Shmuel Nili’s Beyond the Law’s Reach? is an inquiry into the moral duties of the world’s established democracies in a world rife with violent and undemocratic states. Nili argues that these “consolidated” democratic states are “entangled” with the leaders of such violent polities—and uses this entanglement to derive an elegant and plausible series of political duties. In response, this essay seeks to undermine the distinction between the established democracies and the violent states, by showing that some democratic states—including, most centrally, the United States—are as violent as those societies considered by Nili as the focus of international moral obligation. This fact, however, does not impugn the moral obligations identified by Nili; instead, it demonstrates that Nili’s duties might demand something like a necessary form of moral hypocrisy—in which a democratic state might be effectively able to undermine violence abroad, even while incapable of effectively eliminating that violence on its own territory.

In contemporary politics, the rise of a leadership style centered on “gaslighting”—persuasion through systematic besmirching, belittling, and the inversion of shared norms—poses profound challenges to democracy. This essay traces the conceptual roots of gaslighting and its uptake as a style of leadership, explores its distinguishing features compared to other manipulative political tactics, and uses the current American situation (that is, the rhetoric of Donald Trump and JD Vance) alongside international examples to illustrate its consequences. Against this backdrop, “adaptive leadership” is advanced as a normative counterweight—one that invites honest engagement with adaptive challenges and bolsters civic trust. The contrast illuminates the stakes for democratic culture as gaslighting erodes the very fabric of orientation, accountability, and mutual respect. It is no exaggeration here to speak of a battle for the soul of democracy.

The essay examines the lessons from the international intervention in Afghanistan, highlighting the failures of externally imposed state building, including neglect of local governance structures and prioritizing donor interests over Afghan ownership. The international peace- and state-building intervention in Afghanistan, which spanned two decades, culminated in the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, leading to the Taliban’s swift resurgence. This event has sparked a critical examination of the strategies employed by NATO and allied nations during their engagement in Afghanistan. This essay aims to distill seven key lessons from this intervention, emphasizing the need for future peacebuilders to adapt their approaches to better align with local contexts and realities. The analysis highlights the failures of liberal peacebuilding, the importance of local ownership, the necessity of effective and legitimate institutions, and the detrimental impact of corruption. Furthermore, it underscores the significance of coherence among international actors and the need for a nuanced understanding of regional dynamics. By reflecting on these lessons, the essay seeks to provide actionable insights for future international interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states.

In the introduction to this roundtable, we argue that global governance currently faces hard times because it is affected by a set of significant developments revolving around the changing distribution of state power, the rise of nationalist populism, and the frequent occurrence of transnational crises, while seeking to facilitate collective action on complex cooperation problems. Against this backdrop, the essay identifies two major institutional dynamics of global governance in hard times: first, the drift of formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs) that is caused by them being gridlocked in a period of significant changes in their social, (geo)political, economic, and technological environment. Second, the proliferation of various types of low-cost institutions. To help us think systematically about how these two interrelated institutional dynamics affect global governance, the essay develops the innovation thesis and the decline thesis. The “innovation thesis” suggests that by transitioning from a rather exclusive and hierarchical system revolving around FIGOs into a more inclusive and heterarchical system revolving around institutional diversity, global governance is currently being adapted to its new environment. The “decline thesis,” by contrast, argues that the two institutional dynamics undermine rules-based multilateralism and may lead to a shift back toward traditional (great) power politics that does not respect institutional constraints.

The consensus on the need to regulate artificial intelligence is clear, but the how remains elusive. Private regulation, as proposed by the tech industry itself, and state regulation, as embodied in the recent EU Artificial Intelligence Act, are two common forms of governance. We advance a third option that has received very little attention to date: professional regulation. Professional regulation is modeled after hybrid public-private regulatory structures found in medicine, such as those put forth by the American Medical Association. Such governance schemes develop both technical and ethical standards, shaping professional training, continuing knowledge, and conduct. We contend that it is the most practical means of ensuring the development of human-centered AI in an era of rapid technological change and intensely opposing views of what regulation ought to do. This article places the responsibility of acting ethically on the group that knows the technology best and can anticipate its effects: AI developers. But unlike other voluntary standards, professional regulation articulates and enforces standards to certify individuals. Professional licensing is an alternative that provides public protections based on privately developed standards that ensure the safety of AI prior to their release.

In Beyond the Law’s Reach? Shmuel Nili examines the moral responsibilities of affluent democracies toward poorer countries to whose misfortunes they contributed. Because of their entanglement, Nili argues, affluent democracies are (often, but not always) morally barred from pursuing policies more obviously aligned with their moral preferences when another policy would benefit the weakened state more. In this essay, I discuss some of the challenges of trying to repay a moral debt between states. The affluent democracy has incentives to underestimate the extent of its moral debt, while the weakened state benefits from overestimating the harm it suffered. Moreover, since the state is not a unitary actor, different members of a state might disagree on which actions should count as proper forms of atonement. I argue that moral debts cannot ever be fully repaid, but that such impossibility does not undermine the moral requirement to try to pay them; and, further, that the inability to fully settle a moral debt is not a shortcoming to lament, but closer to a blessing in disguise, because acknowledging past misdeeds and embracing the moral implications of deep entanglement may foster greater reciprocity and solidarity in the international realm.

Many aspects of migration policy involve hard moral dilemmas. Whether the dilemmas are concerned with refugee accommodation and integration, temporary labor migration, or the prospects of rejected asylum seekers, policymakers must sometimes make tough choices between competing and equally compelling moral values. Through in-depth discussion of various concrete examples, contributions to this roundtable argue that recognition and systematic analysis of the “ethics of migration policy dilemmas” can both increase philosophical and social-scientific understanding of public debates and policymaking on migration and provide ethical guidance for migration policy. Before introducing the roundtable’s individual contributions, this essay argues for the distinct epistemic value of the Dilemmas perspective by contrasting it with an approach that emphasizes the “busting” of myths; that is, the empirical uncovering of influential falsehoods in public and policy debates, often in the hope of improving policymaking through stronger evidence. We argue that while such myth busting can be valuable, it is insufficient and sometimes unhelpful for understanding how migration policy comes about and can be improved. Policymaking is not just shaped by empirical facts and understandings but also by interests and goals, including moral ones, that give empirical considerations deeper meaning and action-guiding potential. Often, these moral goals are numerous, similarly or equally compelling, and in profound tension with one another. Where this is the case, we should not simply introduce more and more accurate factual descriptions; we must also analyze dilemmas.

Recent times have been hard for global governance, not least for formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs). Given changing conditions and their inability to adapt, many observers argue that FIGOs are drifting and losing ground to low-cost institutions (LCIs). We argue that this widespread perception is incomplete and that it dismisses too quickly the durability of FIGOs. We begin by pointing out that not all FIGOs are drifting and that some may even thrive amid transnational crises and power shifts. We then highlight the possibility that in a densely institutionalized global environment, states can substitute one FIGO for another. Thus, even as one FIGO is drifting, other FIGOs, rather than or alongside LCIs, can take the mantle. We identify and exemplify three key motivations for FIGO substitution: overcoming gridlock, enhancing ideological alignment, and policy laundering. During crises and power shifts, some members might paralyze a FIGO, leading to gridlock and prompting other members to cooperate in another FIGO. Power shifts and crises can also motivate dissatisfied FIGO members to pursue parallel activities in a FIGO that better fits their ideological outlook. Policy laundering occurs when members use one FIGO over another to signal political intent. We conclude by exploring the normative implications of FIGO substitution.

In his new book Beyond the Law’s Reach? Shmuel Nili shows how affluent democracies have become entangled with violent autocratic regimes and brutal international cartels, and have thereby become complicit in serious global injustices. This essay asks who bears responsibility for this complicity. It argues that citizens of affluent democratic societies often share responsibility for their own government’s unjust entanglements and explores the conditions under which this holds true. It focuses in particular on the challenge posed by relatively “obscure” injustices, which even well-informed citizens cannot be expected to know about. In addressing these cases, this essay outlines a theory of civic obligation that can help explain when citizens have a duty to take action against government injustice and clarify how much they can be expected to know about their representatives’ wrongdoing.

The global diffusion of state power has led to a decline in global governance; that is, in the attempt to build authoritative rules and institutions that represent the common goals of the international community. The rise of China and other powers has increased the heterogeneity of the international system, and the erstwhile hegemon has turned against the international order. The major powers today have vastly different domestic characteristics and pursue strongly divergent interests. This has gridlocked and marginalized multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization and seen a worrying disregard for international law. In response, the institutional ecosystem of global governance is adapting by lowering its scope, weakening its commitments, and splintering into partly competing institutional orders. Adaptation and decline are not mutually exclusive: Today, we can witness the adaptation of global governance to its own decline. Theoretically, this points to the enduring relevance of hegemonic stability theory for global governance. The result is a reduced normative ambition for global governance, signaling a retreat from the grand internationalist vision of organized cooperation among all the members of the international community.

This article proposes a reframing of the ethics of human intelligence collection (HUMINT). Intelligence officers (IOs) engaged in HUMINT routinely transgress ordinary ethical norms: to serve their nation-state, they lie, manipulate, deceive, and instrumentalize others not only in professional settings (“doing HUMINT”) but also in private life (“living HUMINT”). The currently dominant framework for HUMINT ethics, derived from the just war tradition, does not adequately address key challenges—particularly at the individual level. I therefore argue for a reframing grounded in the lived experience of HUMINT, aimed at real dilemmas faced by conscientious IOs. The proposal has two components: first, expanding the space for individual moral responsibility across all levels of intelligence decision-making; and second, emphasizing peace as a minimal common telos to guide ethical deliberation by both IOs and their agencies. The reframing, I conclude, can enhance the efficiency and accountability of intelligence agencies while providing IOs with a more robust framework to guide their actions.

Theories of liberal justice depend upon ideas of how much we can expect ordinary people to be motivated by the moral interests of others; there are limits to the motivational power of such notions as altruism and sympathy. This means, however, that the theories of justice we have may have difficulty in understanding how to rightly respond to the moral claims that might emerge in the face of widespread migration in response to climate change. This essay argues that liberal states may face a dilemma in response to this migration—one in which a state must do what cannot be justified toward either the migratory or the sedentary. This claim, further, might represent a new site of intergenerational injustice, in which future generations are given political problems to which our best theories of political justice can provide little assistance.

With formal international organizations (IOs) facing gridlock and informal IOs proliferating, cooperation in the twenty-first century looks different than it did in previous eras. Global governance institutions today also face additional challenges, including a fragmented information environment where publics are increasingly vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation. What do these trends portend for international politics? One way to answer this question is to return to a core ingredient of a well-functioning IO—information provision—and ask how such changes affect efficiency. Viewed through this lens, we see decline in some arenas and adaptation in others. Formal IOs are struggling to retain relevance as their weak policy responses and ambiguous rules create space for competing signals. The proliferation of informal institutions, on the other hand, may represent global governance evolution, as these technocratic bodies are often well-insulated from many political challenges. Yet even if global governance retains functionality, the legitimacy implications of such trends are troubling. IO legitimacy depends in part on process, and from this standpoint, the informational gains of informal governance must be weighed against losses of accountability and transparency. Ultimately, evaluating the normative implications of these trends requires making judgments about the preferred legitimizing principles for global governance.

States are increasingly resorting to international cooperative agreements to deter migrants and refugees from irregularly arriving at their borders. Although scholars have shown how these cooperative deterrence policies are undermining important refugee and human rights protections, making migration journeys more dangerous, and securitizing and criminalizing people on the move, what has not been adequately examined is how these cooperative arrangements can bring about normative changes that produce indifference to the suffering of refugees and migrants. This article examines the psychosocial dynamics of cooperative deterrence policies to show how the social processes of authorization, routinization, evasion of responsibility, and dehumanization weaken moral restraints and opportunities for moral contemplation. Governments are using these social processes to implement, legitimize, and promote harmful policies; evade legal responsibility; and obscure the moral implications of their policies. This article sheds new light on the psychosocial effects of cooperative deterrence, the dark side of international cooperation, and the role that indifference plays in maintaining and legitimizing migration deterrence polices.

Today’s controversies about territorial access and rights of refugees and the cohesion of the nation-state can be traced back to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and Kant’s ideas about hospitality. Seyla Benhabib has argued that the resulting dilemma can be softened and bridged through “democratic iterations,” and that the EU deliberation offers a suitable perspective. However, the complex construction of the EU asylum framework has led to a paradox of highly regulated rights and closed borders, and to disappointment and opposition. The sudden opening of borders and free choice for the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression open a new perspective to address the dilemma, in line with EU principles of free choice and openness.

Michael Blake, Yuna Blajer de la Garza, and Alex Zakaras offer insightful critiques of several arguments central to my book Beyond the Law’s Reach? In the process, they raise large questions in political philosophy more generally, especially as it pertains to global affairs. Blake is skeptical about the distinction, driving much of the book, between consolidated liberal democracies and jurisdictions where the “shadow of violence” prevails. Blajer de la Garza worries that the international reparative duties that the book highlights may linger indefinitely, and, consequently, be exploited by cynical political actors. Finally, whereas Beyond the Law’s Reach? argues that liberal democracies’ collective integrity is affected by their entanglement in violence and corruption abroad, Zakaras doubts whether this collective moral problem carries over into the individual level, given individual citizens’ reasonable ignorance of policy details. I offer responses to each of these critiques in turn. I conclude by highlighting the picture of democratic civic responsibility that emerges from these responses.