The Gray Lady's humanity
By Samuel Moyn 05/12/12, 4:54 PMThe New York Times saw fit to grace its "Sunday Review" section this weekend with our editorial board member's Faisal Devji's excellent essay on the poety of Muslim radicalism, as well as my own piece on human rights. Thanks!
> Read MoreCarl Schmitt, American prophet
By Timothy Nunan 03/22/12, 12:46 PMExplanations of American national security policy can scarcely be more timely. Events in Iraq, Libya, and Syria invite reflection on the propriety of US interventions abroad. Both the Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program as well as the Obama administration's “targeted killing” of American citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki have reflected an expanded executive authority that has drawn criticism. As the country faces new challenges—Iran, Pakistan, China—contemplating the future of its national security policy demands an unambiguous understanding of its recent past.
> Read MoreOn the origins of international human rights courts
By Samuel Moyn 03/03/12, 3:12 PMMy new piece in The Nation reviews two new books on the subject.
> Read MoreDunn on "The Chaos of Humanitarian Aid"
By Elizabeth Cullen Dunn 02/23/12, 7:45 PMOne of the things that fascinate me about humanitarianism is how chaotic it is. I expected to find the aid community to be highly professionalized, highly organized, and highly disciplined—something more like WalMart than a MASH unit. What I found instead was a huge group of aid agencies, donor governments, and representatives of local government who were mostly winging it. So my problem became figuring out how to theorize "winging it," and to find out how to trace its effects on both geopolitics and on the lives of displaced people.
> Read MoreSimmons, social mobilization, and the civil rights movement
By Samuel Moyn 02/16/12, 12:26 PMI’ve abstained from commenting on Beth Simmons’s early chapter about the history of human rights. It is not so much that, in my obviously self-interested view as a contributor to that field, her chapter is often uncritical and occasionally unsubstantiated (in its frequent repetition of the commonplace but dubious notion that the Holocaust prompted human rights law for instance). Rather, Simmons’s history of the origins of human rights doesn’t matter to her argument.
> Read MoreSimmons and self-emancipation
By Samuel Moyn 02/15/12, 3:07 PMDomestic politics, then. This interim post explores how Beth Simmons thinks the interface between international treaties and domestic forces works. When she turns to the domestic forum, Simmons lays out a tripartite structure for how domestic actors can make use of the new tool of international treaties – at any rate, more than they could make of the hazy moral norms of natural law, or their clarification in written form in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
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