Protestant music in South Korea has received little attention in ethnomusicology despite the fact that Protestant Christianity was one of the most popular religions in twentieth-century Korea. This has meant a missed opportunity to consider the musical impact of a religious institution that mediated translocal experiences between South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period (1950s–1980s). This article explores the politics of music style in South Korean diasporic churches through an ethnography of a church choir in California. I document these singers’ preference for European-style choral music over neotraditional pieces that incorporate the aesthetics of suffering from certain Korean traditional genres. I argue that their musical judgement must be understood in the context of their lived and remembered experience of power inequalities between the United States and South Korea. Based on my interviews with the singers, I show that they understand hymns and related Euro-American genres as healing practices that helped them overcome a difficult past and hear traditional vocal music as sonic icons of Korea's sad past. The article outlines a pervasive South Korean/Korean diasporic historical consciousness that challenges easy conceptions of identity and agency in music studies.

Proponents of nonviolent tactics often highlight the extent to which they rival arms as effective means of resistance. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, for instance, compare civil resistance favorably to armed insurrection as means of bringing about progressive political change. In Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, Ned Dobos cites their work in support of the claim that similar methods—organized according to Gene Sharp's idea of “civilian-based defense”—may be substituted for regular armed forces in the face of international aggression. I deconstruct this line of pacifist thought by arguing that it builds on the wrong binary. Turning away from a violence-nonviolence dichotomy structured around harmfulness, I look to Richard B. Gregg and Hannah Arendt for an account of nonviolent power defined by non-coercion. Whereas nonviolent coercion in the wrong hands still has the potential to subvert democratic institutions—just as armed methods can—Gregg's and Arendt's conceptions of nonviolent power identify a necessary bulwark against both forms of subversion. The dangers of nonviolent coercion can be seen in the largely nonviolent attempts at civil subversion by supporters of Donald Trump during Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the U.S. presidential election in 2020, while the effectiveness of noncoercive, nonviolent power is illustrated by the resistance of U.S. democratic institutions to resist them.

The “asymmetry myth” is that war crimes are committed by one's enemies but never, or hardly ever, by one's own combatants. The myth involves not only a common failure to acknowledge our own actual war crimes but also inadequate reactions when we are forced to recognize them. It contributes to the high likelihood that wars, just or unjust in their causes, will have a high moral cost. This cost, moreover, is a matter needing consideration in the jus ante bellum circumstances of preparedness for war as well as of conduct within it. As part of the symposium on Ned Dobos's book, Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, I will argue that the strength of the asymmetry myth is sustained by certain forms of romantic nationalism linked to the glamorization of military endeavor.

Just war theorists who argue that war is morally justified under certain circumstances infer implicitly that establishing the military institutions needed to wage war is also morally justified. In this paper, I mount a case in favor of a standing military establishment: to the extent that going to war is a way to discharge duties to protect fellow citizens and distant strangers from grievous harms, we have a duty to set up the institutions that enable us to discharge that duty. I then respond to four objections drawn from Ned Dobos's recent book Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine.

Suppose it is foreseeable that you will soon encounter a drowning child, whom you will only be able to rescue if you learn to swim. In this scenario we might think that you have a “prospective duty” to take swimming lessons given that this will be necessary to perform the future rescue. Cécile Fabre argues that, by parity of reasoning, states have a prospective duty to build and maintain military establishments. My argument in this essay pulls in the opposite direction. First, I emphasize that learning to swim is only a prospective duty under very specific circumstances. Normally there is no such duty; hence, we do not normally think that people deserve moral censure for choosing to forego swimming lessons. I then argue that, similarly, while a prospective duty to build a military can arise under some conceivable circumstances, these are not the circumstances that most states today find themselves in. I then suggest a more fitting domestic analogy to guide our thinking about this issue: Maintaining a standing army is less like learning to swim and more like keeping an assault weapon in the home “just in case.” This analogy supports a defeasible presumption against militarization.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been shaped by preexisting political, social, and economic relations and governance structures, and will remold these structures going forward. This review essay considers three books on global health politics written by Simon Rushton, Clare Wenham, and Jeremy Youde. Here, I explore what these books collectively and individually can tell us about these preexisting dynamics, the events of the first eighteen months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and possible future directions in the politics of global health. I argue that they provide a firm basis for understanding the inequitable burdens of the pandemic, while juxtaposing these inequities against the narratives of shared vulnerability that sit at the heart of the global health security regime. They also help us make sense of the surveillance, detection, containment, and response mechanisms we have seen during the pandemic; the failures to address the systemic dynamics that drive disease outbreaks; and the national and international politics that have shaped the pandemic response. However, COVID-19 has also vividly and brutally demonstrated how global health hierarchies, racism, border politics, and neoliberal forms of knowledge production have led to a stratified burden of the pandemic. These areas are less apparent in the three books, but ought to be situated front and center in future critical scholarship on global health security.

In recent years, concerns over the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) have mounted. In response, international organizations (IOs) have begun to translate the emerging consensus on the need for ethical AI into concrete international rules and standards. While the path toward effective AI governance faces many challenges, this essay shifts attention to an obstacle that has received little attention so far: the growing illiberal backlash in IOs. Prompted by Poland's recent rejection of a European position on AI due to the document's mention of “gender equality,” we argue that Poland followed a strategy that illiberal actors now regularly employ in IOs. To combat gender norms and women's rights across issue areas, illiberal contesters first identify the progressive language in international documents and then threaten to veto those documents—unless such language is watered down or removed. This spoiling strategy, we argue, may not only lead to the compromising of fundamental human rights norms but may also prevent much needed rules for AI from being adopted altogether. Against this background, we urge scholars and practitioners concerned with AI ethics to pay closer attention to illiberal backlash politics. IOs are emerging as spaces where progressive AI rules and standards are increasingly contested—and where they need to be defended to safeguard fundamental rights in an age of rapid technological change.

The focus on the moral rights of combatants in the ethics of war ignores a very important point: although morally unjust combatants cannot be considered moral equals to just combatants, especially with regard to the right to kill, there are sound moral reasons why the laws of war should accept a kind of equality between them, a concept referred to as “reduced legal equality.” Reduced legal equality is not about equal moral rights but about granting legal immunity to combatants for their conduct in accordance with the laws of war. This article shows that reduced legal equality of combatants is not only the morally best legal regulation in our nonideal international world but also the correct interpretation of international law.

By the end of the 1930s in Italy, ambitious winter and summer camps or colonie cimatiche for the young had been erected along Italy's coastline and in its Alpine resorts. Here, thousands of Italian children from the country's urban centres were sent to experience a regime of fresh air, exercise and Fascist propaganda. The small village of Fai in the autonomous province of Trento in the Italian Alps was home to the first such Alpine colonia managed by the Italian Fascist youth organisation, the Opera Nazionale Balilla. Through an examination of a range of contemporary Italian publications, this article will reveal how the Alpine colonia climatica went beyond its official remit of ‘climatic assistance to childhood’. It offers evidence of the Fascist regime's exploitation of these establishments in newly-annexed Trentino as a tool to unify and italianise, and argues that they were used to promote a militarised view of the national landscape.