It is generally agreed by most observers that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have fallen short of achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. Today, women continue to be more likely than men to live in poverty, and more than 18 million girls in sub-Saharan Africa are out of school. One of the crucial reasons for the failure of the MDGs in relation to women was their inability to address the deeply entrenched and interlocking factors that perpetuate women's disadvantage. The new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as articulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, constitute an improvement over the MDGs. Goal 5, which enshrines the stand-alone goal on gender equality, is comprised of nine specific targets, including the elimination of gender-based violence and access to reproductive health. In addition, gender equality is mainstreamed into numerous others goals. Given that the global community is now poised to implement the SDGs, the challenge is how best to integrate a transformative approach into the planning, implementation, and delivery of the specific targets so that the SDGs contribute to achieving gender equality and women's empowerment.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established following the UN Millennium Declaration, which was approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2000. Described by some as the “world's biggest promise,” they set out a series of time-bound targets to be achieved by the international community by 2015, including a halving of extreme poverty, a two-third reduction in child mortality, a three-quarter reduction in maternal mortality, and universal primary education. The MDGs were, however, often criticized for having a “blind spot” with regard to inequality and social injustice. Worse, they may even have contributed to entrenched inequalities through perverse incentives. As some have argued, in order to achieve progress toward the MDG targets at the national level, governments focused their attention on the “easy to reach” populations and ignored more marginalized, vulnerable groups. The aim of this essay is to examine the extent to which this widespread criticism has been successfully addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2015.

This article examines how contestation between political parties, politicians, and their supporters shaped Guinea's decolonization from 1945 to 1961. The last region to resist the rise of Sékou Touré's PDG, the Fulbe-dominated Futa Jallon – as both a political space and representation of Fulbe culture – was at the center of strategic and intellectual struggles over the shape of the postcolonial Guinean state and society. What resulted from contestation was the general belief that the Fulbe and the Futa Jallon were divergent from the rest of Guinea, a fragment in the making.

In recent years philosophical debates on human rights have focused upon the contrast between humanist and political conceptions of human rights. Defenders of the humanist conception take human rights to be those rights that we have solely in virtue of being human. By contrast, defenders of the political conception aim to offer an account of human rights practice without any recourse to notions such as human dignity, personhood, etc. They take human rights to be those rights that we have in virtue of being subject to political authority. In this essay, I show some of the problematic implications of endorsing this aspect of the political conception. After analyzing some key functions that the concept of human dignity plays in human rights practice, I focus on the gradual extension of legal human rights to corporations. I analyze the negative effects that the distinctive functions of human rights norms can have upon the human rights of natural persons once corporations are recognized as legal persons bearing human rights. Turning to human rights jurisprudence I then explore the normative resources that the concept of human dignity has to offer in order to prevent such negative effects and which are unavailable to a conception of human rights that disregards the humanist core of human rights practice.

What comes to mind when we hear the word “drone”? For many of us, it is the image of a General Atomics MQ-1B Predator drone launching a Hellfire missile at a suspected militant target. But is this picture beginning to change? Should this picture change?

Is the revocation of citizenship—a policy increasingly adopted by democratic states—a violation of democratic principles? In an article published in the Spring 2016 issue of this journal, I argued that it is. A true commitment to the best understanding of democratic citizenship does not permit the revocation of some citizens’ status by others. David Miller and Ben Herzog are unconvinced. Elizabeth Cohen agrees that revocation is a violation of democratic principle, but argues that my defense of this claim leaves room for it nevertheless. These thoughtful critiques raise two questions to which I would like to respond: (1) What is the nature of citizenship in democratic states? (2) What can legitimately be done by democracies to protect themselves?

This forum article explores the major intellectual trajectories in the historical archaeology of Eastern Africa over the last sixty years. Two primary perspectives are identified in historical archaeology: one that emphasizes precolonial history and oral traditions with associated archaeology, and another that focuses mostly on the era of European contact with Africa. The latter is followed by most North American practice, to the point of excluding approaches that privilege the internal dynamics of African societies. African practice today has many hybrids using both approaches. Increasingly, precolonial historical archaeology is waning in the face of a dominant focus on the modern era, much like the trend in African history. New approaches that incorporate community participation are gaining favor, with positive examples of collaboration between historical archaeologists and communities members desiring to preserve and revitalize local histories.

John Locke worried that the common law was bad for business. Although he recognized the political importance of common law institutions such as juries, he also thought that the cumbersome procedures of English courts might hamper economic development in England and its colonies. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which Locke helped draft in 1669, tried to reconcile these competing political and economic concerns. Although the Constitutions guaranteed “Freemen” a right to trial by jury, the document also provided for specialized judges in port towns to “try cases belonging to [the] law-merchant.” These commercial judges would allow merchants to settle their disputes “as shall be most convenient for trade,” rather than by the expensive formality of the common law.