This article explores the Western cultural traditions of democracy and freedom which form a political ethic deeply rooted in the underlying philosophical and theological American heritage. Theories of Machiavelli, Montesqieu, and Niebuhr support the notion that the potential for virtue is found in all individuals, who, through their undeniable freedoms, responsibilities, and participation, have the capability to establish a political community based on democracy, justice, and respect for human rights. Virtue, justice, morality, ethics, freedom, and democracy are all necessary elements for establishing and maintaining the political community. Can history serve to uphold democracy as an ethical standard of governance? The author suggests that the basic and cross-temporal cornerstones of morality; the family and religion serve as “intermediate” social structures in attaining the central virtues of a moral democracy.

Can the momentous events in Tianamen Square and the revolutionary changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe be seen as the inevitable triumph of one political ideology over another? Was there a political morality of “Official Communism”? The author identifies the features and framework within which Marxism endured, particularly as a promise of “political emancipation” whereby the individual would achieve “universal freedom” from capitalism and slavery through cooperation and struggle. Yet, ultimately, the pluralist-led events of 1989 demonstrated that protests were aimed at achieving justice, fairness, and identity in the name of the “people,” a refutation of oppression and the arbitrary allocation of resources and advantages by the nomenklatura. The author contends that the Marxist morality failed because it didnt deliver on its promises.

The author highlights the different ways in which countries measure standards of human rights and social justice within their borders and in other countries. Rigorous reporting of internal human rights violations is crucial in monitoring and evaluating human rights conditions, according to Howard, even in such wealthy countries as the United States and Canada, where malnutrition and abuse of basic human rights also exist.

Despite conservative opposition, in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter turned the tide in favor of the Helsinki Accord by taking a strong stand in fostering U.S. participation in it. Korey focuses on the U.S. delegation to the Commission on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) in Europe and credits the success of the Helsinki Accord to U.S. adroit negotiation strategies, beginning with the Carter administration. By 1980, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came to embrace the “humanitarianism” of the treaty. The Vienna review conference's (1986–89) effort peaked when a milestone was reached in the human rights process, linking it directly to security issues equally pertinent to the East and the West. The author contends that the United States' ardent participation in the monitoring of compliance was particularly effective in putting pressure on the Soviet Union to uphold the agreement within its territory, yielding enormous progress in human rights

A basic premise of Confucianism rests in the intellectuals' responsibility to speak out against an oppressive government. This tradition continued well into the Maoist era, along with “the mandate from heaven,” which provided an additional fundamental right of the people to dispose of an unfair leadership. Why was it not until the mid-1980s that the intellectuals, the “democratic elite” of China, initiated a public dialogue on the necessity of “inalienable” rights in the Western sense? The reason may lie in the impact the events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had in inducing political reform in post-Mao China. The traditional Confucianist beliefs remained at the core of the emerging ideology. Despite Deng's crackdown in Tiananmen Square, the “sprouts” continue to reappear from time to time, and the author predicts that they will be stronger with each comeback.

Environmental degradation can no longer be handled by means of traditional local remedies in the face of the current global environmental crisis. The author outlines specific ways to overcome the crisis through international means, obliging each individual nation to reduce its own hazardous production, while enjoining a collective effort to confront the challenge of global environmental deterioration. Only through policy-making based on the recognition of shared danger and international commitments to reduce damage can we achieve a shared moral responsibility for environmental protection.

External debt, poverty, and the use of natural resources are inextricably linked. This article examines an ethical aspect of that linkage: the social direction of resource flow. It argues that the direction in which a country's economic resources are transferred—from poor to rich, or rich to poor—also sets the pattern for the flow of natural resources. By extension, the same kinds of forces that tend to impoverish human environments also tend to impoverish the physical environment; and conversely, that which tends to restore or promote equity generally tends to be good for the environment. For the past forty years, Costa Rican government policies have been among the fairest and most environmentally progressive in the Third World; yet Costa Rica is heavily in debt in both the economic and environmental sense. Are the “right” policies not right–or are they morally right but not workable? Annis examines this paradoxical question using the notion of “dual debt” and “wrong-way resource flows.”

Deliberate and indiscriminate targeting of civilians, most particularly in a non-war environment, is an unjustifiable form of violence that can be defeated most effectively through multilateral efforts, according to Norton, and must not be fathomed as anything but pure and simple terrorism, which is not to be tolerated. The U.S. State Department's definition of terrorism is too ambiguous to allow delineation between what is permissible in time of war and in time of peace, and creates more controversy than consensus: one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Fortunately, fertile ground for the multilateral combating of terrorist activities and states promoting them (Lybia, Syria, Iran) was laid in 1989 with an unofficial U.S.-USSR agreement to exchange vital information to prevent such acts. The author places great hope in this new dialogue.

“The PLO practice of hiding behind civilians has produced severe tests for the IDF [Israeli Defense Force].” Have Israeli soldiers abandoned their moral obligations in war during the time of Intifada? The moral code of the “purity” of arms (tohar haneshek) has served as an absolute standard for the Israeli Army since the creation of Israel. The author emphasizes that although televised beatings of Palestinian women and children have caused an outcry, it would be unrealistic to hold Israeli soldiers to the same moral standards given the political situation; hence the IDF cannot be criticized for having committed some immoral acts under the unique circumstances of the intifada. The Israeli Defense Force has not abandoned its tohar haneshek and has maintained its commitment to moral values in national and international behavior.

This article reexamines the works of Erasmus, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Kant, and other pacifists who have advocated collective societal efforts toward a lasting world peace. In contrast to Thucydides' (Realist) view of the inevitability of war due to intrinsic human nature, the author presents the early Christian arguments of pacifism grounded in morality and religion, including the “just-war” views of Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, who believed that war fought for self-defense, or other “justifiable” purposes, was morally and religiously grounded in efforts to punish wrongdoings and “convert unbelievers.” Is the state of peace a natural one or one that must be achieved through practical steps within moral constraints by leaders of nations and their citizens? Realist thinkers who once rejected, on strictly normative grounds, the moral claims of the possibility of a lasting world peace now take the strategic position that the goal of attaining lasting world peace is clearly worth striving for, “however utopian it seemed when first advocated.”

Introduced by a few small religious liberal-arts colleges in the 1940s, the reformist movement toward studying peace has recently gained momentum in larger academic auditoriums. The author cites prominent academicians currently examining this trend and presents the case for accepting grass-roots social activism as a crucial link to the closed world of policy-making elites. He places faith in individual thinkers to provide new insights and practical theories of peace studies in both national and international domains.