Michael IgnatieffThinkers

America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order.

Civic nationalism is the belief in the necessity of nations and, in contrast to ethnic nationalism, a belief in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and the rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives.

Genocide is a form of political utopia, a politics that promises one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference.

Human rights is minimally defined as as those necessary legal guarantees for the exercise of human agency.

A Society is not a market. It is a political community.

Terrorism is a strategy that kills politics, the one process we have devised that masters violence in the name of justice.