Amnesty Global Ethics Series

There’s a website for the series now. Click here to go there: Amnesty International Global Ethics Series. Elaine Scarry‘s remarkable Thinking in an Emergency is already out. She shows how much less free we are than we are accustomed to believe, because of the ways in which the idea of an emergency–a potential nuclear or terrorist attack–has been used to authorize the avoidance of democratic oversight.

Next to come, from Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus, Can Intervention Work?, which explores the massive, military-driven efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans, the expansion of the EU, and the bloodless “color” revolutions in the former Soviet states. Rory Stewart–who is now a British Member of Parliament–will be in the United States this month to talk about the book, including a session at Barnes and Noble in New York. Stewart has persuaded me that it’s time for the US and NATO to leave Afghanistan.