Papers by Matthew S Weinert
University of Alberta Press eBooks, Dec 30, 2016
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2007
Today, many individuals are victims, not of foreign military aggression and nuclear war, but of v... more Today, many individuals are victims, not of foreign military aggression and nuclear war, but of violence committed against them by their own state. Moreover, the security of individuals is threatened, not by military forces, but by criminals and terrorists, the forces of nature, disease, and poverty. The traditional interstate security paradigm has no place for most of these threats, and considers many of them to be essentially domestic affairs. The aim of my paper is to briefly look at the choice between a state-centered and an individual-centered approach to global security. I will look at the debates on 'human security' and 'state security', focusing on the most influential reports and declarations on this issue of the last two decades.
Human Rights & Human Welfare, 2004
Human Rights & Human Welfare, 2004
A review of: Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Social Justice by Geoffrey Robertson. New ... more A review of: Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Social Justice by Geoffrey Robertson. New York: The New Press, 1999 (revised 2002). 658pp
Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 2022
The UN Development Programme introduced the human security concept in 1994 to address the diversi... more The UN Development Programme introduced the human security concept in 1994 to address the diversity of challenges to people’s survival, livelihood, and dignity in seven key areas: personal, food, health, economic, political, community, and environmental security. A voluminous literature has since engaged its definitional parameters, theoretical implications, and practical applications. Yet neither dignity nor community security, defined in part to include cultural traditions and identities, have attracted much attention despite considerable human and community insecurities caused by assaults on cultural heritage which, as emblematic of distinctive cultural identities, have downward effects on dignity. This article aims to correct that gap. It identifies and examines three security markers to ascertain and redress the sufferance of indignities and insecurities pertaining to heritage, dignity, and community security: ensuring use of heritage; promoting its transmission; and protecting...
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, 2018
Literature concentrated on sovereignty’s location laid the groundwork for the distinctive sort of... more Literature concentrated on sovereignty’s location laid the groundwork for the distinctive sort of ethical detachment that has characterized sovereignty in international relations (IR). While it is customary to refer to sovereign absolutism as linking a logic of prerogative with sovereignty, mainstream IR theory has reproduced its own variation on the theme and done little until recently to decouple the two. Yet beginning in the late 1970s, the literature began to entertain the idea that interdependence and globalization impede, constrain, corrode, or diminish the core assumptions of sovereignty: the centralization of power and authority, the supremacy of the state, the state’s capabilities to achieve its objectives, and the degree of permissiveness afforded by an anarchical system. Put differently, the space within which sovereignty could operate unencumbered rapidly diminished in size and scope, and the sovereign state, by losing control over various functions, was becoming incoher...
Choice Reviews Online, 2015
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2011
The pluralist—solidarist debate in English School theory — which concentrates on discerning the k... more The pluralist—solidarist debate in English School theory — which concentrates on discerning the kind of international society in which we live — encourages overgeneralisations that either overstate international society’s presumed solidarity or vigorously defend instrumental commitments that underplay actual ethical advances. Building upon insights by Bellamy, Buzan and Hurrell, I attempt to extricate the debate from its current impasse by recasting pluralism and solidarism as ideal-typical assessments of agreements within particular issue areas. The argument is illustrated with reference to human security. Two reasons are behind this choice. Firstly, it allows me to pose more pluralist-friendly claims on a terrain that is presumably ceded to solidarists. Secondly, the contested nature of human security allows me to highlight the fluidity of the concepts, which reveals not necessarily solidarism’s cooperative potential or pluralism’s minimalist pledges, but rather fissures, uncertai...
Politics and Ethics Review, 2006
Despite the truism that grave humanitarian crises shock the human conscience, when – if ever – st... more Despite the truism that grave humanitarian crises shock the human conscience, when – if ever – states may act to protect populations from genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes remains contested. Inaction (Rwanda), inadequate response (Darfur and the Congo), and military intervention (Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo) invite criticism – from moralists who decry the international community’s uneven, selective, and generally ineffective response to humanitarian nightmares, and from sovereigntists, who reify sovereignty’s corollary, non-intervention. Morality and sovereignty appear hopelessly contradictory; common ground seems as elusive as it is necessary. Substantial movement towards common ground came on two recent occasions. At the behest of United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Canadian government, with input from major foundations, multiple non-state actors, and the UN General Assembly (UNGA), established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2000 to wrestle with the legal, moral, and logistical issues bound with humanitarian intervention. Its 2001 final report, published under the title The Responsibility to Protect, single-handedly changed the terms of the debate from ‘the right to intervene’ (which too often ‘focuses attention on the claims, rights, and prerogatives of the potentially intervening states’) to a ‘responsibility to protect’ communities from egregious acts of violence, including ‘mass killing ... systematic rape and ... starvation’ (ICISS, 2001: 16ff.). World leaders adopted in principle a ‘responsibility to protect’ during the September 2005 world summit honouring the UN’s 60th anniversary and called upon the UNGA to continue consideration of it and its implications (World Summit Outcome, 2005: ¶139). Adoption of the principle opens up at least two avenues of inquiry. First, it signifies willingness on the part of states to delimit sovereignty practices visà-vis minimal standards of decency, order and human rights. Placed in a wider historical context, this agreement constitutes part of a seismic, yet under-
International Studies Review, 2010
... Becoming Sovereign. Matthew S. Weinert. Article first published online: 7 JUN 2010. DOI: 10.1... more ... Becoming Sovereign. Matthew S. Weinert. Article first published online: 7 JUN 2010. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2010.00938.x. ... Additional Information. How to Cite. Weinert, MS (2010), Becoming Sovereign. International Studies Review, 12: 325327. ...
Human Rights Review, 2007
... We shall call this sovereignty's "individuality and (in contemporary terms) human r... more ... We shall call this sovereignty's "individuality and (in contemporary terms) human rights thesis ... Here is where Bodin's nomothetic sovereignty falters ... iv-v. 67) When this occurs, subjects may disobey the commands of the sovereign only if they contravene natural and divine law, but ...
Human Rights & Human Welfare
... anymore strikes me, at least, as one-dimensional and, consequently, at once comical and tragi... more ... anymore strikes me, at least, as one-dimensional and, consequently, at once comical and tragic. ... The fourth prong analyzes three features of the social death of the victims: us-them ... Nations' human security agenda.7 Eichmann manifested this malaise: the bored salesman of the ...
Recognition and Global Politics, 2016
Why 'recognition'? The term resonates differently and has distinctive implications depending on i... more Why 'recognition'? The term resonates differently and has distinctive implications depending on its use. The first is grammatical: to recognize something is to comprehend some measure of its essential truth; recognition implies a shared context of perception. The second resonance is intimate: recognition ostensibly connects us to others through shared perspectives, experiences, affiliations and commitments. The third resonance is political: recognition of collective political voice is an affirmation of a mutuality of communal commitments, some of which might conflict with those of other collectivities. Governments recognize one another; to be a political entity without recognition by others of that status is to be excluded from entire spheres of political interaction, access and influence. Recognition is, quite literally, re-cognition -to know again, and by that knowing, to share an affinity with the person or thing thus recognized, affirming the existence of the subject through the very act of recognition. To recognize something presumes a preliminary understanding of it, so that its return will be embedded in a relationship of pre-existing knowledge and thus familiarity.
This article articulates a politics of the world as process, which is imperative as globalizing f... more This article articulates a politics of the world as process, which is imperative as globalizing forces render boundaries unintelligible; trans-border issues occupy international public policy makers as subjects for global governance; and human agents increasingly act in the realm of world politics. Rather than tackling the infinite details of each of these, I instead concentrate on their convergence. I find in Marx and Carr a language and a logic (even if they are rudimentary) with which to recognize the centrality of human agency in a politics of the world. I then turn to Hannah Arendt, whose global conception of politics, which centered on the generative power of human agents, helps us extricate Marx and Carr's accounts from statist boundaries. Finally, I apply their insights to the institutional and nor- mative dimensions of Hedley Bull's underdeveloped concept of world order. Together, their insights enable us to rethink anarchy as a space for political activity.
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Papers by Matthew S Weinert
Because cruelty reveals that the very meaning of being human is subject to the vicissitudes of power and prejudice, we need greater systematic inquiry into humanization. Weinert finds antecedents in various traditions of International Relations theory and, primarily, in the work of Hannah Arendt. Building on such scholarship, he identifies five interlocking processes that make human: reflection on the moral worth of others, recognition of the individuality of the other, resistance to marginalization and oppression, replication of prevailing norms, and responsibility to self and others.
Based on extensive research in primary documents, Weinert examines these processes in four empirical chapters. In the arena of security, he charts changes in the UN Security Council’s understanding of the dehumanized victim and the development of the UN’s human security agenda to protect and empower human beings. In the arena of law, he examines international tribunal treatments of violations of human dignity, before honing in on the International Court of Justice’s grappling with the self-determination of peoples most recently evidenced in the Kosovo advisory opinion.
The practices and processes of making human, the author concludes, provides keys to understanding theoretically and practically how we might construct a world order in which individual human beings are accorded dignity, secure in both their rights and personhood.