Legitimate Authority in War (original) (raw)
Related papers
Just war and the question of authority
Zeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie, 2018
This article assesses the recently renewed interest in the just war criterion of sovereign authority from a Thomistic perspective. It contrasts the classical conceptualisation of authority as found in the work of St Thomas Aquinas with the argument made by today's revisionist just war thinkers. The article points out that the two approaches start from fundamentally different units of moral analysis. While the Thomistic just war emphasises the common good of the political community revisionists advocate the perspective of moral individualism. As a result, for Thomism, only those entrusted with the responsibility for the common good of the political community are entitled to wage war while, in contrast, revisionists argue that any individual has the right to wage war. The latter side's position, the article criticises, is problematic from a moral point of view as it runs counter to the just war tradition's concern about restraint in the employment of force.
Authorization and the Morality of War (Australasian Journal of Philosophy)
Why does it matter that those who fight wars be authorised by the communities on whose behalf they claim to fight? I argue that lacking authorisation generates a moral cost, which counts against a war’s proportionality, and that having authorisation allows the transfer of reasons from the members of the community to those who fight, which makes the war more likely to be proportionate. If democratic states are better able than non-democratic states and sub-state groups to gain their community’s authorisation, this means that some wars will be proportionate if fought by democracies, disproportionate if not.
Since its early origins, just war discourse has had two contrasting functions: it has sought to speak law and morals to power, and thus restrain the use of force, but it has also served to authorize and legitimize the use of force. Critical voices have recently alerted to the growing use of authorization and legitimization in a broader context of hegemonic and unilateral cooptations of just war discourse. In this article I show that this critique of just war has a long history, and reconstruct the powerful challenge that two of the foremost international jurists of the Enlightenment—Christian Wolff and Emer de Vattel— mounted against early modern accounts of just war. Their neglected theory of " regular war " helps us recover a sense of what a truly pluralist and anti-hegemonic doctrine of ius ad bellum may look like, and reveals a deep tension in the just war tradition between the criteria of political authority and just cause.
The Laws of War in International Thought (OUP 2020)
The Law of Armed Conflict is usually understood to be a regime of exception that applies only during armed conflict and regulates hostilities among enemies. It assigns privileges to states far beyond what they are allowed to do in peacetime, and it mandates certain protections for non-combatants, which can often be defeated by appeals to military necessity or advantage. The Laws of War in International Thought examines the intellectual history of the laws of war before their codification. It reconstructs the processes by which political and legal theorists built the laws’ distinctive vocabularies and legitimized some of their widest permissions, and it situates these processes within the broader intellectual project that from early modernity spelled out the nature, function, and powers of state sovereignty. The book focuses on four historical moments in the intellectual history of the laws of war: the doctrine of just war in Spanish scholasticism; Hugo Grotius’s theory of solemn war; the Enlightenment theory of regular war; and late nineteenth-century humanitarianism. By looking at these moments, Pablo Kalmanovitz shows how challenging and polemical it has been for international theorists to justify the exceptional and permissive character of the laws of war. In this way, he contributes to recover a sense of the historical foundations and many still problematic aspects of the Law of Armed Conflict.
Who May Fight Just Wars? Right Authority for States and Non-States
2014
in particular guided my engagement with the Comparative Politics subfield, the main concepts of which mark this dissertation in fundamental ways; I owe them both a great intellectual debt. Dr. David Wilsford was my academic advisor during much of my time at GMU and taught me much. Peg Koback was a lifesaver during my rocky dissertation-writing process, helping me navigate the administrative shoals and come out safely. My father, Todd Litwin, played a key role in the development of this dissertation; most of the concepts found within were hammered out during many, many late-night discussions we shared while doing the dishes. I am grateful for his wisdom and for his continual focus on drilling down to the fundamentals. Dr. Diana Dunham-Scott gave me valuable feedback during the early days of theory development, and suggested the Moro insurgency as a case, for which I am very grateful. And finally, acharon acharon chaviv, thank you to Diane, my incredible wife. She believed in me throughout the bleakest points of writing this dissertation, and carried me through to its end. Je t'aime, mon amour.
The Sovereign Decision. State of exception and war as political horizons.
The Sovereign Decision. State of exception and war as political horizons., 2019
In the present essay we will take as a foundation of Carl Schmitt's thought his book The Concept Of The Political (1932) to describe the differentiation between friends and enemies, we will try to define the nature of the concepts State, People and the duality friend/enemy. To account for the usefulness of the sense of expressing the maximum degree of intensity of a bond or of a separation, an association or a dissociation. Therefore, conceiving political relations as inserted in a scenario of uncertain probabilities and scarce -although valuable- resources is the strategy of national unity to insert itself in the geopolitical chessboard. That opposite that I transform into a threatening external is nothing more than what we do not wish to be, but its symbolic capital can even mobilize us to war. All this is possible because of the imperfect constitution of human beings, as Machiavelli maintains, the human being must be considered as a latent threat rather than as a brother of religion if it is a matter of political affairs, the ruler has a good omen when fear prevails over love among his subjects, but never hatred. To hate is to intensely desire pain or punishment on an object, hatred is a human emotion, therefore it is part of this humanity that we have been detailing. Certainly this emotion takes shape in the figure of otherness, of that which threatens me. At the political level, the emotion of hatred is as effective as it is risky, since only those who hate act with violence, therefore we will use conceptual categories that Sigmund Freud exposes in The Malaise In Culture, such as 'culture', 'consciousness of guilt' and 'otherness'. In a second moment we will try to perceive how symmetrical is the construction of enmity with the theorization of cultural inheritance and the consciousness of guilt experienced by the Human Being as exposed by Sigmund Freud. The fundamental question of this paper is whether it is possible to endow the rival with ethicity, or whether he must necessarily embody evil. Therefore, in a third instance, we will try to theorize about jus belli, the right of a State to declare war. We will look to Carl Von Clausewitz's famous On War (1832) to argue in favor of the free will of nation-states.