Effects of Self-Predicating Judgements of Sublimity

Abstract

This essay develops an account of the link between Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. It does so by articulating a Kantian account of moral psychology by way of aesthetic reflective judgements of sublimity. Since judgements of sublimity enrich the picture of a Kantian subject by forcefully revealing the unbounded power of the faculty of reason, I investigate the possibility that judgements of this kind could serve as a basis for moral motivation. The paper first shows how judgements of sublimity help a subject recognize reason's unbounded nature, and proceeds to analyse the practical effects of a subject judging itself sublime. When judgements of sublimity have as their object the unbounded and unsythesizable power of reason, they may thereby serve as the basis for both the recognition of our moral vocation, and the grounds for determining the will to act from respect for it. Since a judgement of sublimity produces for Kant the experience of an enlivening emotion and an outflowing of vital forces, the paper then develops Kant's concept of “life” motivated by a recognition of its practical orientation. In this way sublimity rather than beauty can be interpreted as symbolic hypotyposis of morality. The paper then takes up less favourable interpretations of the practical effects of self-predicated judgements of sublimity, and constructs critical responses to such positions. I conclude, following Adorno, by stressing the historical and social dimension of the capacities for both making sublime judgements, and being morally enlivened by them.     

Politics and enlightenment: Kant and Derrida on cosmopolitan responsibility

Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the labour of transcribing the sense, inflection and difference of any particular language and text must always situate the translator in a space which is neither ‘of the original, nor ‘of the language into which it is to be transcribed. This ‘non‐position’ of the translator—between the original and its analogue, between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, the difference and the acceptability of the text—marks the labour of translation as an ethical responsibility: that of communicating the significance of something—a gesture, a story, a custom, a tradition—which has appeared to this/our socio‐linguistic culture as strange and unfathomably alien; and to achieve this communication without annulling its strangeness, its alterity. The purpose of my comparison of Kant and Derrida's remarks on cosmopolitical responsibility therefore, is fourfold. First, I want to suggest that it is this ‘stricture’ of translation—this difficult responsibility of both judging and respecting the difference of foreign’ cultures—which marks the (non‐Kantian, non‐situated) ‘territory’ of cosmopolitical responsibility. Second, by using Kant's remarks on the relationship between the political evolution of European Enlightenment culture and a possible world confederation of sovereign states, I want to point up the hierarchies and secondarizations involved in the determination of universal standards of moral, ethical and political conduct (even if these standards are originally prosecuted as the legislative conditions of a ‘radical democracy'). Third, I want to look at the ways in which the stricture of translation has been articulated as a theory of ‘global’ responsibility—particularly in the divergent ethical and political approaches of Jurgen Habermas and Jean‐Francois Lyotard. Fourth, I want to suggest that it is Derrida's idea of a ‘dual responsibility’ of critical thought to the political and philosophical resources of European Enlightenment and to the difference of non‐European nations and cultures, that marks the difficulty (the stricture) of acting responsibly within the global economics of power, identity and legislation. I want, in other words, to show that the ‘nowhere’ of Benjamin's translator, is a ‘place’ whose possibility demands a certain ‘Kantian’ right of reflection; that is, the right to pursue the ‘transcendent’ principle of respect for the other.     

UN Peace Operations and Conflicting Legitimacies

ABSTRACT

Analyses of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping increasingly consider legitimacy a key factor for success, conceiving of it as a resource that operations should seek and use in the pursuit of their goals. However, these analyses rarely break down legitimacy by source. Because the UN is an organization with multiple identities and duties however, different legitimacy sources – in particular output and procedural legitimacy – and the UN’s corresponding legitimation practices come into conflict in the context of peacekeeping. Drawing on a range of examples and the specific case of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), this article argues that looking at different legitimacy sources and linking them to the institutional identity of the UN is thus critical, and it shows how the UN’s contradictory legitimation practices can reduce overall legitimacy perceptions.     

The memorial day statement: women's organizations in the ‘peace offensive’

This contribution examines the gendered aspect of the American response to the issue of peace in the Cold War. In 1949, the US government accused the Soviet Union of launching a ‘Peace Offensive’, designed to represent the Soviet Union as ‘peace-loving’ whilst painting the Americans as ‘warmongers.’ In recognition of the undeniable appeal of ‘peace’ as a rallying cry, the United States sought to re-define the term in such a way as to illustrate the difference between what East and West meant by their commitment to the cause of peace. American women's associations had a particularly active role in US efforts to counter the Soviet ‘Peace Offensive’. Leaders of US women's associations and policy-makers within the government were concerned that the ‘Peace Offensive’ specifically targeted women, on the basis of their special gendered interest in peace. They tried to convince women across the globe that Soviet-backed peace campaigns lacked sincerity and that women's special interest in peace was best represented by the United States.     

Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth and Politics

Hannah Arendt is right to give prominence to Kant's Critique of Judgment—for that work contains Kant's fullest treatment of 'ends' and purposes, and Kantian politics (embracing universal republicanism and eternal peace) is meant to be a 'legal' realization of moral ends (when 'good will' alone is too weak to produce what ought to be). But Arendt is wrong to try to extract a 'new' Kantian politics from Judgment's aesthetic ideas: Kantian politics is already 'there', and need not be squeezed out of his theory of art. She has chosen the right work, but given it a bizarre reading.     

Leonard Woolf,the League of Nations and Peace Between the Wars

Co‐founding The Political Quarterly was one among many of Leonard Woolf's achievements during a long career as a progressive political thinker and publicist, particularly in the field of international affairs. To mark the centenary of the publication of International Government, his most innovative and influential work on the subject, this article seeks to assess Woolf's contribution. It examines the Fabian background to Woolf's work, his support for and approach to the League of Nations and his commitment to collective security as an approach to peace. Through a broader understanding of the League it argues that certain failings in the area of collective security, however profound, should not be permitted to blight an otherwise impressive intellectual legacy.