Search

The Japanese ODA policy transformation ended, or rather began, with the introduction of the Human Security doctrine in its narrative, allowing the Japanese approach to be encompassed within the international development architecture. However, while having as main pillar human security promotion, the Japanese aid structure maintains a strong view to what regards national interest and its importance in the ODA Charter. This has therefore started up worldwide debates on the actual purpose and rationale of the Japanese aid. This paper presents a different perspective in what regards development assistance policies and Japan is chosen as case study precisely because of the particularities of the Japanese society and Japanese policy. Under the theoretical model proposed by this paper - taking into account human security as reflecting cosmopolitan ideas - I have investigated the Japanese Official Development Assistance policy. The main assumption is that domestic attitudes have paved the way for cosmopolitan approaches in the Japanese aid policy. Thus, it was observed that altruism, morality and ethics, elements which have already existed inside the Japanese society long before the beginning of coining the ODA policy, have strongly influenced the current ODA practice of Japan; therefore it would be wrong to assume that the human security doctrine, a result of the convergence between domestic forces and international pressures, is used as a tool to hide national self-interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cosmopolitans often argue that the international community has a humanitarian responsibility to intervene militarily in order to protect vulnerable individuals from violent threats and to pursue the establishment of a condition of cosmopolitan justice based on the notion of a ‘global rule of law’. The purpose of this article is to argue that many of these cosmopolitan claims are incomplete and untenable on cosmopolitan grounds because they ignore the systemic and chronic structural factors that underwrite the root causes of these humanitarian threats. By way of examining cosmopolitan arguments for humanitarian military intervention and how systemic problems are further ignored in iterations of the Responsibility to Protect, this article suggests that many contemporary cosmopolitan arguments are guilty of focusing too narrowly on justifying a responsibility to respond to the symptoms of crisis versus demanding a similarly robust justification for a responsibility to alleviate persistent structural causes. Although this article recognizes that immediate principles of humanitarian intervention will, at times, be necessary, the article seeks to draw attention to what we are calling principles of Jus ante Bellum (right before war) and to stress that current cosmopolitan arguments about humanitarian intervention will remain insufficient without the incorporation of robust principles of distributive global justice that can provide secure foundations for a more thoroughgoing cosmopolitan condition of public right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Echoing the call recently made by Ed and Dana Luck and building on a research project triggered several years ago by Siba Grovogui’s postcolonial critique of the concept of responsibility to protect (R2P), this article explores the significance of what may be labeled individual R2P. It argues that acknowledging individual R2P as part of the doctrine not only highlights the role that a heretofore underappreciated layer of actors can and does play to protect individuals from some of the worst crimes. At the theoretical level, it also has the potential to mitigate some of the R2P doctrine’s main ambiguities, while in real life, acknowledging individual R2P does, without exonerating institutional actors from their obvious responsibilities, recognize at the very least the right of people of conscience, worldwide, to take matters in their own hands even in the worst cases of international paralysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]