New Interventionist Just War Theory

This book offers a systematic critique of recent interventionist just war theories, which have made the recourse to force easier to justify. The work argues that these theories, including neo-traditionalist prerogatives to national leaders and a cosmopolitan human rights paradigm, offer criteria for war that are insufficient in principle and dangerous in practice. Drawing on a plurality of moral considerations, the book recommends a modified legalist national defense paradigm, which includes an atrocity threshold for humanitarian intervention and a legitimate authorization requirement. The plausibility of this restrictive framework is applied to case studies, including the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ongoing targeted killing, and possible interventions in Syria and elsewhere. Various arguments which seek to loosen the criteria for war are also systematically analyzed and criticized. This book will be of much interest to students of just war theory, military history, ethics, political philosophy, and international relations.

This book analyses the problems of current just war theory, and offers a more stable justificatory framework for non-intervention in international relations. The primary purpose of just war theory is to provide a language and a framework by which decision makers and citizens can organize and articulate arguments about the justice of particular wars. Given that the majority of conflicts that threaten human security are now intra-state conflicts, just war theory is often called on to make judgments about wars of intervention. This book aims to critically examine the tenets of just war theory in light of these changes, and formulate a new theory of intervention and just cause. For Michael Walzer, the leading scholar of just war theory, armed humanitarian intervention is permissible only in cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, widespread massacres, or enslavement. This book shows why this threshold is too restrictive in light of the progressive shift away from interstate conflict as well as the emerging norms of 'sovereignty as responsibility' and the 'responsibility to protect'. Justice, Intervention and Force in International Relations aims to establish a new, stable foundation for non-intervention and a revised threshold for 'just cause'. In addition, this book demonstrates that over-reliance on the just cause category distorts understanding, analysis, and public discussion of the justice or injustice of resorting to war. This new book will be of much interest to students of ethics, security studies, international relations and international law. Kimberley Hudson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at American International College, and has a Phd in International Relations from Brown University.

"One of the major developments in international law since World War II is the growth of human rights law dedicated to ensuring the protection of individuals from violence wherever they are, including from their own state. Tracking such changes, in recent decades, just-war theory has evolved from its traditional focus on state sovereignty in the direction of a rights-based approach that treats just wars as a form of global law enforcement. This monograph provides a survey of these developments, focusing on the increased scope for humanitarian intervention, principles of justice after war, and on the question of the responsibility of combatants for assessing the justice of their military's cause. It concludes by considering the call for strengthening international institutions and training programs in military ethics"--Publisher's web site

This book asks whether just war theory and its rules for determining when war is justified remains adequate to the challenges posed by contemporary developments. Some argue that the nature of contemporary war makes these rules obsolete. By carefully examining the phenomena of intervention, terrorism, and torture from a number of different perspectives, the essays in this book explore this complex set of issues with insight and clarity.

Despite the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and ever more visible evidence of the horrors of war, the concepts of ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ and ‘Just War’ enjoy widespread legitimacy and continue to exercise an unshakeable grip on our imaginations. Robin Dunford and Michael Neu provide a clear and comprehensive critique of both Just War Theory and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, deconstructing the philosophical, moral and political arguments that underpin them. In doing so, they show how proponents of Just War and R2P have tended to treat killing in a way which obscures the complex and often messy reality of war, and pays little heed to the human impact of such conflicts. Going further, they provide answers to such difficult questions as ‘Surely it would have been just for us to intervene in the Rwandan genocide?’ An essential guide to one of the most difficult moral and political issues of our age.

Just War scholarship has adapted to contemporary crises and situations. But its adaptation has spurned debate and conversation—a method and means of pushing its thinking forward. Now the Just War tradition risks becoming marginalized. This concern may seem out of place as Just War literature is proliferating, yet this literature remains welded to traditional conceptualizations of Just War. Caron E. Gentry and Amy E. Eckert argue that the tradition needs to be updated to deal with substate actors within the realm of legitimate authority, private military companies, and the questionable moral difference between the use of conventional and nuclear weapons. Additionally, as recent policy makers and scholars have tried to make the Just War criteria legalistic, they have weakened the tradition's ability to draw from and adjust to its contemporaneous setting. The essays in The Future of Just War seek to reorient the tradition around its core concerns of preventing the unjust use of force by states and limiting the harm inflicted on vulnerable populations such as civilian noncombatants. The pursuit of these challenges involves both a reclaiming of traditional Just War principles from those who would push it toward greater permissiveness with respect to war, as well as the application of Just War principles to emerging issues, such as the growing use of robotics in war or the privatization of force. These essays share a commitment to the idea that the tradition is more about a rigorous application of Just War principles than the satisfaction of a checklist of criteria to be met before waging “just” war in the service of national interest.

This book examines the new and ongoing dilemmas and challenges to world public order in an environment in which international law is more restrictive but state practice is more permissive. The chapters use criteria from the just war tradition to attempt to resolve the tensions posed by the challenges of anticipatory self-defense, humanitarian intervention, and developments in asymmetrical warfare. This book is based on a special issue of the Journal of Military Ethics.