The California Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage wasn't the only good human-rights news yesterday. Also exciting is the Court of Arbitration for Sport's decision to allow Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee sprinter, to compete for a place in the Beijing Olympics:The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied...
In a strange move, the Supreme Court on Monday affirmed the ATS Apartheid case of Khulamani v. Barclay Bank (recaptioned at the Supreme Court as American Isuzu Motors v. Ntsebeza). The stated reason? The Court lacked a quorum. From the docket sheet: Because the Court lacks a quorum, 28 U.S.C. § 1, and since a majority of the...
Chimene detects some nostalgia in Beyond Citizenship's suggestion that America may be unsustainable in the long run. But how could I not be nostalgic? I'm an American, and America has had a pretty good run of it. At least I recognize the nostalgia. One thing that is both fascinating and frustrating about engaging on citizenship issues...
I had contemplated weighing in on commentators' unfortunate tendency to equate the Responsibility to Protect doctrine with humanitarian invasion, but John Boonstra at UN Dispatch beat me to it. Here's a snippet:First, by and large, the R2P doctrine has been misunderstood or misrepresented in calls to "invade" Burma. R2P is often implied to boil down to a simple equation:...
Thanks to Ken for injecting the Ignatieff observation, with which I emphatically disagree! Nation-states are useful handmaidens to the superclass, but the real elites could do just fine without them, thank you very much. It's nice to have safe streets in places New York and London, but that's the business of local governments, not national ones. In...
Thanks again to Peter, without whose terrific book we couldn't have done this, and who has responded challengingly and gracefully throughout this conversation. It's been a lot of fun. I want to reassure John that he really isn't the only one here skeptical of global governance. Speaking for myself, I'm not such a fan either. Governance institutions tend...
I want to thank Peter for inviting me to participate in this discussion. It has been very useful and clarifying. I will close with a few thoughts. Peter's book addresses what will become the major issue of world politics in the 21st century and I'm grateful for his efforts. He has made a strong descriptive case (as has Alex and...
We have talked a little bit about assimilation. What I believe is important for strengthening our democracy is what I call "patriotic assimilation. I'm going to sketch this out a little. What is “patriotic assimilation”? First, it does not mean giving up all ethnic traditions, customs, cuisine, and birth languages. It has nothing to do with the food one eats,...
John wonders if I'm being too deterministic in my analysis, and Cristina also clearly sees some possibilities in citizenship policymaking. I agree that there are some important policy choices on the table, such as the ones Cristina discusses in the context of circular migration. But at the core I think there is zero chance of moving citizenship practice...
I want to wrap up my participation in this on-line symposium by thanking Peter again for his great contribution, and the occasion for what has been for me an engrossing discussion. I also want to chime in on two of the issues raised yesterday. 1. Peter, I think that many, if not most, Americans have come to value their citizenship precisely because...
I have blogged from time to time about the trial of Alberto Fujimori, the former President of Peru. Interested readers now have a new — and far better — source of information about the trial: Fujimori on Trial, a new bilingual Spanish/English blog sponsored by the Praxis Institute for Social Justice. Here is the blog's self-description:Praxis Institute for...
I would like to return to the theme of how we should approach the dynamics of erosion Peter has identified and to reiterate that I think we should be asking not whether these forces are inevitable, but rather: what are their real costs, and what might be the costs of trying to reverse them? First, even if the overinclusiveness of...
