Concerns over aid effectiveness have led to calls for greater accountability in international development aid. This article examines the state of accountability within and between international development agencies: aid NGOs, the international financial institutions, and government aid ministries. The investigation finds that there is very little accountability in these agencies, and that the accountability that there is often works against poverty relief. Increasing accountability, however, is not always the solution: increased accountability may just amplify the complexities of development efforts. Only those reforms with real promise to make aid more effective in reducing poverty should be encouraged. One such proposal is set out here.

The critics of the ICC in the Bush administration and its supporters within the human rights community have one thing in common: they assume that the ICC can evolve into a powerful institution independent of states, either to constrain American power or to act on a duty to prosecute to end impunity for perpetrators. Both overestimate the ability of the court to pursue a legalism divorced from power realities. The former attribute to the court powers it is unlikely to exercise, particularly if the United States remains outside the treaty. This is due, in part, to the safeguards within the Rome Statute, but more importantly, to the court's dependence on sovereign cooperation, which will lead it to place a high premium on cultivating the good will of the most powerful states. The latter overestimate the degree to which courts by themselves can deter atrocities. The ICC's effectiveness in any particular case will therefore be dependent on the political consensus of those actors capable of wielding power in that area. They also underestimate the need to compromise justice – at least, prosecutorial justice – in cases in which bargaining and compromise are the central means of facilitating transitions from armed conflict or dictatorship, and in cases in which the strength of the perpetrators and the limits of one's power would make legal proceedings either futile or counterproductive to other interests and values. Hence, decisions to prosecute must first be subjected to a test of political prudence, and then take place according to due process and the rule of law.

This article outlines the two central theories in the ethics of secession and examines whether or under what conditions these normative theories would be satisfied in a post-invasion Iraq. I argue that the two dominant normative theories of secession focus on the secessionist group, which national self-determination theories conceive as a nation holding a right to self-determination, and just-cause theories conceive as having a remedial right to secession as a victim of injustice. The Iraq case suggests that this is a flawed way of thinking about the issue. I argue that secession is more legitimate when fair multinational arrangements are not on offer; and that the fairness requirement involves examining constitutional arrangements from the point of view of all groups.

This article explores issues concerning accountability and global governance by looking at three cases involving Iraq: the economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council; the operation of the Oil for Food Program; and the US-led occupation authority and its management of Iraqi funds. In all three cases the problems that emerge are rooted only in part in criminal acts or failures to meet legal responsibilities. The failures of accountability that took place in these cases included also abuses of power and forms of corruption that had been legitimated within legal institutional structures. An examination of these cases helps to illustrate what accountability can demand, as well as the kinds of diverse institutional arrangements that can undermine it. In the Oil for Food Program, there was corruption despite elaborate structures of oversight. In the case of the US-led occupation authority's management of Iraqi funds, the corruption was tied to systematic procedures that eliminated structures of oversight. I argue that the abuses that occurred in these cases were not due to a lack of understanding about what might bring greater integrity to the processes involved. Rather, they illustrate how well the structures of accountability and integrity were already understood, as evidenced in the systematic efforts to evade and compromise those structures.

One of the most important challenges for the occupation of Iraq has been making decisions about the status of people who were either responsible for or who passively benefited from the regime's past injustices. But how should such people—in this case, members of the Baath Party—be dealt with? And how have they been dealt with under the U.S. occupation? Although lustration is just one of many institutions of jus post bellum, it is arguably one of the most important. The pursuit of administrative justice affects the reconstitution of the public sphere—literally and figuratively—in more fundamental ways than most other institutions of transitional justice. Yet our understanding of the ethics of occupation in the twenty-first century continues to be incomplete, and ethical principles are needed for guiding and clarifying how occupations may justly be carried out and for establishing a legitimate role for international morals in the conduct of peace. This article develops three such principles for guiding the practice of lustration, and argues that they have been widely flouted during the occupation of Iraq. This is problematic from the perspective of jus post bellum, for to paraphrase Michael Walzer's argument in Just and Unjust Wars, the restraint of peace is the beginning of peace.