This article explores the different moral and legal arguments used by protagonists in the debate about whether or not to conduct a humanitarian intervention in Darfur. The first section briefly outlines four moral and legal positions on whether there is (and should be) a right and/or duty of humanitarian intervention: communitarianism, restrictionist and counter-restrictionist legal positivism and liberal cosmopolitanism. The second section then provides an overview of the Security Council's debate about responding to Darfur's crisis, showing how its (...) policy was influenced by both normative concerns and hard-nosed political calculations. The article concludes by asking what Darfur's case reveals about the legitimacy and likelihood of humanitarian intervention in such catastrophes and the role of the UN Security Council as the primary authorising body for the use of international force. The authors argue that this case demonstrates that for the cosmopolitan/counter-restrictionist case to prevail pivotal states need to put humanitarian emergencies on the global agenda and express a willingness to act without Council authorisation, though the question of how to proceed in cases where the Council is deadlocked remains vexed. (shrink)

This paper discusses how the general and abstract concept of legitimacy applies to international institutions, using the United Nations Security Council as an example. We argue that the evaluation of the Security Council’s legitimacy requires considering three significant and interrelated aspects: its purpose, competences, and procedural standards. We consider two possible interpretations of the Security Council’s purpose: on the one hand, maintaining peace and security, and, on the other, ensuring broader respect for human (...) rights. Both of these purposes are minimally morally acceptable for legitimacy. Second, we distinguish between three different competences of the UNSC: 1) the decision-making competence, 2) the quasi-legislative competence, and 3) the referral competence. On this basis, we argue that different procedural standards are required to legitimise these competences, which leads to a more differentiated understanding of the Security Council’s legitimacy. While maintaining that the membership structure of the Council is a severe problem for its legitimacy, we suggest other procedural standards that can help to improve its overall legitimacy, which include broad transparency, deliberation, and the revisability of the very terms of accountability themselves. (shrink)

This contribution explores Grotian Moments in the practice of the UN Security Council in three different but closely related subject areas. The three areas are, in turn, the way the Security Council interprets the concept of ‘threat to the peace’ or more generally ‘international peace and security’, the law-making by the Security Council, and the subjects – in the sense of legal or natural persons – that the Security Council chooses to (...) address. It turns out that the interpretation by the Security Council of the UN Charter has been remarkably flexible, expanding the scope of action of the Council considerably. Whether its interpretation of the UN Charter also deserves to be labelled ‘Grotian’, however, is rather a matter of rhetoric than law. (shrink)

Twenty years after the outbreak of the threat posed by international jihadist terrorism, which triggered the need for democracies to balance fundamental rights and security needs, 9/11 and the Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law offers an overview of counter-terrorism and of the interplay among the main actors involved in the field since 2001. This book aims to give a picture of the complex and evolving interaction between the international, regional and domestic levels in framing counter-terrorism law and policies. Targeting (...) scholars, researchers and students of international, comparative and constitutional law, it is a valuable resource to understand the theoretical and practical issues arising from the interaction of several levels in counter-terrorism measures. It also provides an in-depth analysis of the role of the United Nations Security Council. (shrink)

In this note I examine a case of teleological reasoning in international law and find it to be the fallacy of affirming the consequent.I then show that and how the basis of this fallacy is a manipulation (or juxtaposition) of ?necessary? and ?sufficient? conditions.I conclude by giving reasons for thinking that this kind of reasoning is a regular feature of international law.

The principle of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) conceives of a broad set of measures that can be employed in preventing and responding to atrocity crimes. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council remains an important part of the implementation architecture, given what the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty referred to as its authoritative position in international society as the “linchpin of order and stability.” As part of the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: (...) Twenty Years since Its Inception,” this review of the Council's role in fulfilling its responsibility to protect advances two somewhat contrasting arguments about the original ICISS report. First, it suggests that the commissioners may have underestimated the Council's potential contribution, by concentrating on the authorization of coercive means to address crises of human protection. Over the past two decades, the Security Council has not only employed various diplomatic, political, and humanitarian measures to address atrocity crimes but also adjusted the purposes and practices of peace operations to advance protection goals and more subtly shaped discourses and expectations about state responsibilities for protection. However, I also argue that the willingness of the ICISS to identify potential alternatives to the Security Council when its members are paralyzed appears in retrospect to have been both bold and forward looking, in light of the Council's failures to act in a timely and decisive manner to protect amid crises and the contemporary realities of geopolitical rivalry. The article concludes by suggesting that future efforts to protect populations from atrocity crimes should focus not only on the herculean task of trying to change the behavior of P5 members of the Council but also on encouraging a new institutional balance between the Security Council and other intergovernmental bodies. (shrink)

The failure of the UN Security Council to adequately and effectively address the Syrian crisis has brought renewed scrutiny to the veto and its capricious use during mass atrocity situations. In response to these concerns, the idea of a code of conduct to regulate the exercise of the veto during humanitarian situations is now being increasingly advanced by several states, including France and the United Kingdom. This paper disputes the utility of such a code and argues that it (...) would not make any significant difference to the way mass atrocity crimes are addressed. I examine three core arguments often extended to justify the merit and the utility of the norm: the circumvention argument, the naming and shaming argument, and the Charter reform argument. I show how each of these arguments is undermined by mistaken notions about the norm's procedural effectiveness, and the role the veto plays in cases of what Simon Chesterman calls “inhumanitarian noninterventions.” Additionally, drawing on interviews conducted with diplomats at the United Nations in New York, I present evidence that resistance to a code of conduct comes not only from the permanent five members of the Council but also from the nonpermanent members, further imperiling the idea's capacity to effect change. Ultimately, I contend that the current global effort to curtail the influence of the veto is nothing more than a journey down the rabbit hole: exciting, but ultimately distracting. (shrink)

L’ambiguïté du sens de la résolution 242 (1967) du Conseil de sécurité est un problème classique de l’interprétation en droit international. Celle-ci repose sur l’ambiguïté de la signification du déterminant zéro pluriel anglais, le sens générique d’une part, qui emporte tous les éléments du groupe, et le sens catégoriel d’autre part, qui lui ne dit rien sur la quantité considérée. Ce déterminant zéro pluriel anglais se traduit en français par différents déterminants pluriels : défini pour le sens générique, indéfini pour (...) le sens catégoriel. En relevant les fréquences de traductions en français du déterminant zéro pluriel anglais dans le corpus des résolutions du Conseil de sécurité, on peut établir les proportions de ces deux sens et établir le sens majoritaire du déterminant zéro pluriel anglais dans le corpus. Ce sens majoritaire permet ainsi d’établir de façon plus rigoureuse le sens ordinaire de l’expression anglaise problématique de la résolution 242 (1967). (shrink)

This paper will discuss the role of modality in UN Security Council resolutions. As a work in progress on whether the use of strategic vagueness in UN resolutions has contributed to the outbreak of the second Gulf war, this work proposes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the role of vagueness of the central modal verbs shall, should, and may in the institutional language of the UN, drawing upon Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach and Jenkins, Gotti, and Trosborg's theories on (...) modality. Observing the semantic and linguistic values of these modals, the analysis investigates their double-faced strength: though they can be used to guarantee a wide degree of applicability of the resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, supporting a legislative intent of using vagueness as a political strategy. (shrink)

Over the last few years the diplomatic language of UN resolutions has repeatedly been questioned for the excessive presence of vagueness. The use of vague terms could be connected to the genre of diplomatic texts, as resolutions should be applicable to every international contingency and used to mitigate tensions between different legal cultures. However, excessive vagueness could also lead to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of resolutions, undermining their legal impact and triggering conflicts instead of diplomatic solutions. This study aims (...) at investigating intentional vagueness in Security Council resolutions, by focussing on the analysis of the resolutions relating to the second Gulf war. Using the qualitative Discourse-Historical approach (Wodak in Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism, Taylor & Francis Ltd., London [2000]) and quantitative analysis tools (Antconc and Sketch Engine), special attention is given to the historical/political consequences of the vagueness and indeterminacy used in that framework and to the study of vague ‘weasel words’ (Mellinkoff in The language of the law, Little, Brown & Company, Boston [1963]), modals, and adjectives contained in the corpus. The hypothesis of intentional vagueness is further reinforced through an analysis of the US legislation related to the outbreak of the war, to reveal how the US has legally interpreted UN legislation and to understand the purposes and consequences of vague language contained in it. The findings indicate that vagueness in resolutions has triggered the Iraqi conflict instead of diplomatic solutions with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy. (shrink)

Relative to the abundance of literature devoted to the legal significance of UN authorisation, little has been written about whether the UN’s failure to sanction an intervention can ever make it immoral. This is the question that I take up here. I argue that UN authorisation (or lack thereof) can have some indirect bearing on the moral status of a humanitarian intervention. That is, it can affect whether an intervention satisfies other widely accepted justifying conditions, such as proportionality, “internal” legitimacy, (...) and likelihood of success. The more interesting question, however, is whether the UN’s failure to provide a mandate can make a humanitarian operation unjust independently of these other familiar considerations. Is a proportional, internally legitimate humanitarian intervention, with a just cause and strong prospect of success, still morally unacceptable if it is not approved by the United Nations Security Council? This is the question that I turn to in the second half of the paper. (shrink)

As global governance institutions proliferate and become more powerful, their legitimacy is subject to ever sharper scrutiny. Yet what legitimacy means in this context and how it is to be ascertained are often unclear. In a previous paper in this journal, we offered a general account of the legitimacy of such institutions and a set of standards for determining when they are legitimate. In this paper we focus on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council as an institution (...) for making decisions concerning the use of military force across state borders. The context for this topic has changed over the last decade as a result of the ongoing development of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) doctrine and extensive discussions about it in the United Nations. Yet the mostly widely accepted proposals for RtoP still require Security Council authorization for forceful intervention, and strictly limit the conditions under which such intervention may take place. (shrink)

The response to COVID-19 demonstrates an inclusive and dispersed form of global health security that is less reliant on the UN Security Council or the World Health Organization (WHO). While WHO remains central to fighting the pandemic, the dispersed global health security addressing the crisis is inclusive of the wider UN system, civil society, and epistemic communities in global health. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” (...) this essay argues that instead of facing crisis or criticism like WHO, this inclusive and dispersed form of global health security provides mechanisms of resilience and support to the UN at the height of global political tensions surrounding COVID-19. (shrink)

Over the past seventy-five years, the UN has evolved significantly, often in response to geopolitical dynamics and new waves of thinking. In some respects, the UN has registered remarkable achievements, stimulating a wide range of multilateral treaties, promoting significant growth of human rights, and at times playing a central role in containing and preventing large-scale armed conflict. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that the organization has (...) been the most impactful in three areas: producing, shaping, and driving key ideas, particularly on development and rights; generating such effective operational agencies as UNICEF and the World Food Program; and, especially in the immediate post–Cold War period, addressing major conflict risks through the Security Council. Since then, however, the UN has struggled to meet emerging challenges on many fronts and been increasingly hampered by internal ossification and institutional sprawl as well as internecine dysfunction. The twenty-first century has confronted the UN with further challenges relating most notably to climate change; to risks arising from new technologies; and to the increasingly fraught relationships between China, Russia, and the United States. If the past seventy-five years can offer one lesson, it is that new thinking and new ideas will need to drive the organization to evolve still further and faster, or else risk irrelevance. (shrink)

The United Nations Since its foundation in international relations has become a core system. From the United Nations restrictions on the use of force, peacekeeping and monitoring operations of the rapid expansion of the controversy surrounding the reform of the Security Council and international standards and guidelines for the four in terms of advocacy, the United Nations has played an irreplaceable role, and will remain in the international transformation of society play an important role. The United Nations has (...) become one of the central institutions since its foundation. This study takes into account some important issues in appraising the role of the United Nations in international relations including: the UN's restriction on the use of force, the rapid expansion of UN peacekeeping and election-monitoring activities, the debates concerning the reform of the Security Council and the UN's promotion on international standards and norms. It reaches a conclusion that the United States has played an irreplaceable role and will still been so in the transformation of international society. (shrink)

RESUMEN: El trabajo aborda las sanciones inteligentes aplicadas por el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU en la lucha contra el terrorismo y tiene como objetivo analizar el impacto de aquellas en el ámbito de los derechos humanos, con énfasis en el derecho a la tutela judicial efectiva, lo que suscita complejas divergencias, cuyo análisis implica examen de cómo ocurre la articulación entre el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU y los Estados demandados por éste en la aplicación de las (...) dichas medidas, así como cuáles son los parámetros de vinculación y limitación de estos. ABSTRACT: The work addresses the smart sanctions applied by the UN Security Council in the fight against terrorism and aims to analyze the impact of those in the field of human rights, with emphasis on the right to effective judicial protection, which raises complex divergences, whose analysis implies an examination of how the articulation between the UN Security Council and the States demanded by it in the application of these measures takes place, as well as the parameters of linkage and limitation of these. PALABRAS CLAVE: terrorismo, sanciones inteligentes, derechos humanos, tutela judicial efectiva. KEYWORDS: terrorism, smart sanctions, human rights, effective judicial protection. (shrink)

This paper is based on a doctoral thesis which aimed at investigating on whether the use of strategic vagueness in Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq has contributed to the breakout of the 2002–2003s Gulf war instead of a diplomatic solution of the controversies. This work contains a linguistic and legal comparative analysis between UN and U.S. documents and their drafts in order to demonstrate how vagueness was deliberately added to the final versions of the documents before being (...) passed, and thus strategically used vagueness has played a crucial role in UN resolutions related to the outbreak of war in Iraq, and in relevant legislation produced by the United States for its Congressional authorisation for war. The comparative analysis between S/RES/1441(2002) and US legislation has evidenced that that there would have been diplomatic solutions to the Iraq crises which were not synonymous of light-handed intervention against Iraq, but deliberately vague UN wording allowed the US to build its own legislation with a personal interpretation implying that the UN did not impede military action. (shrink)

This paper explores the apparently fairness of the United Nations’ collective security system, through an indicator: the attention paid, in terms of amount of resolutions, by the Security Council to the major episodes of political violence within the second half of twentieth century where the principle of “responsibility to protect” should have been activated. This study, however, is embedded into a wider context: the social conditions which allowed for the emergence of the modern State. The underlying thesis (...) points out that those same conditions had to be present at the international before a global organism with real capacity to order the world may appear. Along this line of thought, the paper resorts to the experience of the Human Rights Effectiveness Institute in the process of developing a human rights effectiveness index. (shrink)

The UN Security Council adopted sanctions as a means of addressing unrest in Haiti, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Somalia. Damrosch examines this shift from unilateral to collective enforcement and assesses the moral legitimacy and conclusive results of this policy.

This article explores the status of a UN mandate for military intervention, especially in the aftermath of the non-mandated interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. It examines the realist and positivist approaches to this issue, and proposes a third approach, called the ?human rights model? in which public legitimacy plays a key role. It shows that not only political assessments but also legal ones differ on this question according the premises they are based on. The article further analyses how normative and (...) military power interacts in today's global public debate, and concludes that legitimacy for an intervention is established on a case-by-case basis. The existence of a UN mandate no longer gives automatic legitimacy. (shrink)

The legitimacy of humanitarian intervention has been contested for more than a century, yet pressure for such intervention persists. Normative evolution and institutional design have been closely linked since the first debates over humanitarian intervention more than a century ago. Three norms have competed in shaping state practice and the normative discourse: human rights, peace preservation, and sovereignty. The rebalancing of these norms over time, most recently as the state’s responsibility to protect, has reflected specific international institutional environments. The contemporary (...) legitimacy of humanitarian intervention is based on UN Security Council authorization of the use of force. Although the Security Council is often viewed as representative of great-power influence, international acceptance of its role is based on the role of non-permanent members and their support for the sovereignty norm. The current rebalanced norms supporting humanitarian intervention, institutional bias that protects state sovereignty, and the changing character of mass violence may undermine the tenuous contemporary legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. Normative adjustments and new institutional designs are required to insure the legitimacy of international action that protects populations against mass violence. (shrink)

This work attempts to understand whether it is possible to talk about the emergence of specific recurring linguistic patterns in UN resolutions, used as a political strategy. The paper presents a comparative analysis between a corpus of resolutions related to the Second Gulf War and to the 2011 North Korean nuclear crisis, focussing on ethic adjectives and preambulatory and operative phrases used in these resolutions. It is attempted to show how vague and weak expressions can be used either to lead (...) to intentionally biased interpretations of the law as was supposed in the Iraqi case, or to mitigate international tensions, though maintaining a firm position against international threats, as supposed for North Korea. (shrink)

This study aims at investigating vagueness in Security Council Resolutions by focussing on a selection of nouns and phrases used as the main casus belli for the Second Gulf War. Analysing a corpus of Security Council Resolutions relating to the conflict, the study leads a qualitative and quantitative analysis drawing upon Mellinkoff’s theories on “weasel words”, which are “words and expressions with a very flexible meaning, strictly dependent on context and interpretation”. Special attention is devoted to (...) the historical/political consequences of such vague and indeterminate expressions. The findings indicate that excessive vagueness might have led to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of the Resolutions, triggering the Iraqi conflict instead of a diplomatic solution. The analysis of the “weasel words” used in the Resolutions suggests the double-faced strength of such expressions: though they can guaranteed a wide degree of applicability of the Resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy. (shrink)

Most individuals realise that we have a moral obligation to avoid the evils of war. But this realization raises a host of difficult questions when we, as responsible individuals, witness harrowing injustices such as ""ethnic cleansing"" in Bosnia or starvation in Somalia. With millions of lives at stake, is war ever justified? And, if so, for what purpose? In this book, Richard J. Regan confronts these controversial questions by first considering the basic principles of just-war theory and then applying those (...) principles to historical and ongoing conflicts. Part One presents two opposing viewpoints: first, that war is not subject to moral norms and, second, that war is never morally permissible. The author rejects both perspectives, and moves to define the principles of just-war theory. He evaluates the roles of the president, Congress and, most importantly, the UN Security Council in determining when long-term US military involvement is justified. The moral limits of war conduct and the moral problem of using, or threatening to use, nuclear weapons are also discussed. On the just cause to wage war, Regan argues that defense of nations and nationals - whether in self-defense or in defense of others - remains the ""only"" classical cause that in the modern world would justify resorting to war. With respect to military intervention in secessionist and revolutionary wars, he contends that such intervention might be justified, but that prudence dictates extreme caution. In considering acceptable war conduct, Regan elaborates the specific principle of discrimination and proportionality; he maintains that civilians uninvolved in the enemy's war should not be directly targeted and that the costs of military action must be proportionate to the anticipated benefits of destroying military targets. The second part of the book presents case studies of eight historical wars - World War I, the Vietnam War, the Falklands War, the revolution and civil war in Nicaragua, the civil war in El Salvador, the Gulf War, the intervention in Somalia, and the Bosnian War - and poses several provocative questions about each. It invites readers and students to apply just-war principles to complex war-related situations and to understand the factual contingencies involved in moral judgements about war decisions. The book should be of particular interest to students of the moral issues of international relations and to readers interested more generally in philosophy, theology and political science. (shrink)

In October 2000, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on "Women, Peace and Security", calling for women's full and equal participation in all aspects of conflict prevention, resolution and peacebuilding. The world is at last recognizing that gender issues and peace are inextricably connected, and that women's involvement in peace efforts is essential for the prevention of renewed conflict. Given the need for women's involvement in peace and security issues, we must address the reasons (...) why women's influence is limited, why they still do not have access to power or leadership roles, while their level of participation in the armed forces is minimal to non-existent. Meanwhile, wars rage. This paper argues that to think through the deeper connections between gender issues and peace is to engage in an unsettling, necessarily philosophical inquiry about the nature of modern ethical life— as a dysfunctional system of separate and competing ethical imperatives: family and state, public and private, individual and state, masculine and feminine. My inquiry is conducted from the standpoint of Hegel's philosophy. In the Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel draws upon the tragedian Sophocles for his insight that once upon a time in the ancient world, universal ethical substance divided itself into distinct ethical spheres of human and divine law. Human relationships to these ethical worlds were shaped by gender. The division of ethical substance precipitated conflicts that eventually caused the ancient world to collapse. For Hegel, the project of modernity is all about the recovery, in self-conscious form, of a harmonious ethical life, through reconciliation of conflicting ethical worlds. Hegel's philosophy of modern life has its shortfalls, but is a powerful resource for the argument that gender justice is a condition for long-lasting peace. (shrink)

In October 2000, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on "Women, Peace and Security", calling for women's full and equal participation in all aspects of conflict prevention, resolution and peacebuilding. The world is at last recognizing that gender issues and peace are inextricably connected, and that women's involvement in peace efforts is essential for the prevention of renewed conflict. Given the need for women's involvement in peace and security issues, we must address the reasons (...) why women's influence is limited, why they still do not have access to power or leadership roles, while their level of participation in the armed forces is minimal to non-existent. Meanwhile, wars rage. This paper argues that to think through the deeper connections between gender issues and peace is to engage in an unsettling, necessarily philosophical inquiry about the nature of modern ethical life— as a dysfunctional system of separate and competing ethical imperatives: family and state, public and private, individual and state, masculine and feminine. My inquiry is conducted from the standpoint of Hegel's philosophy. In the Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel draws upon the tragedian Sophocles for his insight that once upon a time in the ancient world, universal ethical substance divided itself into distinct ethical spheres of human and divine law. Human relationships to these ethical worlds were shaped by gender. The division of ethical substance precipitated conflicts that eventually caused the ancient world to collapse. For Hegel, the project of modernity is all about the recovery, in self-conscious form, of a harmonious ethical life, through reconciliation of conflicting ethical worlds. Hegel's philosophy of modern life has its shortfalls, but is a powerful resource for the argument that gender justice is a condition for long-lasting peace. (shrink)

Abstrac. The work argues the activation of the competence of the UN Security Council to review the complex humanitarian emergency situation in Venezuela, and adopt as a provisional measure a Humanitarian Electoral Intervention (IHE), which allows to settle and alleviate conflicts by holding some general elections, based on the experience of Cambodia (1992-1993) and Timor Leste (2001-2002), and thus ruling out any possibility of violence in the Venezuelan conflict, also removing any possibility of military intervention, bearing in mind (...) that the continuity or aggravation they constitute a threat to regional and world peace and security. (shrink)

Preventive use of force may be defined as the initiation of military action in anticipation of harmful actions that are neither presently occurring nor imminent. This essay explores the permissibility of preventive war from a cosmopolitan normative perspective, one that recognizes the basic human rights of all persons, not just citizens of a particular country or countries. It argues that preventive war can only be justified if it is undertaken within an appropriate rule-governed, institutional framework that is designed to help (...) protect vulnerable countries against unjustified interventions while also avoiding unacceptable risks of the costs of inaction. The key to ensuring the fairness of rules governing the preventive use of force is accountability.This essay proposes a scheme that would make those promoting and those rejecting the preventive use of force more accountable. The proposal contains the following crucial features:States proposing preventive war are required to enter into a contract with a diverse body of states as a condition for authorization of their actions;Prior to taking preventive action, states must make an evidence-based case to the UN Security Council, and agree in advance to submit themselves to an evaluation by an impartial body after the preventive action occurred;Both proponents of action and those opposing it will be held accountable ex post for the accuracy of their prior statements and the proportionality of their actions;Sanctions will be imposed against intervening states or states that opposed preventive action, respectively, depending on the findings of the ex post evaluation.If preventive action were blocked in the Security Council, states seeking to engage in preventive action could then present their case in a different body–a coalition of democratic states–with its own ex post and ex ante accountability procedures. (shrink)

This work offers an analysis of all the legal and moral issues surrounding humanitarian intervention: the deaths of innocent persons and the Doctrine of Double Effect Governmental legitimacy - The Doctrine of Effective Political Control; UN Charter and evaluation of the Nicaragua ruling; The Morality of not intervening; US-led invasion of Iraq; Humanitarian intervention authorised by the UN Security Council - Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia among others highlight NATO's intervention in Kosovo; The Nicaragua Decision; and The (...) precedents of Panama, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The book's features include: a new framework based on the doctrine of double effect; basic principles of international ethics; outline of the moral argument for humanitarian intervention; explores the morality and legality of military action to end tyranny or anarchy; arguments in a much more detailed and complete fashion than in previous editions; in-depth examination of philosophy of international law; the relationship between custom and moral theory; new discussion of the question of right authority; and a full analysis of recent interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. book addresses a broad interdisciplinary audience of international lawyers, philosophers, and political scientists. In this new edition, the author responds to critics while updating the discussion in the light of the momentous events that took place at the beginning of the new millennium. (shrink)

Abstract The article criticizes the trend of reformulating the traditional just-war criterion of Proper Authority, which was designed to de-legitimize force by non-state actors, into a requirement that decisions to resort to force be multilateral. The article illustrates several shortcomings of the judgment processes of the UN Security Council and General Assembly, the World Court, and states? populations, and argues among other things that reformulating Proper Authority would render other criteria meaningless, especially Just Cause. Finally, the article rebuts (...) the strongest objection to a system in which states judge their own causes for war: the problem of invincible ignorance. (shrink)

Despite its preeminent position in the just war tradition, the concept of proportionality is not well understood by military leaders. Especially lacking is a realization that there are four distinct types of proportionality. In determining whether a particular resort to war is just, national leaders must consider the proportionality of the conflict, i.e., balance the expected gain or just redress against the total harm likely to be inflicted by the impending armed action. This proportionality consideration is called jus ad bellum (...) proportionality. The second type of proportionality discussed is a continuing re-evaluation of the proportionality, taking into account the changing situation. The last true proportionality discussed is a consideration of hostile action taking during a conflict, or jus in bello proportionality. This consideration weighs the expected military gain of a particular action against the collateral damage and injuries that are expected from the act. Finally, the fourth category addressed is ‘political proportionality’, which is not a true proportionality consideration, but is rather self-interested deliberation on the possible political and military outcomes of actions. In some instances, it could be referred to as a measured response. A better understanding of proportionality in all its forms will help military leaders to give appropriate and moral advice on the potential resort to war, as well as on the conduct of military actions in war. The recent US war with Iraq in the spring of 2003 in defiance of the wishes of the majority of the UN Security Council, and especially with the potential for high noncombatant casualties in Baghdad, makes a discussion of the proper conduct of war even more poignant. (shrink)

Differences between human beings have long been used to justify a range of degrading, exclusionary, and murderous practices that strip people of their humanity and dignity. While considerable scholarship has been devoted to such dehumanization, Matthew S. Weinert asks how we might conceive its reverse—humanization, or what it means to “make human.” Weinert proposes an account of making human centered on five mechanisms: reflection, recognition, resistance, replication of dominant mores, and responsibility. Examining cases such as the UN Security (...) class='Hi'>Council’s engagements with crises and the International Court of Justice’s grappling with Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, he illustrates the distinct and contingent ways these mechanisms have been deployed. Theoretically, the cases evince a complex, evolving relationship between state-centric and human-centric views of society, ultimately revealing the normative potentialities of both. Though the case studies concern specific human relations issues on an international level, Weinert argues in favor of starting from the shared problem of being human and of living in a world in which the humanity of countless groups has been demeaned or denied. Working outward from that point, he proposes, we obtain a more pragmatically grounded understanding of the social construction of the human being. (shrink)

The primary purpose of government is to secure public goods that cannot be achieved by free markets. The Coordination Principle tells us to consolidate sovereign power in a single institution to overcome collective action problems that otherwise prevent secure provision of the relevant public goods. There are several public goods that require such coordination at the global level, chief among them being basic human rights. The claim that human rights require global coordination is supported in three main steps. First, I (...) consider Pogge's and Habermas's analyses as alternatives to Hobbesian conceptions of justice. Second, I consider the core conventions of international law, which are in tension with the primacy of state sovereignty in the UN system. Third, I argue that the just war tradition does not limit just causes for war to self-defense; it supports saving innocent third parties from crimes against humanity as a just reason for war. While classical authors focused less on this issue, the point is especially clear in twentieth-century just war theories, such as those offered by the American Catholic bishops, Jean Elshtain, Brian Orend, and Michael Walzer. Against Walzer, I argue that we add intractable military tyranny to the list of horrors meriting intervention if other ad bellum conditions are met. But these results require us to reexamine the "just authority" of first resort to govern such interventions. The Coordination Principle implies that we should create a transnational federation with consolidated powers in place of a treaty organization requiring near-unanimity. But to be legitimate, such a global institution must also be directly answerable to the citizens of its member states. While the UN Security Council is inadequate on both counts, a federation of democracies with a directly elected executive and legislature could meet both conditions. (shrink)

This article argues that an artificial superintelligence (ASI) emerging in a world where war is still normalised constitutes a catastrophic existential risk, either because the ASI might be employed by a nation–state to war for global domination, i.e., ASI-enabled warfare, or because the ASI wars on behalf of itself to establish global domination, i.e., ASI-directed warfare. Presently, few states declare war or even war on each other, in part due to the 1945 UN Charter, which states Member States should “refrain (...) in their international relations from the threat or use of force”, while allowing for UN Security Council-endorsed military measures and self-defense. As UN Member States no longer declare war on each other, instead, only ‘international armed conflicts’ occur. However, costly interstate conflicts, both hot and cold and tantamount to wars, still take place. Further, a New Cold War between AI superpowers looms. An ASI-directed/enabled future conflict could trigger total war, including nuclear conflict, and is therefore high risk. Via conforming instrumentalism, an international relations theory, we advocate risk reduction by optimising peace through a Universal Global Peace Treaty (UGPT), contributing towards the ending of existing wars and prevention of future wars, as well as a Cyberweapons and Artificial Intelligence Convention. This strategy could influence state actors, including those developing ASIs, or an agential ASI, particularly if it values conforming instrumentalism and peace. (shrink)

Should the U.N. Security Council use its coercive powers to bring about effective climate change mitigation? This question remains relevant considering the inadequate mitigation goals set by the signatories of the Paris Climate Accord and the ramifications of U.S. withdrawal from the Accord. This paper argues that the option of the unsc coercing climate change mitigation through military action, or the threat thereof, is morally flawed and ultimately antithetical to effectively addressing climate change. This assessment is based significantly (...) on the application of jus ad bellum principles of just war theory, incorporating some feminist critiques of this theory. (shrink)

The June 1967 war brought the superpowers perilously close to confrontation, driving home the importance of a diplomatic settlement. In November 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which expressed a broad international consensus on the general terms for a settlement. The current agreement is based entirely on UN 242 (and 338, which endorses it). Article I of the 1993 draft agreement, outlining the "Aim of the Negotiations," specifies that "the negotiations on the permanent status will lead (...) to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338"; no other UN Resolutions are mentioned, thus resolving a central issue in the controversy in accord with US-Israeli demands. (shrink)

On July 12, 2006, the Hezbollah terrorist organization attacked two Israeli Defense Forces' armored Hummer jeeps patrolling along the border with gunfire and explosives, in the midst of massive shelling attacks on Israel's north. Three soldiers were killed in the attack and two were taken hostage. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) began heavy artillery and tank fire. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert convened the government on Wednesday night, June 12, 2006 to decide Israel's reaction. The government agreed that the attack had (...) created a completely new situation on the northern border, and that Israel must take steps that will "exact a price", and restore its deterrence. The Israeli-Hezbollah War had started after one rushed and short governmental meeting, without realizing the full implications of the decision. The war ended on August 14, 2006 when the UN Security Council Resolution (no. 1701) entered into force. During the war, voices of protest were heard in Israel, mainly from reserve service soldiers, journalists, and distinguished writers. After the war, thousands of people have criticized the government decisions, demanded the establishment of a national inquiry committee to investigate the war events and, called for the resignation of the war architects: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Minister of Defence Amir Peretz, and Chief of Staff Dan Halutz. This article criticizes the establishment of the committee and the results it reached, arguing that it was a "sold game": The person under investigation should never be allowed to nominate his judges. This is mockery of justice, and travesty of social responsibility. (shrink)

Ever since the end of the Second World War, Rational Actor models have dominated strategic thinking at all levels of government policy and military planning. In the confrontation between states, and especially during the Cold War, these models were insightful and useful in anticipating a wide array of challenges and in stabilizing the world peace enough to prevent nuclear war. But now our society faces a whole new range of challenges from non-state actors who are committed to die in order (...) to kill and terrorize enough of our citizens to change the course of history. The darkest fear in the current struggle with terrorism is a nuclear bomb exploding in a major city. (shrink)

The book offers insights on whether international law can shape the politics of the Security Council and, conversely, the extent to which the latter contribute to the development of international law. By providing a systematic analysis of the quantity and quality of international legal instruments referred to in the text of resolutions, the book reconstructs patterns of the Security Council's behavioural regularities and assesses them against the provisions of the United Nations Charter, which establishes its mandate. (...) The analysis is divided into three periods - the origins and Cold War period, post-Cold War period and the twenty-first century - and assesses the resolutions passed in each period by thematic category. The book argues that while international law plays an important role in shaping the politics of the Security Council, the Council's resolutions do not contribute significantly to the development of international law. (shrink)

The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents (...) a significant research gap, as the Tribunal’s public discourse can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has “irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law” and lists six specific achievements: “Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law”. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of ‘achievement’ actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY. (shrink)

In 2005 the member states of the United Nations recognized a “responsibility to protect” (“R2P”) victims of mass atrocities such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. They acknowledged a special role for the U.N. Security Council in responding to these atrocities, including potentially authorizing military action using its extensive powers under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. However, the Council has very rarely been able to agree on appropriate action, and the five permanent Council (...) members (“P5”), most notably China and Russia, have often vetoed or threatened to veto Council resolutions authorizing R2P action. The article argues that the veto poses a major impediment to the Council acting on its R2P responsibilities, and that to resolve it, the P5, and all U.N. member states, need to agree on a common ethical approach. The article proposes such an approach based on ethical concepts that are widely endorsed by states, especially in the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and explores its implications for legal and ethical controversies relating to the role of the Council, its obligations under R2P, and proposed reforms of the veto. (shrink)

Despite triggering one of the largest civilian death tolls in modern history, the policy and human consequences of economic sanctions on Iraq between 1990-2003 remain largely unexamined. This lack of scrutiny mirrors the euphemism and mis-information surrounding the embargo itself and the Oil-for-Food program ostensibly adopted to protect Iraq's civilian population. But it also reflects incomprehension among Western publics - long removed from the realities of hunger and economic destitution - of the intimate link between economic conditions and mortality. Iraq (...) suffered an estimated 1.5 million excess deaths because of a catastrophic undermining of civilian livelihood triggered by the embargo; an outcome termed slow famine in the demographic literature. With much of the population fully dependent on daily food rations of less than 21 cents per person for much of the sanctions period, OfF `relief' was inherently incapable of substituting for a functioning civil economy. Recent positive accounts of the impact of OfF, in the form of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the Oil-for-Food Program, are refuted by close analysis of malnutrition and mortality rates across the sanctions period. The example of Iraq reveals the danger in treating economic sanctions as a cheap, `non-violent' tool for conflict resolution. In reality their deadly power is terrorizing for societies not protected from their application by permanent member status on the UN Security Council, a threat which continues to generate global insecurity. The Iraq experience reveals how current, narrowly framed, international law prohibitions on starvation as a weapon of war need to be extended to cover interference with civilian livelihood and hence access to food. (shrink)

Despite its preeminent position in the just war tradition, the concept of proportionality is not well understood by military leaders. Especially lacking is a realization that there are four distinct types of proportionality. In determining whether a particular resort to war is just, national leaders must consider the proportionality of the conflict, i.e., balance the expected gain or just redress against the total harm likely to be inflicted by the impending armed action. This proportionality consideration is called jus ad bellum (...) proportionality. The second type of proportionality discussed is a continuing re-evaluation of the proportionality, taking into account the changing situation. The last true proportionality discussed is a consideration of hostile action taking during a conflict, or jus in bello proportionality. This consideration weighs the expected military gain of a particular action against the collateral damage and injuries that are expected from the act. Finally, the fourth category addressed is ‘political proportionality’, which is not a true proportionality consideration, but is rather self-interested deliberation on the possible political and military outcomes of actions. In some instances, it could be referred to as a measured response. A better understanding of proportionality in all its forms will help military leaders to give appropriate and moral advice on the potential resort to war, as well as on the conduct of military actions in war. The recent US war with Iraq in the spring of 2003 in defiance of the wishes of the majority of the UN Security Council, and especially with the potential for high noncombatant casualties in Baghdad, makes a discussion of the proper conduct of war even more poignant. (shrink)

The gendered implications of COVID-19, in particular in terms of gender-based violence and the gendered division of care work, have secured some prominence, and ignited discussion about prospects for a ‘feminist recovery’. In international law terms, feminist calls for a response to the pandemic have privileged the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), conditioned—I argue—by two decades of the pursuit of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda through the UNSC. The deficiencies of the UNSC response, as characterised (...) by the Resolution 2532 adopted to address the pandemic, manifest yet again the identified deficiencies of the WPS agenda at the UNSC, namely fragmentation, securitisation, efficacy and legitimacy. What Resolution 2532 does bring, however, is new clarity about the underlying reasons for the repeated and enduring nature of these deficiencies at the UNSC. Specifically, the COVID-19 ‘crisis’ is powerful in exposing the deficiencies of the crisis framework in which the UNSC operates. My reflections draw on insights from Hilary Charlesworth’s seminal contribution ‘International Law: A Discipline of Crisis’ to argue that, instead of conceding the ‘crisis’ framework to the pandemic by prioritising the UNSC, a ‘feminist recovery’ must instead follow Charlesworth’s exhortation to refocus on an international law of the everyday. (shrink)