I will be teaching Ethics in international affairs in August as part of my new position (University of Guyana). The last good texts on the subject were kinda liberal, ... Now that I will design and teach my own course, I would like to take a more Critical approach.
Ismail Lagardien
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My first thought reading the above---there are no ethics in international affairs. The relations are power relations between nation states.
That's one thought. The other thought is about the UN which is supposed to compose an ethics through setting out the rules of conduct between states. The trouble with the UN, it is designed to be virtually powerless in enforcement of its charters, conventions, and resolutions.
Consider the US has violated practically every article of the Geneva Conventions on War, as well as the Convention on Human Rights and openly done so with a lot of legal sounding mumbo jumbo to excuse itself.
I don't know anything about this field. At a guess you are going to have to develop your own text from your lectures. What the professoriat at UCB do or did is piece together selected readings from various books, and have them scanned. They then took the scanned copies to a print center and had them make a laserprinter bound book in copies.
I've thought a lot about this mention of ethics in international affairs and I am not sure why. I think it touches deeply on a lot of other things I've been thinking: theory of nation states, theory of rights, theories of history and intellectual history. These seem to follow directly from the endless stream of US and Israeli wrong doing, and the UN as about the only international arbiter of state conduct and conflict.
It's interesting to muse on how the UN is politically structured and why. The Security Council acts like the House of Lords, back when it had almost all the power and Parliment had almost none. In this parallel though the Secretary General might correspond to a weak Prime Minister.
What's going to be really interesting to watch is the Palestinian move toward member state status. You have to study the rights of the Observer Mission which is their current status and the rights of Member States to see why the US and Israel are more than usual freaked out.
This is getting to complicated for moving week. Good Luck Ismail.
CG