Toni Erskine
Oxford University Press (July 2008)
http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780197264379
About the book: Toni Erskine's vision of 'embedded cosmopolitanism' responds to the charge that conventional cosmopolitan arguments neglect the profound importance of community and culture, particularity and passion. Bringing together insights from communitarian and feminist political thought, she defends the idea that community membership is morally constitutive - while arguing that the communities that define us are not necessarily territorially bounded and that a moral perspective situated in them need not be parochial.
Erskine employs this framework to explore some of the difficult moral dilemmas thrown up by contemporary warfare. Can universal principles of restraint demanded by conventional laws of war be robustly defended from a position that also acknowledges the moral force of particular ties and loyalties? By highlighting the links that exist even between warring communities, she offers new reasons for giving a positive response - reasons that reconcile claims to local attachments and global obligations. Embedded Cosmopolitanism provides a powerful account of where we stand in relation to 'strangers' and 'enemies' in a diverse and divided world; and provides a new theoretical framework for addressing the relationship between our moral starting point and the scope of our duties to others.
About the author: Toni Erskine is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Aberystwyth University and Senior Research Fellow in Global Ethics (2008-2011) at the Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include the following: the moral agency and responsibilities of formal organizations such as states, intergovernmental organizations, and transnational corporations; the ethics of war, including issues of non-combatant immunity, torture, and intelligence collection; communitarian and cosmopolitan conceptions of duty; the changing nature of norms of restraint in world politics, such as the prohibitions against torture and preventive war; and assumptions of agency within International Relations (IR) theory. Embedded Cosmopolitanism is her first monograph. She is editor of the following books: (with Richard Ned Lebow) Tragedy and International Relations (forthcoming, 2009); Responding to Delinquent Institutions: Blaming, Punishing and Rehabilitating Collective Moral Agents in World Politics (forthcoming, 2009); and, Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). She is currently working on a monograph entitled, Who is Responsible? Institutional Moral Agency and International Relations. Toni received her PhD from Cambridge University, where she was also British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.
Contact: tae@aber.ac.uk
