Isaiah's Vision of Human Security: Virtue-Ethics and International Politics
Scott Thomas Friday, 1 December 2006
God ... is just as much present in the remorseless economic trends and in the oscillations of the balance of power as he is in the fall of a sparrow (Matthew 10:29-39); and we see that he is indeed sovereign in history, the peripeties of the historical process are properly understood as judgments and that all history is ultimately Sacred history.
—Martin Wight
For scholars and practitioners in international affairs it should be both sobering and inspiring to realize that the ideals of the United Nations, as far as the organization's founders were concerned, are summarized by the vision of the prophet Isaiah. His key prophesy (Isaiah 2:4-6), on "nations hammering their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles," is now written on the granite, curved wall, called the Isaiah Wall, in the plaza in front of the United Nations building in New York. Indeed, the Book of Isaiah with its visions of peace and the restoration of Israel has loomed larger in the Western theo-political imagination than almost any book of the Hebrew Bible.
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