“Coalition of the willing” is a phrase that we hear invoked with frequency in world politics. Significantly, it is generally accompanied by claims to moral responsibility. Yet the label commonly used to connote a temporary, purpose-driven, self-selected collection of states sits uneasily alongside these assertions of moral responsibility.This article explores how the informal nature of such associations should inform judgments of moral responsibility. I begin by briefly recounting what I call a model of institutional moral agency in order to explain (...) why it seems theoretically and practically problematic to talk about the moral responsibilities of informal associations. I then focus on coalitions of the willing as prominent, and challenging, examples of such associations, before raising misgivings about my own rather stark distinction if it means that accounts of moral responsibility must be reduced to the members—or potential members—of such coalitions in a way that neglects the moral significance of their acting together. Prompted by these concerns, I explore arguments by Virginia Held and Larry May about moral responsibility in relation to informal associations and identify insights that can be taken from these positions to refine our expectations and evaluations of the actions associated with such collectivities. Finally, I consider the particular implications of these insights in relation to the widely espoused duty to intervene to rescue vulnerable populations. (shrink)

Institutions can be assigned duties, and thus can also be blamed for failing to discharge them. But how can we respond to this type of failure? Punishment is a prominent and problematic response to institutional delinquency.

Dr Erskine's 'embedded cosmopolitanism' embraces the perspective of local loyalties, communities and cultures in the theory of why we have duties to 'strangers' and 'enemies' in world politics. Taking examples from the 'war on terror', she examines duties to 'enemies' through norms of non-combatant immunity and the prohibition against torture.

Determining who, or indeed what, is to respond to prescriptions for action in cases of international crisis is a critical endeavor. Without such an allocation of responsibilities, calls to action–whether to protect the environment or to rescue distant strangers–lack specified agents, and, therefore, any meaningful indication of how they might be met. A fundamental step in arriving at this distribution of duties is identifying moral agents in international relations, or, in other words, identifying those bodies that can deliberate and act (...) and thereby respond to ethical guidelines. Often, the most effective and relevant moral agents in international relations are not individuals but institutions. However, it is necessary to qualify any claim that institutions can bear duties in international relations. Not only must they possess capacities for decision-making and purposive action, they must also enjoy the conditions under which specific duties can be discharged. The importance of this latter stipulation can be usefully illustrated by examining the disparate circumstances within which states–those that exercise positive sovereignty and those that are sovereign only in name–are expected to act. (shrink)

In international politics, institutions – in the sense of formal organisations – are frequently portrayed as important bearers of duties and appropriate objects of blame. This makes eminent sense. Many states, multinational corporations, and intergovernmental organisations, to name a few types of institutional actor, have considerable capacities to respond to crises, address injustices – and, indeed, cause harm on a grand scale. When the United States , for example, is widely charged with a moral obligation to combat climate change, and (...) held to account for failing to take this responsibility seriously enough, such talk of duty and blame at the corporate level of the state is intuitively compelling. Simply put, individual human actors on their own lack the power, coordination and resources to achieve the outcomes open to many institutions. The US, in contrast , has a significant capacity to redress large-scale environmental problems and has contributed to them disproportionately. Moral responsibilities at the corporate level should follow – as should blame and charges of ‘delinquency’ if these are not met. (shrink)

One type of change that has lurked at the edges of scholarly discussions of international politics—often assumed, invoked, and alluded to, but rarely interrogated—is learning. Learning entails a very particular type of change. It is deliberate, internal, transformative, and peaceful. In this contribution to the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” I ask whether intergovernmental organizations can learn in a way that is comparable to the paradigmatic learning of individual human beings. In addressing this question, I take three steps. First, (...) I explore references to corporate entities “learning” within the discipline of international relations and ask whether what is being proposed is, in fact, genuine learning by the organizations themselves. Second, I attempt to construct a robust account of institutional learning that departs from these conceptions and acknowledges instead the self-reflection and structural transformation that I argue learning at the corporate level requires. Third, for the purpose of illustration, I turn briefly to the UN following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the slaughter of more than eight thousand men and boys outside Srebrenica in 1995 to identify examples of each stage of institutional learning. Finally, I offer three provisional claims about my proposed conception of institutional learning that warrant attention in future work. Namely, I suggest that institutional learning: cannot be equated with moral progress; is possible despite formal organizations being incapable of emotional responses such as shame or regret; and, perhaps most controversially, can occur at the level of the IGO without prior or parallel learning taking place at the level of the state or individual human actor. (shrink)