This book offers original essays on the subject of evil in international relations. It considers questions of moral agency associated with the perpetration of evil acts by individuals and groups in the international sphere, and the range of ethical responses the international community has available to it in the aftermath of large-scale evils.

This book seeks to determine what is meant by 'evil' when used to describe actors and events in international politics. Focusing on the history of evil in western secular and religious thought, it reintroduces a classical understanding of evil as the means to which we seek to understand otherwise meaningless human suffering.

A thought-provoking guide to the history of ideas that form the bedrock of the future global arena

Hannah Arendt is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most powerful political theorists. The purpose of this book is to make an innovative contribution to the newly emerging literature connecting Arendt to international political theory and debates surrounding globalization. In recent years the work of Arendt has gathered increasing interest from scholars in the field of international political theory because of its potential relevance for understanding international affairs. Focusing on the central theme of evil in Arendt’s work, this book weaves together elements of Arendt’s theory in order to engage with four major problems connected with contemporary globalization: genocide and crimes against humanity; global poverty and radical economic inequality; global refugees, displaced persons, and the ‘stateless’; and the destructive domination of the public realm by predatory neoliberal economic globalization. Hayden shows that a key constellation of her concepts—the right to have rights, superfluousness, thoughtlessness, plurality, freedom, and power—can help us to understand and address some of the central problems involving political evil in our global age. In doing so, this book takes Arendtian scholarship and international political theory into provocative new directions. Political Evil in a Global Age will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of politics, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies.

The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time before justice is the moment to put evil in the past. Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.

This book seeks to reimagine why and how to confront mass atrocities in world politics. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s conception of evil, it interprets and understands mass atrocities as ‘evil’ in an ‘Arendtian’ sense, that is, as crimes against human plurality and, thus, crimes against humanity itself. This understanding of mass atrocities paves the way for reframing responses to mass atrocities as attempts to confront evil. In doing so, the book focuses on military intervention under the banner of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and judicial intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and reframes them as tools to protect human plurality from evil. Furthermore, the book looks at the place and the role of R2P and the ICC in the changing landscape of world order. It argues that the protection of humanity from evil can serve as a legitimate Grundnorm (basic norm) around which a global constitutional order in an inherently pluralistic world can be constructed.

In an interview with Günther Gaus for German television in 1964, Hannah Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher but a political theorist. Disillusioned by the cooperation of German intellectuals with the Nazis, she said farewell to philosophy when she fled the country. This book examines Arendt's ideas about thinking, acting and political responsibility, investigating the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of action that preoccupied Arendt throughout her life. By joining in the conversation between Arendt and Gaus, each contributor probes her ideas about thinking and judging and their relation to responsibility, power and violence. An insightful and intelligent treatment of the work of Hannah Arendt, this volume will appeal to a wide number of fields beyond political theory and philosophy, including law, literary studies, social anthropology and cultural history.