The Use Of Force In International Relations

This book examines US recourse to military force in the post-9/11 era. In particular, it evaluates the extent to which the Bush and Obama administrations viewed legitimizing the greater use-of-force as a necessary solution to thwart the security threat presented by global terrorist networks and WMD proliferation.

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.

This volume of essays examines the development of political and legal thinking regarding the use of force in international relations. It provides an analysis of the rules on the use of force in the political, normative and factual contexts within which they apply and assesses their content and relevance in the light of new challenges such as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and cyber-attacks. The volume begins with an overview of the ancient and medieval concepts of war and the use of force and then concentrates on the contemporary legal framework regulating the use of force as moulded by the United Nations Charter and state practice. In this regard it discusses specific issues such as the use of force by way of self-defence, armed reprisals, forcible reactions to terrorism, the use of force in the cyberspace, humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. This collection of previously published classic research articles is of interest to scholars and students of international law and international relations as well as practitioners in international law.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on the works of strategic literature and international relations theory, this book examines the theoretical nature behind a threat of force in order to inform and explain why and how the normative structure operates in the way it does. The core of the book addresses whether Article 2(4) is adequately suited to the current international climate and, if not, whether an alternative means of rethinking Article 2(4) would provide a better solution.

This fully updated and revised edition explores the evolution, nature and function of international law in world politics.

This book provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the nature, content and scope of the rules regulating the use of force in international law as they are contained in the United Nations Charter, customary international law and international jurisprudence. It examines these rules as they apply to developing and challenging circumstances such as the emergence of non-State actors, security risks, new technologies and moral considerations.

The international law on the use of force is one of the oldest branches of international law. It is an area twinned with the emergence of international law as a concept in itself, and which sees law and politics collide. The number of armed conflicts is equal only to the number of methodological approaches used to describe them. Many violent encounters are well known. The Kosovo Crisis in 1999 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 spring easily to the minds of most scholars and academics, and gain extensive coverage in this text. Other conflicts, including the Belgian operation in Stanleyville, and the Ethiopian Intervention in Somalia, are often overlooked to our peril. Ruys and Corten's expert-written text compares over sixty different instances of the use of cross border force since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, from all out warfare to hostile encounters between individual units, targeted killings, and hostage rescue operations, to ask a complex question. How much authority does the power of precedent really have in the law of the use of force?