Force And Legitimacy In World Politics

A leading group of international authorities consider the issues surrounding the legitimation of force.

The thirteen essays by Allen Buchanan collected here are arranged in such a way as to make evident their thematic interconnections: the important and hitherto unappreciated relationships among the nature and grounding of human rights, the legitimacy of international institutions, and the justification for using military force across borders. Each of these three topics has spawned a significant literature, but unfortunately has been treated in isolation. In this volume Buchanan makes the case for a holistic, systematic approach, and in so doing constitutes a major contribution at the intersection of International Political Philosophy and International Legal Theory. A major theme of Buchanan's book is the need to combine the philosopher's normative analysis with the political scientist's focus on institutions. Instead of thinking first about norms and then about institutions, if at all, only as mechanisms for implementing norms, it is necessary to consider alternative "packages" consisting of norms and institutions. Whether a particular norm is acceptable can depend upon the institutional context in which it is supposed to be instantiated, and whether a particular institutional arrangement is acceptable can depend on whether it realizes norms of legitimacy or of justice, or at least has a tendency to foster the conditions under which such norms can be realized. In order to evaluate institutions it is necessary not only to consider how well they implement norms that are now considered valid but also their capacity for fostering the epistemic conditions under which norms can be contested, revised, and improved.

DIVExplores the ways states build political capacity; discusses how states learn to resolve conflict politically rather than violently /div

Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World is a much-needed teaching anthology that rethinks and broadens the scope of the stale and limiting classifications used for Early Christian-Byzantine visual arts. A comprehensive anthology offering a new approach to the visual arts classified as Early Christian-Byzantine Comprised of essays from experts in the field that integrate the newer, historiographical research into 'the canon' of established scholarship Exposes the historical, geographical and cultural continuities and interactions in the visual arts of the late antique and medieval Mediterranean world Covers an extensive range of topics, including the effect that converging cultures in late antiquity had on art, the cultural identities that can be observed by looking at difference of tradition in visual art, and the variance of illuminations in holy books

"Legality and legitimacy in global affairs edited by Richard Falk, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Vesselin Popovski, brings together analyses of controversial events in international politics from top experts in field ; combines approaches to involvement between nations from across the social science disciplines ; approaches contemporary international relations from a philosophical, ethical, and legal standpoint" --

Developments and problems associated with police power are at the very front of current public debate. This volume addresses contemporary issues of policing with a focus on the characteristics of police power as a coercive force in society and its continued need for legitimacy in a democratic social order.

This book aims to examine the conditions under which the decision to use force can be reckoned as legitimate in international relations. Drawing on communicative action theory, it provides a provocative answer to the hotly contested question of how to understand the legitimacy of the use of force in international politics. The use of force is one of the most critical and controversial aspects of international politics. Scholars and policy-makers have long tried to develop meaningful standards capable of restricting the use of force to a legally narrow yet morally defensible set of circumstances. However, these standards have recently been challenged by concerns over how the international community should react to gross human rights abuses or to terrorist threats. This book argues that current legal and moral standards on the use of force are unable to effectively deal with these challenges. The author argues that the concept of 'deliberative legitimacy', understood as the non-coerced commitment of an actor to abide by a decision reached through a process of communicative action, offers the most appropriate framework for addressing this problem. The theoretical originality and empirical value of the concept of deliberative legitimacy comes fully into force with the examination of two of the most severe international crises from the post Cold War period: the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo and the 2003 US military action against Iraq. This book will be of much interest to students of international security, ethics, international law, discourse theory and IR. Corneliu Bjola is SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow with the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, and has a PhD in International Relations.

Voters expect their elected representatives to pursue good policy and presume this will be securely founded on the best available knowledge. Yet when representatives emphasize their reliance on expert knowledge, they seem to defer to people whose authority derives, not politically from the sovereign people, but from the presumed objective status of their disciplinary bases. This book examines the tensions between political authority and expert authority in the formation of public policy in liberal democracies. It aims to illustrate and better understand the nature of these tensions rather than to argue specific ways of resolving them. The various chapters explore the complexity of interaction between the two forms of authority in different policy domains in order to identify both common elements and differences. The policy domains covered include: climate geoengineering discourses; environmental health; biotechnology; nuclear power; whaling; economic management; and the use of force. This volume will appeal to researchers and to convenors of post-graduate courses in the fields of policy studies, foreign policy decision-making, political science, environmental studies, democratic system studies, and science policy studies.