Columbia Conference on War and the Modern Classics (plus super-squirrels)

I spent last weekend in New York attending a conference on: The modern classics and the ethics of war. There were paper presentations by Jennifer Pitts, Richard Tuck, Michael Doyle and many others. "The modern classics" refers to, I suppose, writers from the 16th to 19th century, such as Vitoria, Grotius, Woolf, Kant, Hegel, Mazzini, and Mill. The thrust of the conference was on what we might learn from these political theorists, jurists, and writers today when thinking about the ethics of war. Not surprising, issues of humanitarian intervention came up a great deal. One of the more interesting claims was that Mazzini was the first to articulate the idea of *separate* democratic peace. In contemporary international relations scholarship, the idea of the "democratic peace" has shown that democracies tend not to fight each other. This is different from earlier writers such as Kant, who said that democracies (or republics) are less likely to go war with any regime. It is important not to squirrel away this caveat. Mazzini apparently suggested the idea of separate democratic peace, that is, a peace among democracies. This was brought out by a presentation by Stefano Recchia, the organizer of the conference, whom I knew from my previous time as a graduate student at Columbia University, before coming to Queen's University.


On Squirrels: I am losing the war with squirrels in Kingston. They had previously managed to chew through the screen windows three times and make off with bread. New animal proof windows were installed a month or two ago. But today, I woke up to find a small hole chewed, and entire screen window pushed open. These truly are super-squirrels.