Author: Jennifer Rubenstein
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191507016
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
This book provides the first book-length, English-language account of the political ethics of large-scale, Western-based humanitarian INGOs, such as Oxfam, CARE, and Doctors Without Borders. These INGOs are often either celebrated as heroes or do-going machines or maligned as incompetents 'on the road to hell'. In contrast, this book suggests the picture is more complicated. Drawing on political theory, philosophy, and ethics, along with original fieldwork, this book shows that while humanitarian INGOs are often perceived as non-governmental and apolitical, they are in fact sometimes somewhat governmental, highly political, and often 'second-best' actors. As a result, they face four central ethical predicaments: the problem of spattered hands, the quandary of the second-best, the cost-effectiveness conundrum, and the moral motivation trade-off. This book considers what it would look like for INGOs to navigate these predicaments in ways that are as consistent as possible with democratic, egalitarian, humanitarian and justice-based norms. It argues that humanitarian INGOs must regularly make deep moral compromises. In choosing which compromises to make, they should focus primarily on their overall consequences, as opposed to their intentions or the intrinsic value of their activities. But they should interpret consequences expansively, and not limit themselves to those that are amenable to precise measurements of cost-effectiveness. The book concludes by explaining the implications of its 'map' of humanitarian INGO political ethics for individual donors to INGOs, and for how we all should conceive of INGOs' role in addressing pressing global problems.
Author: Gary N. Knoppers
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195329546
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
Winner of the R.B.Y. Scott Award from the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies Even in antiquity, writers were intrigued by the origins of the people called Samaritans, living in the region of ancient Samaria (near modern Nablus). The Samaritans practiced a religion almost identical to Judaism and shared a common set of scriptures. Yet the Samaritans and Jews had little to do with each other. In a famous New Testament passage about an encounter between Jesus and a Samaritan woman, the author writes, "Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans." The Samaritans claimed to be descendants of the northern tribes of Joseph. Classical Jewish writers said, however, that they were either of foreign origin or the product of intermarriages between the few remaining northern Israelites and polytheistic foreign settlers. Some modern scholars have accepted one or the other of these ancient theories. Others have avidly debated the time and context in which the two groups split apart. Covering over a thousand years of history, this book makes an important contribution to the fields of Jewish studies, biblical studies, ancient Near Eastern studies, Samaritan studies, and early Christian history by challenging the oppositional paradigm that has traditionally characterized the historical relations between Jews and Samaritans.
Author: Alison Brysk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199700680
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
In a troubled world where millions die at the hands of their own governments and societies, some states risk their citizens' lives, considerable portions of their national budgets, and repercussions from opposing states to protect helpless foreigners. Dozens of Canadian peacekeepers have died in Afghanistan defending humanitarian reconstruction in a shattered faraway land with no ties to their own. Each year, Sweden contributes over $3 billion to aid the world's poorest citizens and struggling democracies, asking nothing in return. And, a generation ago, Costa Rica defied U.S. power to broker a peace accord that ended civil wars in three neighboring countries--and has now joined with principled peers like South Africa to support the United Nations' International Criminal Court, despite U.S. pressure and aid cuts. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are alive today because they have been sheltered by one of these nations. Global Good Samaritans looks at the reasons why and how some states promote human rights internationally, arguing that humanitarian internationalism is more than episodic altruism--it is a pattern of persistent principled politics. Human rights as a principled foreign policy defies the realist prediction of untrammeled pursuit of national interest, and suggests the utility of constructivist approaches that investigate the role of ideas, identities, and influences on state action. Brysk shows how a diverse set of democratic middle powers, inspired by visionary leaders and strong civil societies, came to see the linkage between their long-term interest and the common good. She concludes that state promotion of global human rights may be an option for many more members of the international community and that the international human rights regime can be strengthened at the interstate level, alongside social movement campaigns and the struggle for the democratization of global governance.
Author: Patrick McCloskey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780867169706
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The editor of "St. Anthony Messenger" magazine for many years, Fr. McCloskey has answered many questions in his "Ask a Franciscan" column. He mines that wealth of material to find the most helpful questions and answers for readers to help them see the connection between their faith and their spiritual growth as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Author: Ilan Stavans
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199913701
Category : Hispanic Americans
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
"An emerging field of study that explores the Hispanic minority in the United States, Latino Studies is enriched by an interdisciplinary perspective. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, demographers, linguists, as well as religion, ethnicity, and culture scholars, among others, bring a varied, multifaceted approach to the understanding of a people whose roots are all over the Americas and whose permanent home is north of the Rio Grande. Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies offers an authoritative, trustworthy, and up-to-date intellectual map to this ever-changing discipline."--Editorial page.
Author: Bernardo Zacka
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067498143X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
When the State Meets the Street probes the complex moral lives of street-level bureaucrats: the frontline social and welfare workers, police officers, and educators who represent government’s human face to ordinary citizens. Too often dismissed as soulless operators, these workers wield a significant margin of discretion and make decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives. Combining insights from political theory with his own ethnographic fieldwork as a receptionist in an urban antipoverty agency, Bernardo Zacka shows us firsthand the predicament in which these public servants are entangled. Public policy consists of rules and regulations, but its implementation depends on how street-level bureaucrats interpret them and exercise discretionary judgment. These workers are expected to act as sensible moral agents in a working environment that is notoriously challenging and that conspires against them. Confronted by the pressures of everyday work, they often and unknowingly settle for one of several reductive conceptions of their responsibilities, each by itself pathological in the face of a complex, messy reality. Zacka examines the factors that contribute to this erosion of moral sensibility and what it takes to remain a balanced moral agent in such difficult conditions. Zacka’s revisionary portrait reveals bureaucratic life as more fluid and ethically fraught than most citizens realize. It invites us to approach the political theory of the democratic state from the bottom-up, thinking not just about what policies the state should adopt but also about how it ought to interact with citizens when implementing these policies.
Author: Marianna Charountaki
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030914631
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
This edited volume addresses the role of non-state actors (NSAs) in international relations. From their emergence in the early 20th century, entities of non-state status have played a role of increasing prominence in international politics. Scholarly work has been slow to catch up, approaching NSAs mainly through the scope of legitimacy and international law or limiting focus to NGOs, international organizations, and economic corporations. This volume remedies that, creating a typology of NSAs based on systematic and coherent analysis. Presenting a series of cases of NSAs across the continuum of international relations, the chapters firmly ground NSAs in the ontology of international relations theory. Filling a gap in the current literature, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of international relations theory, international politics, international security, diplomatic history, and European and Middle East politics, as well as policy-makers and practitioners.
Author: Pummer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004666087
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
Author: Avihay Dorfman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108752284
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
Some goods and services seem to be fundamentally public, such as legislation, criminal punishment, and fighting wars. By contrast, other functions, such as garbage collection, do not. This volume brings together prominent scholars from a range of academic fields - including law, economics, philosophy, and sociology - to address the core question of what makes a certain good or service fundamentally public and why. Sometimes, governments and other public entities are superior because they are more likely to get at the right decisions or follow fair procedures. In other instances, the provision of goods and services by public entities is intrinsically valuable. By analyzing the these answers, the authors also explore the nature of the state and its authority. This handbook explores influential arguments for and against privatization and also develops a number of key studies explaining, justifying, or challenging the legitimacy and the desirability of public provision of particular goods and services.
Author: Alasdair Gordon-Gibson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538151049
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
The book examines the reasons behind accusations of dysfunctional humanitarian identities and the loss of space for impartial action. Through a combination of practical examples in case studies from the field with a theoretical and philosophical approach to questions of voluntary service, community and identity, it reconsiders the exceptional discourse that constructs these identities and drives humanitarian response in environments of complex emergency. By recognizing both the strength and the limits of its social and political agency, the study presents opportunities for the construction of a less exceptional space, or ‘niche’ within the humanitarian sector, where the politics is around one of an ordinary humanitarian society instead of an ordered humanitarian system.
