Despite its short life and the nonexistence of either troops or strong authority, the League of Nations did manage to generate positive developments in the establishment of international protection.

Monograph on the historical evolution of women's rights from 1902 to 1978 - describes various campaigns for achieving civil rights for women, rights for political participation, equal opportunities for the woman worker, etc., and considers the contributions made to the emancipation of women by the international alliance of women (interest group), the League of Nations, the UN (role of UN) and other international organizations, the international women's year, etc. ILO mentioned. Bibliography pp. 312 to 314, chronology of major (...) events and photographs. (shrink)

Jan Smuts was one of the key figures in the creation of the League of Nations, the first international organisation with truly global pretensions. However, Holism and Evolution, the most philosophical of his works, and one that illuminates his views on international organisation, has remained in a state of relative academic neglect. This paper turns to that work for a richer understanding of the background assumptions of those who contributed to the creation of the League. To do (...) so, this paper lays bare the main ideas of Holism and Evolution, emphasising those elements most relevant to Smuts's proposals for international organisation, and situates his thought within broader currents of liberal imperialism. Such an examination of Holism and Evolution aids greatly in our understanding of some of the most contested issues in the debate over the nascent League of Nations: sovereignty, imperialism, self-determination, and the conception of politics in organic terms. (shrink)

In this article I explore how, in the League of Nations’ emerging anti-trafficking regime of the 1920s and 1930s, one category of race science — climate — played a prominent role in positing natural hierarchies between nations. My purpose is twofold: (1) to explain the currency of climate at this moment and to examine the trajectory of climate as an explanatory device in the intellectual history of ‘race’; and (2) to reflect on the biopolitical implications of explanations (...) rooted in climate. The article begins with a description of how League of Nations delegates used climate as shorthand to refer to differences between the sexual mores of various nations. I then reflect more broadly on the emergence, submergence, and reemergence of climate in the history of race science, and its effects in practical settings. I move to a discussion of the significance of the age of consent as a category, and analyse the League of Nations-sponsored efforts to track ages of consent across countries as a biopolitical project. My overarching argument is that references to climate performed important ideological work in naturalizing hierarchical relations between nations. In arenas where diplomats sought to arrive at a consensus, such references rendered them more palatable and less disputable. (shrink)

The article investigates the problem of Kant's proposal for a final global legal order. Kant expressed his stance very vaguely in the consecutively published texts On the Common Saying, Toward Perpetual Peace and The Metaphysics of Morals, which enabled numerous, often contradictory interpretations. The aim of the paper is to propose an alternative method of analysis of Kant's texts, which on one side reconciles textual discrepancies in his writings and on the other throws new light on many of the previous (...) interpretations. In order to accomplish this goal, I draw distinctions between four perspectives, from which the philosopher considers this issue in his writings. This allows me to give the final form of Kant's world peace, explain the character of the international state of nature vs the original one, and understand the role of the principles of politics and the status of Kant's teleological understanding of history. (shrink)

In the 21st century, as the peoples of the world grow more closely tied together, the question of real transnational government will finally have to be faced. The end of the Cold War has not brought the peace, freedom from atrocities, and decline of tyranny for which we hoped. It is also clearer now that problems like economic risks, tax havens, and environmental degradation arising with global markets are far outstripping the governance capacities of our 20th century system of distinct (...) nation-states, even when they try to work together through intergovernmental agreements and organized bureaucracies of specialists. This work defends a cosmopolitan approach to global justice by arguing for new ways to combine the strengths of democratic nations in order to prevent mass atrocities and to secure other global public goods. While protecting cultural pluralism, Davenport argues that a Democratic League would provide a legal order capable of uniting the strength and inspiring moral vision of democratic nations to improve international security, stop mass atrocities, assist developing nations in overcoming corruption and poverty, and, in time, potentially address other global challenges in finance, environmental sustainability, stable food supplies, immigration, and so on. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international organizations, philosophy and global justice. (shrink)

In 1921, the traffic in women and children became the first human rights issue to be formally recognized by a Convention of the League of Nations, a recognition soon followed by the creation of the...

The National Football League, the premier professional organization for American football, developed a policy concerning the protocol in cases where players contract COVID-19. This policy includes elements such as collective punishment that appear, at first glance, to be morally problematic. To the contrary, the policy is indeed morally acceptable as we should not think of organizations such as the NFL in the same way we think of governments in stable nations, but rather in the same way that we (...) think of hybrid justice systems in countries where because of histories of colonialism, the identity of citizens is divided, with tribal identities being more important than national citizenship. (shrink)

Concussive injuries to the head and brain are relatively common in the National Football League. This is not news, since the issue has been covered in many articles in the popular press and many news specials on television. As an NFL offensive lineman for 13 years, I suffered a huge number of hits to the head — an estimated 215,000 at least. Nevertheless, I have fared better than many of the players of my era: many suffered from chronic traumatic (...) encephalopathy. For example, some of my fellow Hall of Fame players from that era, Mike Webster, Jim Ringo, John Mackey, and Joe Perry, all suffered from CTE and all are now deceased. I count myself lucky that the main malady affecting me after those many blows to the head is a 60% hearing loss in my left ear — probably due to undiagnosed concussions and particularly to thousands of head slaps by defensive players, whose first hit after the snap was often a right-handed blow to the helmet's open hole over my left ear. (shrink)

Violence in sports is under intense public scrutiny. One hotly disputed issue concerns the acceptability of violent retaliation in sports, particular in the form of fighting in the National Hockey League. The question posed here is: Can fighting in the NHL be virtuous? Some think not, maintaining that fighting is undisciplined and ostensibly at odds with the virtues of good temper and justice. Contrary to this conclusion, this paper presents arguments that support the view that fighting in the NHL (...) can be virtuous and clearly and consistently action guiding if certain conditions are met. These conditions require that fighting as a practice helps to provide an education in the virtues, is reasonably safe, is good for the community of participants, and is part of a morally sensitive and progressive tradition and organizational structure. Yet in the end, while fighting in the NHL can be morally justified, recognizing and instilling the virtues of a good fight would require some rather significant formal.. (shrink)