World Justice Research Articles

Education, Complaints, and Accountability

Better-educated countries have better governments, an empirical regularity that holds in both dictatorships and democracies. Possible reasons for this fact are that educated people are more likely to complain about misconduct by government officials and that more frequent complaints encourage better behavior from officials. Newly assembled individual-level survey data from the World Justice Project show that, within countries, better-educated people are more likely to report official misconduct. The results are confirmed using other survey data on reporting crime and corruption. Citizens’ complaints might thus be an operative mechanism that explains the link between education and the quality of government.

Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism by Jessica Berman (review)

Reviewed by: Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism by Jessica Berman Marian Eide Jessica Berman , Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 372 pp. In 2004 when "Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf" appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, the article altered and expanded my understanding of Woolf 's writing and enhanced my approach to teaching her works. I have since followed Jessica Berman's presentations at conferences with increasingly high expectations and awaited the publication of this book with eagerness. The book itself exceeds my expectations. It will be the title I name—reluctant to pass along my own copy perhaps—to advanced students and curious colleagues investigating the links between ethics and politics or seeking an invigorated, transnational understanding of modernism. Jessica Berman presents here a new approach to comparative literary studies that considers transnational difference within imperial languages like English and Spanish, but beyond the European or U.S. metropolis where comparative literature has traditionally staked its claims. This book allows us to understand the early twentieth century's literary legacy across nations as it is carefully theorized and here investigated in "the living archive of intercultural literary history," to quote Jed Esty's succinct description on the book's back cover. While Berman convincingly expands global modernism's reach, she maintains traditional definitions based on time (beginning with the turn into the twentieth century and ending with the Second World War) and stylistic or formal experimentation. At the same time, the field is newly enriched by her understanding of modernism's grounding ethical commitments and political engagement. Modernist narrative, she argues, is an ethical engagement with the demands of modernity. Narrative allows us to traverse the variant paths between "ought" and "is," from the politics of the actual through ethical commitments to a vision of practicable global justice. The book opens by claiming: "Narrative is the mode in which we, as individuals and collectives, account for ourselves"; it arises "in conjunction with particular rhetorical situations or exigencies that call forth its action in the world" (5). Throughout, in a broadly ranging series of examples, the book compellingly presents narrative as the [End Page 317] site of experimentation where aesthetics and epistemology meet the social world. A surprising conclusion meditates on the role of narrative in Barack Obama's Nobel acceptance speech to conclude that his narratives represent broader impulses to "create 'as if ' realms that not only respond to the exigence of their rhetorical situations but also carry implications for action in the world and for the establishment of real- world justice within the domain of politics" (284). Berman's book travels a transnational course through which such texts move from intimate ethics to global politics without ever diminishing either the intimate or the ethical but recognizing their conjunction as the only substrate on which global justice can be built. Even summarizing this book's scope is daunting: Mulk Raj Anand's novels move into position as a "constitutive part of modernism" allowing readers to envision James Joyce's more canonical colonial writing in a new light. Jean Rhys's voice is located here as much in a Creole Caribbean as in a metropolitan Europe, underscoring one of the questions Berman maintains as crucial to modernist narrative politics: "Who speaks, and from what location?" (283). The recent scholarly emphasis on the modernist domestic is invigorated with consideration of the hybridgenre Indian zenana texts. While recognizing the contributions of Hemingway, Orwell, and Woolf (in Three Guineas) to the literary heritage of the Spanish Civil War, Berman guides our attention to Spanish- language fiction stubbornly excluded from the canons of this period; she compellingly explicates the foundational work of Max Aub alongside propaganda produced on all sides of the conflict. Setting aside established platitudes about the conventional stylistic tendency of committed political writing in the 1930's, she situates working class literature in the U.S. in a crucial place within the modernist stylistic experiment and between ethical and aesthetic commitments. The expansive understanding Modernist Commitments provides opens not only the geographic borders of the field, but enhances our understanding of its proper critical practices, engagements, and politics. Within this sweep there...

The Effect of International Trade on Rule of Law

In this paper, we look at the relationship between international trade and the rule of law, using the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, which include index figures on human rights, limits on government powers, transparency and regulatory efficiency. Based on regression analyses using the rule of law index figures and international trade figures (merchandise trade, service trade, exports and imports as percentage of GDP,) international trade and basic human rights seem to have little relationship; but trade has a close positive relationship with strong order and security. Somewhat surprisingly, regulatory transparency and effective implementation seems to have little or no effect on international trade and vice versa. International trade shows a clear positive relationship with the country’s criminal justice system, but the relationship with the civil justice system is not as clear as such. For regulatory implementation and civil justice, services trade positively affect these institutions, but these institutions in turn affect exports more strongly than services trade. Finally, the effect of trade on rule of law is stronger on a medium to long term (10-20 year) time horizon.

World Justice Project Counter-Terrorism Expert Network: Report of Key Findings and Recommendations on the Rule of Law and Counter-Terrorism

The current report seeks to capture wider observations, and to summarize the key findings and recommendations of a three year multinational, multidisciplinary project on the rule of law and counter-terrorism between the University of Nottingham, the Club of Madrid, Dr Silvia Casale, and the University of Malaga, under the umbrella of a global initiative to strengthen the rule of law called the World Justice Project. The overarching theme is how legitimate security imperatives may be accommodated within rather than erode the existing rule of law framework.The current report draws heavily upon and in some cases develops the contributions and recommendations of over 40 multinational, multidisciplinary experts – drawn from inter alia judicial, practitioner, policy-maker, institutional, academic, policing, military, and civil society perspectives, and from every major region of the world – which culminated in the publication of a significant 1200 page book: AM Salinas de Frias, KLH Samuel, and ND White (eds), Counter-Terrorism: International Law and Practice (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012). Additionally, a number of further expert submissions were made to the project for the purpose of writing this report, and the report’s authors have contributed new sections also.

World Poverty and Justice beyond Borders

Most cosmopolitans who are concerned about world poverty assume that for citizens of affluent societies, justice beyond national borders is a matter of their positive duty to provide aid to distant people suffering from severe poverty. This assumption is challenged by some authors, notably Tomas Pogge, who maintains that these citizens are actively involved in the incidence of poverty abroad and therefore neglect their negative duty of refraining from harming others. This paper examines the extent to which it is pertinent to contend that citizens in economically advanced countries are morally liable for the impoverishment of a sizable population of the developing world. The contention in question can be interpreted in two nonexclusive ways. First, it might imply that historical injustices, including colonialism and slavery, contributed to both contemporary affluence in some parts of the world and poverty in others. Second, it could imply that the present global economic system, instituted and implemented by the governments of rich and powerful countries acting in the name of their citizens, is benefiting the citizens while harming the world’s disadvantaged. The author argues that the idea of reparation for historical injustices suffers from serious philosophical difficulties, including the non-identity problem presented by Derek Parfit, and thus fails to provide a satisfactory approach to the existing problem of poverty. This paper then examines the alleged liability of citizens in affluent countries, with a special reference to empirical observations on the policy process. The paper concludes by suggesting a twofold theory of global justice, which combines material, managerial, and moral assistances for a society lacking a competent government and proposes institutional reforms in the global order in order to achieve poverty reduction.

Rankings and Ratings: Instructions for Use

Multidimensional measures (composite indicators, indices, ratings, league tables) can effectively underpin the development of data-driven narratives in support to policy. A controversy surrounds the use of these measures. We review some good and bad practices from the recent literature. We then discuss briefly a decalogue to develop a multidimensional measure. We argue in favor of a multi-modeling approach to represent different scenarios in the construction of an aggregate measure prior to drawing recommendations for policy making. Finally, we try to establish a link between the analytic use of well-designed aggregate measures and the development of a robust culture of evaluation of policies based on evidence. An application of these concepts and tools to the Rule of Law index developed by the World Justice Project is given.

Indices and Indicators of Justice, Governance, and the Rule of Law: An Overview

Throughout the past two decades, the demand for social science indicators to quantify the performance of various institutions has increased dramatically. These indicators seek to address the concerns of policymaking and public audiences by operationalizing such complex, multi-dimensional concepts as governance, access to justice, corruption, and the rule of law, to name a few. The increased demand for institutional indicators has led to a proliferation of indices. This special issue of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law , entirely dedicated to measurement of institutional indicators across countries, represents the outcome of a collaborative effort between the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL) and The World Justice Project (WJP). In August 2010, these institutions convened in Washington, DC, a seminar with some of the leading researchers and indicator developers in the fields of governance, corruption, and access to justice. The goal of the seminar was to facilitate an open conversation about the need for, and the limitations of, cross-country institutional indicators. Presentations made at this seminar have been turned into papers for this special issue.

Health, Luck, and Justice

Health, Luck, and Justice

Yoko's Story and the battle of memory: fragmentation and suture of national memory and gender in the age of globalization

Since its publication in 1986, Yoko Watkins’ So Far from the Bamboo Grove has been used as a textbook by some primary and middle schools in the US. The book is an autobiographical novel about the experiences of a Japanese girl named Yoko who returns to her home country with her mother and sister with an anti‐war and peace message. However, it became the center of attention and was referred to as the Yoko incident when, in January 2007, it became known to the Koreans that the book was being used as a textbook by American students and contained a story about Japanese women raped by Korean men at the end of Japanese colonial rule. It immediately incited outcries from the Korean media and online communities, complaining that any suggestion of the rape of Japanese women by Korean men at the end of Japanese colonial rule is a grave distortion of history and a reversal of the perpetrator and the victim. This paper analyzes how the memory structure of the Koreans regarding colonialism is based on a victim nationalism and how Korean feminism has intervened in the fragmentation and suture of national memory since the 1990s. Furthermore, the paper reveals how American multiculturalism turns a blind eye to, or even promotes, the clashing of collective identities in the age of globalization. The so called Yoko incident illustrates how the competition of East Asian countries for a historical position of ‘victim’ in a battle of memory in the US not only strengthens exclusive nationalism in the area but also connives in ‘Americanization of world justice’.

The World Justice Project

The World Justice Project (WJP) was founded to show that the work of all disciplines depends on the rule of law and to engage representatives of various disciplines in efforts to advance the rule of law worldwide. The WJP has conducted several programs including outreach meetings, scholarship programs, and an index to assess countries’ adherence to the rule of law. A World Justice Forum was held in 2008 and planning has begun for a second round of multidisciplinary programs.

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE NEO-LIBERAL IMAGINATION

‘The end of sovereignty’: this has been an ominous refrain in the chorus of global political and human rights analyses aimed at reformulating a post-Cold War configuration of world power. In cultural studies, the same pronouncement is more likely made through a mix of theoretical exuberance and ambivalence toward a post-nationalist and cosmopolitan imaginary. This essay takes as a point of departure the rise of ‘new sovereignties’ – a fractured Westphalianism – as a rubric for understanding the political imagination about the international community today. It asks: to what dimensions of the regime of the new sovereignties can the human rights legal discourse as we know it today still exert influence, given the new configurations of globally disaggregated power? With human rights today reemerging as a bifurcation, how can cultural studies reconcile a theory of rights as subaltern claim-making with that of rights as an all-englobing tool in the neo-liberal order of world justice? Through a preliminary mapping of the moral-juridical and political forces that shape the regime of the new sovereignties, this essay attempts to illuminate why rights as international deontological politics is inadvertently complicit with the reproduction of rights as something constitutive of empire and neo-liberalism.

The role of the justice motive in economic decision making

In two studies, a dictator game was used to investigate the hypotheses that two types of justice motives should be differentiated, the need to belief in a just world and a self-attributed justice motive, that both justice motives could explain the decision for equal allocations, and that the explicit justice motive could explain the avoidance of an egoistic allocation. In Study 1, both justice motives predicted equally well the decision for an equal allocation, whereas the explicit justice motive predicted the avoidance of an egoistic allocation. A similar pattern of results emerged in Study 2. Additionally, the explicit but not the implicit justice motive covaried with social desirability, and social desirability explained the decision for equality and the avoidance of an egoistic allocation just as well as the explicit justice motive. Finally, allocation decisions were better explained in Study 2, where real money was at stake. The findings support the idea that allocation decisions can best be understood by taking the just world justice motive and social desirability into account.

Summit on the Global Economy, the Rule of Law, and the State of Indiana

On April 23, 2008, lawyers and business leaders gathered in Indianapolis, Indiana, for a one day conference entitled, A Summit on the Global Economy, the Rule of Law and Their Effects on Indiana. The Summit was an initiative of the World Justice Project of the American Bar Association (ABA) and was hosted by the Indiana State Bar Association, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. Through three panels and a keynote address, speakers and the audience explored issues around the of and global economy. The conference proceedings, when taken as a whole, propose a future line of research about the relationship between the of and the global economy. Discussants engaged with the fact that stable, strong, and growing economies are often preconditions to the establishment of sustainable and quality legal systems and human rights. Yet, they also wrestled with the need for pro-business laws and predictable enforcement mechanisms to be in place to encourage cross-border business in the first place. The group clarified the meaning of the rule of law and its relationship to the global economy, as well as raised new questions for future scholarship.

International migration, border controls and human rights: Assessing the relevance of a right to mobility

This article discusses the arguments in favor of and against a right to mobility. It argues that contemporary migration and border policies are largely restrictive but still fail to meet their proclaimed objectives which call for alternative approaches to international human flows. From a human rights perspective, tight border controls are accompanied by major challenges; including trafficking, the asylum crisis, and the death and vulnerability of irregular migrants; which ultimately threaten the moral foundations of liberal democracies. In this context, a right to mobility may constitute a relevant answer and the article examines the implications of such a right in terms of world justice, social cohesion, economic wealth, security, and border/migration governance.

A Proposal for the Proclamation of 17 July as "World Justice Day"

A Proposal for the Proclamation of 17 July as “World Justice Day” Allieu I. Kanu Allieu I. Kanu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Chinese Journal of International Law, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 471–472, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.cjilaw.a000529 Published: 01 September 2004

World Justice, Global Politics and Nation States: Three Ethico-Political Problems

This paper identifies three sets of problems of a specific ethico-political type, generated by the interrelationship between ethics and politics in the areas of world justice and global politics. One instance in which this interrelationship is tested is that of the conflict of duties and values as it appears in the particular domain of the relations amongst sovereign nation states as well as between them and other social groups. Following the general Introduction, the main body of the paper contains the following three sections. (1) Without elaborating on the detailed mechanics of Kant's theory of perpetual peace, Section II discusses criticisms against the Kantian version of world peace in the context of which the first problem is encountered. The problem identified here is the ambiguity as to whether the establishment of a federated kind of peaceful co-existence between sovereign nations depends on the moral improvement of mankind or whether it is the other way round--i.e. whether ethical progress is a necessary presupposition or, rather, a consequence of political peace. That is, what is here identified as worrying is that the direction of dependence is not clear in such a proposal. Furthermore, such an approach, when applied to certain cases of inter-state differences, yields a rather alarming result as to the de-politicization of national states (Section II.2). (2) Yet such a type of international federalism requires a certain, peculiar, kind of legal enforcement of order without recourse to a supra state. So a re-examination of the notion of a legal order in general is needed. Given these requirements, Section III moves on to discuss moral conflict from the standpoint of relativism as it appears in the ethical and in the legal spheres. The second of our problems, identified in this section, is that, before discussing world justice we must first acknowledge the special relation and asymmetry between ethical standards and legal rules required by such a world order. (3) Finally, Section IV asks whether, given the above two problems, it is possible to envisage theoretically the logical possibility of moral conflict-resolution by postulating unchanging and encompassing super-norms of conduct. These special norms, if possible, would be able to direct action unequivocally when confronted with ethical or other dilemmas of duties (involving equally valid but conflicting demands among sovereign nations). This is the third problem. The Conclusion offers an evaluation of the whole discussion. These three ethico-political problems are shown to be interrelated. The overall thrust of the discussion is that it points to a number of philosophical difficulties in understanding the changing role of national states in a globalized political, economic and cultural environment. Accordingly, such difficulties have repercussions for any moral criticism of issues of world justice and global politics. I must make clear at the outset, though, that the discussion does not concern international relations theories per se.

A Conversation with Reverend Theodore Hesburgh: Building a World Class University

Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. is the President Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame stepping down in 1987, after 35 years at the helm. Father Hesburgh served the University of Notre Dame well, building the academic quality of the university from a modest position to one of a national reputation in scholarship and quality of instruction. At 82 years of age, he still is active throughout the world in striving for world peace and justice. He is also active at Notre Dame in serving as an inspiration providing counsel and religious strength to the community of faculty and students. Father Hesburgh was born in Syracuse, New York on May 25, 1917. He attended the University of Notre Dame from 1934-1937. He then attended Gregorian University in Rome from 1937-1940, where he received a bachelor of philosophy degree. He was ordained a priest in the Congregation of Holy Cross College in 1943. Following his ordination, Father Hesburgh continued his study of scared theology at the Catholic University of America receiving a Doctor of Theology in 1945. Father Hesburgh was an assistant professor of religion at Notre Dame from 1945-1948, and was the chairman of the department from 1948-1949. In 1949, he became the executive vice president of Notre Dame until 1952, when he became the 15th President of the University. He held that position until 1987. He has held 15 presidential appointments over the years most recently for the United States Institute for Peace. At the same time, he remained a national leader in the field of education, serving on many commissions and study groups. As chairman of the International Federation of Catholic Universities from 1963-1970, Father Hesburgh led a movement to redefine the nature and mission of the contemporary Catholic university. His stature as an elder statesman in American higher education is reflected in his 141 honorary degrees, the most ever awarded to a single person. Highlighting a lengthy list of awards to Father Hesburgh is the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, bestowed on him by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and on the 10th of July, 2000, he will receive the Congressional Gold Medal. Father Hesburgh has served as the first Catholic Priest to serve as a director of the Chase Manhattan Bank and a trustee (later chairman) of the Rockefeller Foundation. His appointment as ambassador to the 1979 United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development was the first time a priest had served in a formal diplomatic role for the United States government. He was the first priest elected to the Board of Overseers at Harvard University being chosen as President in 1994 and 1995. In 1990-1996, he co-chaired the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, studying the need for reform of college sports. I served under Father Hesburgh from 1977-1984 and was very impressed with the quality of leadership he displayed. It is an honor to spend time with a legend and get a better understanding how he worked to improve the academic quality of the University of Notre Dame and worked to promote social justice and world peace. I hope this interview will provide you some insights into a man that has typified quality leadership over four decades. K.T.: Father Hesburgh, how would you describe your leadership philosophy? FATHER HESBURGH: My leadership philosophy is that leadership is more than just management. A person can come to a company or a university and manage it very well for 10 years. And when your 10 years are up, the organization has gone 10 years with no revolutions and no big failures of any kind, but no greatness either. It seems to me that the first thing a leader needs more than anything else is vision. He has to know let's say, where this institution is to go. He wants to know what it is to be. I gave a talk, I remember, at the beginning of being President and I said we had a mediocre faculty, we had a criminal budget given what we were purporting to do (like $7 million a year). …

Multinational self‐determination

Even as Woodrow Wilson began to envision a world justice system, with peace as a legal concept, to replace the outdated conventions of the balance of power between nations, the architect himself sought coercive means to mobilize the transition. The times, more than the man, demanded new thinking in matters of international relations, and Wilson himself could rarely reconcile his own political actions with the new legalistic moral ideals. Henry Kissinger explains Wilsonian sentiments of 1917 as follows: America disdained the concept of the balance of power and considered the practice of Realpolitik immoral. America's criteria for international order were democracy, collective security, and self‐determination—none of which had undergirded any previous European settlement. To Americans, the dissonance between their philosophy and European thought underlined the merit of their beliefs. Proclaiming a radical departure from the precepts and experiences of the Old World, Wilson's idea of world order derived from American's faith in the essentially peaceful nature of man and an underlying harmony of the world. It followed that democratic nations were, by definition, peaceful; people granted self‐determination would no longer have reason to go to war or to oppress others. Once all peoples of the world had tasted of the blessings of peace and democracy, they would surely rise as one to defend their gains. But in attempting to implement his new policy Wilson declared, “When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking, because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.” Once it was apparent that U.S. participation in the new system was crucial to European approval, Wilson, oddly enough, used the Monroe Doctrine to bolster American support, stating: I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people ... that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power ...

World Justice? U.S. Courts and International Human Rights. Edited by Mark Gibney. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1991. Pp. iv, 178. $39.95.

Human rights and universal jurisdiction, Daniel Bodansky human rights litigation and the "one-voice" orthodoxy in foreign affairs, Ralph G. Steinhardt enforcement of human rights in US courts - the trial of persons kidnapped abroad, John Quigley courts as "teachers in a vital national seminar" on human rights, Mark Gibney international human rights law and U.S. law, John M. Rogers interest group litigation to enforce human rights - confronting judicial restraint, Howard Tolley, Jr toward the economic "brown" - economic rights in the United States and the possible contribution of international human rights law, Bert Lockwood the relation of the individual to the state in the era of human rights, Anthony D'Amato.

World Justice? U.S. Courts and International Human Rights. Edited by Mark Gibney. Boulder: Westview, 1991. 175p. $39.95. - Federal Courts and the International Human Rights Paradigm. By Kenneth C. Randall. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. 295p. $45.00 - International Fugitives: A New Role for the International Court of Justice. By Barbara M. Yarnold. New York: Praeger, 1991. 149p. $37.95.

World Justice? U.S. Courts and International Human Rights. Edited by Mark Gibney. Boulder: Westview, 1991. 175p. $39.95. - Federal Courts and the International Human Rights Paradigm. By Kenneth C. Randall. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. 295p. $45.00 - International Fugitives: A New Role for the International Court of Justice. By Barbara M. Yarnold. New York: Praeger, 1991. 149p. $37.95.