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Working Papers Series

Call for Working Papers

The Center for the Study of Human Rights (CSHR) welcomes submissions from Columbia faculty and students working on manuscripts that will eventually lead to publication. The working paper series will be made available through CSHR’s website and will allow writers an opportunity to distribute their work widely and to receive initial reactions from a broad community of scholars working in areas related to human rights.

To submit a paper, please with the email subject of “Working Paper Submission.” Submissions will be reviewed by at least one member of the CSHR Board. For answers to questions, please contact Yasmine Ergas, CSHR Associate Director, or at 212-854-4384.

Papers in Progress

Liberal Paternalism and Post-war International Statebuilding

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Abstract: The focus of this paper is on the ethics of international state-building in deeply divided postwar societies. Several leading international relations scholars have recently argued for the establishment of (quasi-) permanent international trusteeship arrangements over divided postwar societies to overcome centrifugal forces at the domestic political level (Keohane 2003; Fearon and Laitin 2004; Krasner 2004). Yet similar arrangements appear to be highly problematic from a moral point of view. Normative theorists are still far from having developed any systematic normative guidelines for international state-building, and the arguments put forward are often quite impressionistic. In this paper I rely on John Rawls’s Law of Peoples (1999) to identify a few key normative guidelines upon which a liberal ethics of international state-building could be built. I show that there is a quite sophisticated theory of state sovereignty underlying Rawls’s broader argument, from which it is possible to gain a more nuanced understanding concerning the degree of foreign intrusiveness that can be justified under different postwar circumstances. In particular, I extrapolate from the Rawlsian argument a normative model of institutionalized ‘shared responsibility’ between domestic and international authorities for the reconstruction of postwar societies. This model, based on the non-coercive involvement of external experts in the domestic authority structures of postwar societies, is both normatively superior to full-fledged international trusteeship and promises greater success in the long run. In the final part of the paper, I show how the Rawlsian ideal-type of shared responsibility has been approximated (albeit in a very imperfect manner) by several components of the ongoing international peace operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Abstracts coming soon:

Original Ownership of the Globe and the Right of Relocation: A Theoretical Inquiry into the Validity of International Borders with Respect to People
Anil G.C

Eyes without Teeth? Non-State Actor Monitoring of State Compliance with the Law of War
Brooke Greene

Peacekeeping and the Protection of Civilian Populations in Civil Wars
Eric N. Mvukiyehe