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Intro to Just War Theory Classics of Just War TheoryClassics of RealpolitikClassics of Pacifism

Terrorism & Counter-terrorismInvasion & Occupation of IraqWar with Iran?

Rights of Enemy CombatantsHumanitarian InterventionNationalism & Cosmopolitanism

Global Society & HegemonyCivil WarWar Criminals & Trials

General Resources on War

INTRODUCTORY MATERIALS:

• Just war theory is the attempt to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable uses of organized armed forces. Unfamiliar with the basic terms of analysis and debate? Then check out the BBC's introduction to the ethics of warfare, or read Brian Orend's excellent introduction from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Just war theories attempt to conceive of how the use of arms might be restrained, made more humane, and ultimately directed towards the aim of establishing lasting peace and justice. Contrary to facile accusations of absurdity, the idea of fighting for peace actually does make sense in theory. There is no more contradiction in waging war to keep warfare in check than there is in fighting fire with fire (which firefighters do all the time). Unfortunately, however, what makes sense in theory too often fails in practice. World War I was touted in the U.S. as "the war to end all war." Yet, the world has seen a lot of warfare since the end of WWI, some of it in more or less direct consequence of that war. Armed human conflicts turn out to be more complex, varied and difficult to control than something as relatively simple and predictable as fire. Moreover, as Barbara Ehrenreich explains in her essay on "The Roots of War", warfare tends to engender more warfare. (Imagine a fire that generates its own fuel.) Arguably, we should therefore promote and actively engage in it only on the rarest of occasions, excercising nearly "infinite caution" (to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke). Just and peace-promoting war efforts are exceedingly rare in human history. This is the reason why nearly every major figure in the just war tradition, from Augustine and Aquinas to Grotius and Walzer, has argued that warfare is only ever justified as a LAST RESORT. In many academic enumerations of the principles of just war theory, the principle of last resort shows up at the end of the list. It is, however, the FIRST PRINCIPLE of just war theory, because the ultimate justifying aim of the resort to arms is the protection of innocent lives and this aim is usually best pursued by peaceful means. For this reason, Vincent Ferraro's introductory statement of the conventional Principles of the Just War is exemplary. The importance of the principle of last resort is not entirely uncontroversial, however. Peter S. Temes, for one, argues that the experiences of the 20th century, especially WWII and the war in former Yugoslavia, should lead us to abandon the principle of last resort. (See the JWT Book Reviews page for a review of Temes' book, The Just War: An American Reflection on the Morality of War in Our Times. (Updated 5/1/05) And in his excellent (more advanced than introductory) article on "Proportionality in the Morality of War," Philosophy & Public Affairs, Volume 33, Number 1, 2005, Thomas Hurka argues that the principle of last resort is reducible to the requirement that the morally relevant harms of just warfare should be "proportionate" in the sense that they must not outweigh the morally relevant benefits. (Updated 5/14/07)
• Just war theory is not a settled doctrine. It is a field of critical ethical reflection. That's why there are as many just war theories as there are just war theorists. So, rather than allow traditionally accepted (yet highly contested) theoretical principles dictate what is required to justify the use of armed forces, let your first lesson in just war theory be one which you teach yourself in a simple introductory exercise of reflection: Start by thinking of a paradigm case or prime example from history which strikes you intuitively as being an instance of an ethically acceptable, or perhaps even laudable use of armed forces. And ask yourself what makes it so. If you can neither think of a single example in history, nor imagine any possible future instances of the justifiable use of arms, then you may be an absolute pacifist. If you cannot think of a single ethically condemnable act of warfare, and you "love the smell of napalm in the morning," then you may belong to the realpolitik camp. If you can think of some limited class of ethically condemnable instances or forms of warfare, and your head is swimming with great examples of ethically acceptable and even laudable warfare, then you may be a relatively hawkish just war theorist. If your head is swimming with historical examples of condemnable warfare, and you can think only of a relatively limited class of ethically acceptable instances, and few or no laudable ones, then you may be a relatively dovish just war theorist (like me). The theoretical task of the just war theorist is to figure out what sets the ethically acceptable and laudable examples apart from the rest. (Posted 8/30/05)
• Just war theorists have traditionally concerned themselves with the grounds for going to war in the first place and with questions about ethical conduct in warfare. But they should also be concerned that warfare is suspended and settled in ways that help to prevent more of the same. As Brian Orend suggests, we must also concern ourselves with "Justice After War". (Posted 11/5/04)
• The tradition of just war theory and the international war conventions that emerged from it help us to see many of the ways in which the use of arms might be limited and controlled for the sake of international peace. In some ways, however, this tradition (as with every tradition) fails to provide us with complete, reliable guidance for contending with present and future political realities. As Thomas B. Baines argues, "The future of peacekeeping missions will be focused on activities and objectives not anticipated by the framers and developers of traditional Laws of War." (Posted 11/5/04)
• In "How Has War Changed Since the End of the Cold War?" (Perameters, US Army War College Quarterly, Spring 2005), Colin S. Gray argues for the following broad realpolitik conclusions: "First, the objective nature of war, as Clausewitz put it, is not changing at all. His theory of war [see CLASSICS section below] will apply to all modes of armed conflict in the future. An understanding of that theory is vastly more important than is a grasp of the latest military possibilities enabled by technological, organizational, and doctrinal change. . . Second, the leading driver toward, and in, war, is the political context . . . Third, war is about the peace that will follow. . . Fourth and finally, one should never forget that over time all trends decline and eventually expire . . . [and] that a major source of trouble lurks beyond the power of prediction in Secretary Rumsfeld's concept of the 'unknown unknowns.'" (Posted 4/2/05)
• Richard Falk offers a very lucid reflection on the history of the political ethics of warfare from the first world war to the post-9/11 era in this video lecture from San Diego State University's Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, March 9, 2004. (Posted 1/7/06)
• When it comes to economic and military foreign policy 'imperialism' is a dirty word. Dissenters at home and abroad often condemn war mongers as 'imperialists'. But what is imperialism, you ask? Michael Parenti offers an explanation in "Imperialism 101. (Posted 2/24/06)
• Robert Sapolsky's "A Natural History of Peace" (Foreign Affairs January/February 2006) asks "So what does primatology have to say about war and peace?" Sapolsky's finding: "Contrary to what was believed just a few decades ago, humans are not "killer apes" destined for violent conflict, but can make their own history." (3/3/06)
• Princeton's WebMedia page includes several good, accessible philosophical video lectures on warfare. Mark Juergensmeyer's February 2006 lectures include reflections on "God and War: The Odd Appeal of War", in which he suggests that war is "a way of thinking and living through chaos in order to become free from it"; reflections on the question "Are We at War?" in which he ponders the peculiarities of the age of terrorism/counter-terrorism; and reflections on the question "What Does God Have to Do with It?" Also available from Princeton are videos of Arun Gandhi's November 2001 discussion of the power of nonviolence in "Terrorism, Nonviolence, and Justice"; and Jean Bethke Elshtain's October 2001 plea for a strong military response to 9-11 in "Just War and Military Intervention". (Note that these links are to 300k RealPlayer files, because that's what I use. If you use different software or need something slower, look for alternatives on the WebMedia page.) (Posted 4/24/06)
• "Whenever it is right to resist an assault by force, it must then be allowable to do so by guile." So says Sissela Bok in Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, and most ethicists would likely agree. Accordingly, just war theorists pondering issues of "last resort" or military "necessity" should consider the ethics of espionage and other covert means short of war that might be equally or more effective in achieving legitimate security aims. For a good introduction, see David L. Perry's "Repugnant Philosophy:Ethics, Espionage, and Covert Action," Journal of Conflict Studies, Spring 1995. For a review of the state of intelligence studies as an academic sub-discipline of international relations, see Gustavo Diaz Matey's "Intelligence Studies at the Dawn of the 21st Century: New Possibilities and Resources for a Recent Topic in International Relations," UNISCI Discussion Papers, May 2005. (Posted 2/12/07)
• In "Jus Ad Bellum After 9/11: A State of the Art Report," forthcoming in the International Political Theory Beacon, June 2007, Mark Rigstad presents an overview and critical assessment of how just war theoretic principles of just cause, discrimination, and proportionality have been applied in the Global War on Terror. (6/17/07)
• Contrary to Barbara Ehrenreich's argument against simplistic biological accounts of the nature of war (above), Steven A. LeBlanc argues in "Why Warfare?" that it makes perfectly good sense to think of warfare as something that is caused by complex interactions between human biology and limited environmental resources. (Posted 6/2/07) Arthur H. Westing, Warwick Fox, and Michael Renner further examine the environmental dimension of warfare in "Environmental Degradation as Both Consequence and Cause of Armed Conflict," Nobel Peace Laureate Forum, June 2001. These considerations do not completely undercut Ehrenreich's insight (above). The dichotomy between nature and nurture is best taken as representing two aspects of the causal story, rather than two mutually exclusive causal models. Warfare occurs as a result of complex biological and environmental causes, AND it is also fueled by the development of war-making industries, institutions and mentalities. (Posted 8/31/07)

CLASSIC SOURCES:

• The Just War Tradition: Every educated citizen should reflect on the pre-modern, proto-modern, and modern classics of the just war tradition. Follow these links to read Francisco de Victoria's classic relectiones (1557) "On the Indians" and "On the Law of War"), Hugo Grotius's erudite and systematic masterpiece on the The Laws of War and Peace (1625), Book X of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws (1748), Emmerich de Vattel's treatise on the Law of Nations (1758), and Immanuel Kant's essay on "Perpetual Peace" (1795). Among more recent works, Thomas Nagel's "War and Massacre", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Winter 1972, is a classic Vietnam-era philosophical argument for principled moral restraint in warfare. Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars (1977) is the consensus favorite to join the pantheon of modern classics in just war theory. The Carnegie Council has published a transcript of Walzer's general lecture with Q&A about his more recent book, Arguing about War. Also, click on these links to jump further down on this page and find a video of Walzer lecturing on humanitarian intervention, or his published comments on "Just and Unjust Occupation." (Updated 9/2/06) If you ask me Jeff McMahan's bold and excellent work in the field of just war theory is the best bet for future classic status. Here is his video keynote address on the subject of pacifism for the 2nd On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC2) on May 21, 2007. (Added 5/30/07)
• It is sometimes said that just war theory originates from a Catholic tradition that can be traced to the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. Although these figures and the traditions of thought associated with them are highly important and influential (See James Turner Johnson's overview), any sectarian expropriation of just war theory is historically unsupportable. Many pre-Christian thinkers -- including Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Cato the Younger, Seneca, Polybius and Sallust, to name but a few -- distinguished between just and unjust grounds for waging war, and between just and unjust conduct in the course of war. An examination of Grotius' reference materials (this task requires some reading as none of the online editions include an index) is a good guide to the full diversity of ancient, medieval and Renaissance sources, not all of which are products of Christian theology. Relevant biblical passages are found in both the old Hebrew scriptures and the Christian New Testament, which means that just war theory belongs (in part) to a broader Judeo-Christian tradition. Although the history of mutual theological infuences is a complex affair, contemporary Judaic approaches to just war thinking are often developed in terms that are largely if not completely independent of explicit reliance upon Christian sources. Michael Walzer has voiced doubts about the viability of a Jewish "purity of arms" doctrine that has more to do with the influence of platonism via Philo of Alexandria than with any kind of well developed rabbinical casuistry of war. Even so, Arye Edrei finds a separate source of just war thinking in the efforts of Israel's first chief military Rabbi to "create a modern corpus of Jewish law and ethics relating to war and the military." See Edrei's "Spirit and Power: Rabbi Shlomo Goren and the Military Ethic of the Israel Defence Force," Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Vol. 7, 2005-2006, pp. 255-297. Further, although it is seldom recognized in the West, there is also an independent Islamic tradition of just war thinking. For a useful introduction to this tradition, see "Islamic Rulings on Warfare," by Youssef H. Aboul-Enein and Sherifa Zuhur, Strategic Studies Institute, October 2004. (Posted 7/16/06, updated 4/28/07)

• Pacifism: If, as just war theorists maintain, the use of arms is justifiable only as a last resort for the resolution of conflicts, then it is incumbent upon anyone who would propose a just war already to have studied, and to have exhaustively considered or pursued, the full range of non-violent alternatives. Although the ancient Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu directed his ethical criticisms only against "offensive wars" of aggression and conquest, he is sometimes said to have been a pacifist due to his doctrine of "universal love" and his active efforts to prevent armed conflicts during the "warring states" period in which he lived. In The Laws of War and Peace, Grotius was responding in part to Desiderius Erasmus' In Praise of Folly, which presented an impassioned and influential statement of Renaissance Catholic pacifism. Etienne de la Boetie's Of Voluntary Servitude (pdf) (1553) is recognized by many scholars of political thought as one of the earliest and most compelling philosophies of civil disobedience as a form of non-violent resistance to tyrannical regimes of political domination. For other writings that suggest the power and the promise of peaceful social change, turn to Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Mahatma Gandhi's "Freedom's Battle" (updated 7/29/07), and Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and "Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam" (RealPlayer audio). William James' essay 'The Moral Equivalent of War' looks forward to a global "reign of peace," but argues that its achievement requires substitute forms of national service (the argument is often credited with inspiring the establishment of the U.S. Peace Corp). "Democracy or Militarism" is just one of Jane Addam's important works of American pacifism. And "Neither Victims nor Executioners" is Albert Camus' expression of a global existential pacifism. Also well worth reading in the context of American reflection on warfare is Howard Zinn's argument for pacifism in his essay on "Just and Unjust War." For a very helpful guide to the philosophical varieties of pacifism, see Andrew Fiala's article the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy. Some forms of "contingent," "relative" or "conditional" pacifism dovetail with dovish just war theory, according to Larry May's reading of "Grotius and Contingent Pacifism," Studies in the History of Ethics, February 2006. (Added 11/11/06) For a review of successful 20th century practices of political nonviolence, see Gene Sharp's Disregarded History: The Power of Nonviolent Action. Also available online is the entire text of Robert L. Helvey's On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Thinking about the Fundamentals, Albert Einstein Institute, 2004. (Added 1/25/07) Jeff McMahan's bold and excellent work in the field of just war theory is a good candidate for future classic status. Here is his video keynote address on the subject of pacifism for the 2nd On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC2) on May 21, 2007. (Added 5/30/07) Chris Hedges, a fellow pk, has seen enough war not to like it. Check out his 2003 audio or video lecture on "the myth of war" on themes drawn from his book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. (Added 8/10/07) Hippies and folk singers are often associated with absolute pacifism, and Joan Baez's funny defense of the stance is part of the reason why. (Added 7/14/08)

• Look here for the growing number of available online SECONDARY STUDIES of all of the above classic works in the philosophy of peace & war.
• And this is the place for book reviews of these and other recent works in the field of peace and war studies.

TERRORISM & COUNTER-TERRORISM WARFARE: (scroll down for the most recent posts)

• See how the U.S. Code defines terrorism.
• For good information and objective analysis of the U.S. "war against terrorism", it's hard to beat the Federation of American Scientists.
• To keep abreast of the legal news pertaining to counter-terrorism warfare, the Human Rights First website is the place to go.
• Look here for book reviews related to the topic of terrorism.
• The concept of "terrorism" is commonly used to designate unconventional forms of political violence and to condemn those forms of violence as inherently unjust. Click here to visit the Christian Science Monitor's website and test your conception of terrorism.
• Have fun watching a video discussion of terrorism from the underground TV show "No Dogs or Philosophers Allowed".
• Worried that terrorists may attack civilian populations on U.S. soil using radioactive "dirty bombs"? For a realistic assessment of this terrorist threat, follow this link to an informative MSNBC video.
• Igor Primoratz's essay on "State Terrorism & Counterterrorism" (pdf) is available here for downloading from the web.
• Neta C. Crawford offers an insightful evaluation and critique of America's new "permanent war" in "Just War Theory and Counter-Terror War".
• Originally published in the March 1992 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin R. Barber's "Jihad Vs. McWorld" presents an influential argument contending that both tribalism and globalism threaten democracy and generate terrorism. Timothy Mitchell challenges Barber's account in "McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order," Social Text 73, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 2002. (Posted 11/11/05)
• As the nature of warfare has changed over the course of history, just war theorists have repeatedly been confronted with new and challenging questions. Can a "War against Terrorism" be fought by conventional means? Or, as Rob Elder argues, are rations more effective than bombs against such an enemy?
• Looking for a scholarly and authoritative attempt to justify the Bush administration's approach to counter-terrorism warfare from a realpolitik ("instrumental") perspective? If so, then look no further than John Yoo's "Using Force" (pdf). Yoo argues that in an age of global terrorism and rogue nations, a "hegemonic power" like the U.S. can serve both its own narrowly conceived national self-interests AND the broader interests of the world community as a whole by acting on more flexible principles of self-defense than traditional just war theories and international conventions allow. How convenient for the hegemon (or would-be hegemon). If this theory were sound, we would find confirming evidence in how stable, secure and happy U.S. counter-terrorism war efforts are making the rest of the world. Yet, most of the international community is opposed to the kind of American exceptionalism that Bush has embraced and that Yoo defends. Yoo could attempt to address this objection by arguing that dissenting peoples and states (uninformed as they are by his theory) are failing to recognize their "real interests". This rejoinder would be essentially a priori and therefore ultimately unconvincing in any sort of reasonable international dialogue. But at least it would lay bare the essential logic of imperialism: Q: Who is the best judge of your interests? A: The hegemon is, that's who, because it is more powerful than you are. (Posted 7/18/04) (For more of Yoo's thought, see the RIGHTS OF ENEMIES section below.)
• Follow this link to Chief Deputy Attorney General of California Peter Siggins' discussion of the ethics of "Racial Profiling in an Age of Terrorism". (Posted 10/02/04)
• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Rand Corporation fund the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, which is "a comprehensive databank of terrorist incidents and organizations" as identified from a mainstream Washington perspective. (10/11/04)
• Davida Kellogg presents a useful critical account of how Guerrilla Warfare invariably leads to the proliferation of war crimes. (Posted 10/20/04)
• Martin Shaw critically examines the common assumptions of counter-terrorism warfare in his essay, "Risk-transfer militarism and the legitimacy of war after Iraq". See also his Dialectics of War: An Essay in the Social Theory of Total War and Peace. (Posted 11/21/04)
• In his essay on "Terrorism and the Philosophy of History: Liberalism, Realism, and the Supreme Emergency Exemption", Andrew Fiala critically examines John Rawls' Law of Peoples as it applies to counter-terrorism warfare. (Posted 11/24/04)
• In "Optimal War & Jus ad Bellum, Eric A. Posner and Alan O. Sykes defend the Bush administration's post-9/11 policy of pre-emptive self-defense. They conclude that "There are good reasons for allowing preemptive self-defense, quite possibly without Security Council authorization... The potential proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction to rogue states and state sponsors of terrorism provides a rationale for invading dangerous states sooner rather than later." The framework of this approach places too much weight on the "rogue state" designation, which criminalizes enemy states and, accordingly, denies them standard protections of international law. Allowing every state to justify aggression in this manner is a clear recipe for anarchy. It would substitute name-calling and unilateral aggression for the rule of international law. Within any legitimate legal order, there are no criminal persons or states, but only criminal acts. There is no such thing as a rogue nation. There are only roguish acts, such as the promotion of terrorist activities and the unprovoked and harmful invasion of another state. (Posted 12/8/04)
• Cass Sunstein's forthcoming article, "Minimalism at War" (PDF), is now available for dowloading. Abstract: "When national security conflicts with individual liberty, reviewing courts might adopt one of three general orientations: National Security Maximalism, Liberty Maximalism, and minimalism. National Security Maximalism calls for a great deal of deference to the President, above all because of his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Liberty Maximalism asks courts to assume the same liberty-protecting posture in times of war as in times of peace. Minimalism asks courts to follow three precepts: the President needs clear congressional authorization for intruding on interests having a strong claim to constitutional protection; fair hearings should generally be provided to those who have been deprived of their freedom; and courts should discipline their own authority through narrow, incompletely theorized rulings. Of the three positions, Liberty Maximalism is the easiest to dismiss; courts will not and should not adopt it. National Security Maximalism is far more plausible, but it is in grave tension with the constitutional structure, and it is built on excessive optimism about the incentives of the President. The most appealing approach is minimalism, which does remarkably well in capturing prominent decisions of the Supreme Court in World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the war on terrorism." Review: Although this is an important piece of constructive jurisprudence, Sunstein arguably does not make a compelling case for his Ginzburg-style piecemeal judge. Perhaps most importantly, his argument does not adequately address the changing character of "wartime". It makes no sense to allow the historically limited wartime provisions of the past to set the constitutional standard for a condition of counter-terrorism which lacks conceivable historical limits. Sunstein also does not adequately defend the assumption that counter-terrorism ought to proceed by more or less conventional methods of warfare (invasion & occupation) rather than by new, multi-lateral, and at most quasi-military methods of international law enforcement (international forces targeting responsible parties for ICC prosecution). Consequently, he too easily dismisses the appropriateness of a principled juridical protection of civil liberties in present-day U.S. constitutional law. Moreover, his Liberty Maximalist is a straw judge. (Posted 12/28/04)
• Although it hasn't been updated since October 2003, Yale University's Avalon Project houses a useful compendium of internet-available historical documents relating to international terrorism. (Posted 12/29/04)
• If you already have RealPlayer (or if you click here for a free download of it), you can sit back in your thinking chair and listen to an hour long light discussion of terrorism on the PhilosophyTalk radio show, hosted by John Perry and Ken Taylor, and featuring Alan Dershowitz. (Posted 12/30/04)
• Samuel Vaknin's Terrorists and Freedom Fighters, which offers historical analysis of 20th century Balkan conflict, is available for html or richtext dowloading, or online reading, from Project Gutenberg. (Posted 1/23/05)
• It's worth going back in time and reading or watching The Cato Institute's 11/27/2000 Policy Forum on Terrorism. John Parachini's introductory talk is a catalogue of good advice not taken. He emphasizes diplomacy, international law enforcement and prevention, rather than knee-jerk military action. In contrast, Anthony Cordesman is skeptical of, among other solutions, any kind of legal internationalism, though he is open to unsavory alliances with "repressive intelligence services"... (Posted 1/25/05)
• Edmund Santurri examines the moral evaluation of terrorism in "Philosophical Ambiguities in Ostensibly Unambiguous Times" (pdf) -- courtesy of the author and The Journal of Peace and Justice Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2. (Posted 2/2/05)
• "Breathing Easier?" (pdf), is a downloadable empirical report from the Century Foundation Working Group on Bioterrorism Preparedness. (Posted 2/2/05)
• Ronald Dworkin's "Rights and Terror" (pdf) is available for downloading from the NYU Colloquium in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory. (Posted 2/2/05)
• In "Ethics and War: Beyond Just War Theory (pdf), Mervyn Frost argues that "In the global war on terror those using violence will have to be able to demonstrate that they really are serious about defending the values in whose name they are fighting, rather than just using the words to justify terror against terror. Those using force in the nameof defending human rights will have to be seen to be defending human rights, not only at home but also aboard [sic] wherever they are threatened. Those using counterterror measures, including force, in the name of defending democracy, will have to show at home and abroad that they are indeed practising democracy. Those using anti terror methods in the name of protecting a world of free sovereign states, will have to demonstrate in practice that they are doing this and are not practising a form of, not so covert, imperialism." Agreed. (Posted 2/23/05)
• Chalmers Johnson's "Blowback," The Nation September 27, 2001, argues that "World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century -- that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world. The United States likes to think of itself as the winner of the Cold War. In all probability, to those looking back a blowback century hence, neither side will appear to have won, particularly if the United States maintains its present imperial course." (Posted 3/06/05)
• After 9/11, Interights.org published the following two-part report on "Responding to September 11th: The Framework of International Law". Part One concerns international legal limitations on the grounds for waging war: "Peaceful Resolution of Disputes and Use of Force" (pdf). Among the relevant restrictions on the use of force is the (recently ignored) Caroline 'necessity and proportionality' test, which strictly limits the circumstances under which nations may justifiably engage in anticipatory self-defense. The Caroline test requires that the 'necessity' for the use of pre-emptive military force must be "instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and nomoment for deliberation." Part Two of the Interights report concerns "Laws Applicable in Armed Conflict" (pdf), which include restrictions on the use of indiscriminate weapons systems (e.g., landmines, homemade mortars, and cluster munitions), standards for the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war, etc.. (Posted 3/16/05 & 8/9/05)
• In "The Difference Uniforms Make: Collective Violence in Criminal Law and War" (pdf), Christopher Kutz argues "that the special problem of non-uniformed combatants and the general problem of justifying war are profoundly linked." His paper was part of a workshop recently hosted by the Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs, UC Berkeley School of Law. (Posted 3/20/05)
• Mark Tushnet's "Defending Korematsu?: Reflections on Civil Liberties in Wartime" is available here for downloading. It argues that the historical pattern of U.S. governance typically involves over-reaction to national security concerns, adoption of bad solutions that abrogate civil liberties, and expressions of judicial remorse in hindsight. Unlike Sunstein (above), Tushnet acknowledges that the dangers of terrorism constitute a longstanding "normal" security condition, not an episodic state of emergency. Accordingly, a "categorical" approach to the protection of civil liberties is more appropriate than a "balancing" approach that would too readily trade liberty for security. (Posted 4/5/05)
• Janna Thompson's essay, "Is There Such a Thing as a Rogue State" (pdf) is available for downloading from the excellent Working Papers Series of the Australian Research Council's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. (Posted 4/8/05)
• Noam Chomsky's 11/16/2004 lecture, 'Illegal, but Legitimate: A Dubious Doctrine for the Times' is available for viewing as a QuickTime video (1:17:44) from Columbia University's Earth Institute. (Posted 4/11/05)
• Does Poverty Cause Terrorism? According to Alberto Abadie's 'Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism' (National Bureau of Economic Research) "the risk of terrorism is not significantly higher for poorer countries, once other country-specific characteristics are considered." (Posted 5/9/05)
• Peter Golding's "The Transformation of Counter Terrorism" (pdf), from the U.S. Army War College Research Project, April 2002, is worth reviewing. Golding's two main arguments against referring prosecutions for 9/11 terrorist crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court (ICC) are (1) that the ICC does not exist because only 42 of the required 60 signatory nations have ratified the Rome Statute, and (2) that the ICC is unlikely to adopt the death penalty. More than three years later, (2) remains true. And yet, as Golding notes, even the U.S. has been reluctant in the past to use the death penalty against political terrorists on grounds that doing so makes martyrs of them. As for reason (1) for repudiating the authority of the ICC, it effectively evaporated by July of 2002 when the Rome Statute (pdf) went into effect. Now U.S. policy, and the reluctance of the U.S. Senate to ratify the Rome Treaty that President Clinton signed in 1998, are the primary obstacles to the international legal prosecution of terrorist crimes against humanity. (Posted 5/17/05)
• James Turner Johnson's "Jihad and Just War" argues that versions of "radical jihad" which purport to justify terrorism are out of line not only with western just war thinking but also with Islamic tradition. (Posted 6/11/05)
• Jeremy Shapiro and Benedicte Suzan examine 'The French Experience of Counter-terrorism' (pdf), Survival, vol. 45, no. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 67-98. (Accessed 7/11/05 from MetaFilter)
• Samuel P. Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilizations' (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993) is now available from Alamut.com. (Posted 7/16/05) In a more recently published Slate magazine e-mail exchange (May 2006), Robert Kagan and Amartya Sen discuss the shortcomings and merits of the Huntingtonian vision of contemporary global politics. (Posted 7/21/05)
• In his own unique version of the clash-of-civilizations thesis, Rene Girard characterizes the global interplay of terrorism and counter-terrorism (or, better, reciprocal terrorisms) as 'Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale'. (Posted 7/16/05)
• There are a number of game-theoretic analyses of terrorism available on the internet: 'Terrorism and Game Theory' (pdf), by Todd Sandler and Daniel G. Arce, Simulation and Gaming Vol. 34 (3) September 2003; 'Terrorism and Game Theory', by Daniel Tay Kok Siong, Foo Yong Wee & Wee Kien Meng; and 'Terrorism and Game Theory: Coalitions, Negotiations and Audience Costs' (pdf), by C. Maria Keet. (Posted 7/18/05)
• Thomas R. O'Connor hosts a large criminology website, which includes a survey of The Criminology of Terrorism. (Posted 7/22/05)
• Amitai Etzioni argues that nuclear deproliferation should be the "first priority" of counter-terrorism. "The main danger many nations face in the near future is a nuclear attack by terrorists. Attempts to defend against it by hardening domestic targets cannot work, nor can one rely on pre-emption by taking the war to the terrorists before they attack. Hence, there is an urgent need to limit greatly the damage that terrorists will cause by curbing their access to nuclear arms and the materials from which they can be made..." Click here to download the rest of Etzioni's detailed report on 'Pre-Empting Nuclear Terrorism in a New Global Order' (pdf). (Posted 7/27/05)
• In the best of all possible worlds, every academic journal would be available online, free of charge -- just like the Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly. In recent years, Phil Pub Pol Quart has published some of the best philosophical work on counter-terrorism warfare, including the following: "The Perils of Preemptive War" by William A. Galston; "Is Development an Effective Way to Fight Terrorism?" by Lloyd J. Dumas; "The Paradox of Riskless Warfare" by Paul Kahn; "The War on Terrorism and the End of Human Rights" by David Luban; "The Realist Illusion, a Patriarchal Reality, and the Plight of Osama the Pirate" by Robert Hunt Sprinkle; "The Ethics of Retaliation" by Judith Lichtenberg; & "Terrorism, Innocence, and War" by Robert K. Fullinwider. (Posted 8/15/05)
• Carl Conetta, Charles Knight and others at PDA, theProject on Defense Alternatives, have compiled and continue compile an exceedingly useful collection of strategy studies on, among other topics, Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, Homeland Security. (Posted 9/23/05)
• The Counterterrorism Blog, founded and edited by Andrew Cochran, is self-described as "The first multi-expert blog dedicated solely to counterterrorism issues, serving as a gateway to the community for policymakers and serious researchers." It's a good resource for keeping abreast of the inside-the-beltway view of Islamist political violence. (Posted 9/30/05)
• In his essay on "The Mind of Terrorism", Jean Baudrillard suggests that "the terrorist imagination . . . dwells within us all" and the war on terror is "a continuation of the absence of politics by other means." (Posted 10/31/05)
• In this online rough, rough draft of "A Critique of the Rogue Doctrine," Mark Rigstad argues that demonization of other states as a strategic element of the U.S. hegemonic gambit is transparently hypocritical and rhetorically unsustainable. Better to refrain from imagining that nation states have moral personalities. It may be useful when reflecting constructively about norms of international conduct to think about how "virtuous" and "brave" states should behave. But judgments that purport to capture the underlying moral characters of states or regimes should not guide the use of force in specific cases. (Posted 11/1/05)
• Check out "Just War, Humanitarian Intervention and Equal Regard: An Interview with Jean Bethke Elshtain," by Alan Johnson of Democratiya, September 1, 2005. Elshtain is the author of Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, Basic Books, 2003 & Women and War, Basic Books, 1987. (Posted 11/18/05)
• The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) have pre-published online findings from their Research Project on Political Violence which, among other things, endeavors "to analyze how governments have responded to the 'global war on terror' with regard to its impact on their domestic policies, and to assess the effectiveness of these responses in relation to locally based insurgent groups." (Posted 12/23/05) LI>In "Is International Humanitarian Law Lapsing into Irrelevance in the War on International Terror?", Theoretical Inquiries in Law 7(1), 2005, Dan Belz critically examines advocacy of humanitarian law as a means of counter-terrorism from the standpoint of an economic theory concerned with the "audience costs" and "negative externalities" of law. (Posted 12/23/05)
• Thomas Franck addresses the issues of legal theory pertaining to "Preemption, Prevention and Anticipatory Self-Defense" in this video lecture from San Diego State University's Institute of Ethics and Public Affairs, February 19, 2004. (Posted 1/7/06)
• Many just war theorists have supposed that under conditions of "supreme emergency" states are justified in targeting non-combatants who would otherwise be morally and legally immune from attack. In his article on "Supreme Emergencies and the Protection of Non-combatants in War" (International Affairs, Volume 80, October 2004), Alex J. Bellamy offers a cogent challenge to this supposition. His paper is available online for free courtesy of Blackwell-Synergy.com. (Posted 1/14/06)
• In "Defining a Just War," The Nation, October 29, 2001, Richard Falk argues that "The perpetrators of the September 11 attack cannot be reliably neutralized by nonviolent or diplomatic means; a response that includes military action is essential to diminish the threat of repetition, to inflict punishment and to restore a sense of security at home and abroad. . . [and yet] . . . Unlike in major wars of the past, the response to this challenge of apocalyptic terrorism can be effective only if it is also widely perceived as legitimate. And legitimacy can be attained only if the role of military force is marginal to the overall conduct of the war and the relevant frameworks of moral, legal and religious restraint are scrupulously respected." Stephen R. Shalom responds in "A 'Just War'? A Critique of Richard Falk", ZNet, October 21, 2001. Falk's analysis of how our handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has exacerbated the problem of terrorism appears online in "Ending the Death Dance", The Nation, April 29, 2002. Ron Radosh responds unsympathetically in "A New Low for The Nation", FrontPageMag.com, April 19(?), 2002. (Posted 1/15/06)
• Paul Treanor has petitioned the European Parliament "to legalise terrorism, and to assess each case of political violence separately" on grounds that present European law systematically favors the violence of status quo maintenance over the violence of political change. (Posted 1/19/06)
• Amy Ellis Nutt reports for Newhouse News Service that "social cognitive neuroscientists are using technologies that normally detect illnesses to better understand the behavior and motivation of terrorists." It seems the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is funding this research in the hopes of developing neurological sensors which can "literally can look into the brain to uncover malevolence." (Posted 1/19/06)
• Douglas Kellner, UCLA's "radical of the week," offers reflections on "The Mind of Terrorism" (see 10/31/05 post above) in "Baudrillard, Globalization and Terrorism: Some Comments on Recent Adventures of the Image and Spectacle on the Occasion of Baudrillard’s 75th Birthday." (Posted 1/19/06)
• In "The Futility of Barbarism: Assessing the Impact of the Systematic Harm of Non-combatants in War" Ivan Arreguín-Toft asks "Under what conditions does barbarism -- a state or non-state actor's deliberate and systematic injury of non-combatants during a conflict -- help or hinder its military and political objectives?" He finds that "in general, war crime doesn't pay." (Posted 1/20/06)
• The Federation of American Scientists offer useful analyses of agricultural biowarfare and bioterrorism and so much more. (Posted 1/20/06)
• In "Chemical and Biological Terrorism: Lessons from History" (pdf) Mark Wheelis explains that "the extraordinary concern about bioterrorism that has characterized the last decade is misplaced. It has been sparked not by a rational threat analysis, but by worst-case scenarios that assume that terrorist groups are on the verge of developing the capability to deliver a military-style aerosol biological attack. There is no evidence that any terrorist group is within a decade of such a capability." (Posted 1/20/06)
• In "Terrorism and Just War Theory" Scott C. Lowe argues against Andrew Valls and others who maintain that classic principles of just war theory sometimes justify terrorist acts. (Posted 1/20/06)
• In "Defining Terrorism: Philosophy of the Bomb, Propaganda by Deed and Change Through Fear and Violence," Arthur H. Garrison argues that "terrorism can be understoodand defined through the writings of terrorists themselves." Some conception of terrorism is presupposed in the selection of terrorists, however. (Posted 1/24/06)
• Olga Kallergi argues that "the war against terrorism can be won without sacrificing our legal ethics" in "Exporting U.S. Anti-Terrorism Legislation and Policies to the International Law Arena, a Comparative Study: the Effect on Other Countries' Legal Systems." (Posted 1/26/06)
• In "Legal Lines in Shifting Sand: Immigration Law and Human Rights in the Wake of September 11," Daniel Kanstroom outlines a pragmatic, consensus-based approach to the following legal issues in our counter-terrorism practices: "government disclosure and the public's right to know; the deportation system's habeas corpus practices; racial profiling; the convergence of immigration and criminal law since the attacks; judicial review of military detentions at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere; and noncitizens' rights in the United States and the European Union." (Posted 1/26/06)
• Vanda Felbab-Brown examines the connection between international drug trade and political violence in "A Better Strategy Against Narcoterrorism," MIT Center for International Studies Audit of the Conventional Wisdom, January 2006. (Posted 2/9/06)
• Benjamin H. Friedman helps to put into perspective the menace of terrorism and the cost of protecting ourselves against it in "The Hidden Cost of Homeland Defense," MIT Center for International Studies Audit of the Conventional Wisdom, November 2005. (Posted 2/9/06)
• "Good Lives, Bad Lives" is the first chapter of Ted Honderich's book, After the Terror(2002), a sustained philosophical reflection on terrorism. See the JWT Book Reviews page for Richard Wolin's review and Honderich's reply to Wolin. There has also been some extra-curricular controversy surrounding Honderich's book. In this first chapter he argues that "History is a proof that peoples demand the freedom that is their running of their own lives in a place to which their history and culture attaches them. It is a freedom for which oppressed people have always fought. It is a freedom such that a threat against it in 1939 united almost all of us against Germany. It has been denied to the Palestinians. . . Palestinians have been denied by their enemy exactly the right of a people that has been secured and defended by that enemy for itself. . . The terrible inconsistency is plain to all who are unblinded, plain to very many Jews in and out of Israel. No hair-splitting will help. It is as plain to those of us who also see that it was a moral necessity after the second world war that the Jews come to have a homeland, in Palestine if not elsewhere." (First posted 1/10/05, updated 2/23/06)
• Alan Johnson argues that "The fact is we are not engaged in a 'war on terror', any more than World War Two was a 'war on blitzkrieg'. We are engaged in a conflict with Totalitarian Political Islam and our enemy uses not only terror but also 'popular' riot, electoral politics, and ideological warfare." His essay, "Camus' Catch: How Democracies Can Defeat Totalitarian Political Islam," recommends a form of democratic internationalism as the key component of a workable political solution. (Posted 3/16/06)
• In "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt argue that "saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around." This long and detailed study of the impact of pro-Israel lobbying on U.S. security interests is also available in abridged form. (Posted 3/23/06)
• Robin Frost's "Nuclear Terrorism Post-9/11: Assessing the Risks," Global Society, Vol 18, No 4, October 2004, is available as a sample upon request from Routledge. (Posted 3/25/05)
• In this December 2004 video (RealPlayer), Alan Krueger presents a lecture entitled, in the manner of presidential locution, "Misunderestimating Terrorism: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism". Available from Princeton WebMedia. (Posted 4/24/06)
• In "The Crusader", a review of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (edited by Bruce Lawrence and translated by James Howarth), Khaled Abou El Fadl provides insight into the worldview of America's elusive enemy and argues that we have unwisely bolstered its credibility. (Posted 5/17/06)
• In "Terrorism and Response: A Moral Inquiry into the Killing of Noncombatants," Camillo C. Bica argues that the deliberate killing of non-combatants in terrorist attacks and the "collateral" killing of non-combatants in counter-terrorism warfare are "morally equivalent." (Posted 5/18/06)
• Richard J. Goldstone and Janine Simpson remind us of "the important link between peace and prosecution by an impartial court" in "Evaluating the Role of the International Criminal Court as a Legal Response to Terrorism," Harvard Human Rights Journal, Volume 16, 2003. (Posted 5/21/06)
• James Roper uses rational choice theory to show that American's exaggerate the risk of terrorism in "Probability and Risk Assessment: Taking a Chance on 'Terrorism'," Florida Philosophical Review, Vol. II, issue 2, Winter 2002. (Posted 5/21/06)
• In "Optimal Liability for Terrorism," Darius Lakdawalla and Eric Talley offer a game-theoretic analysis to show that "the September 11 Victims' Compensation Fund waswell-conceived, but may not have gone far enough to preclude opt-out tort claims." (Posted 6/1/06)
• In "Before and After 9/11," Ars Disputandi, Volume 6, 2006, Tom Rockmore challenges the notion that 9/11 radically altered the shape of global society. (Posted 6/22/06)
• In ""Terrorism and War," The Journal of Ethics Volume 8, 2004, Virginia Held compares war and terrorism "to show how war can be morally worse." (Posted 7/7/06)
• Question: How difficult would it be for terrorists to smuggle radioactive materials across U.S. borders? Answer: Not very difficult at all. The proof is in this interesting report of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). (Posted 7/12/06)
• Anna Goppel's "Defining 'Terrorism' in the Context of International Law", Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Working Paper 2005/1, proposes set of requirements that a useful international definition ought to meet and defines terrorism accordingly. (Posted 7/13/06)
• Samuel Scheffler asks "What's Morally Distinctive about Terrorism?", in contrast with other prima facie evils. He finds that what is distinctive about terrorism is that, in producing the kind of widespread fear that destabilizes existing social orders, it "treats the primary victims as means to a means." (Posted 7/13/06)
• Allen Buchanan's outstanding and important "Institutionalizing the Just War" is publicly available online for a limited time, thanks to the IPT Beacon. I include it in this section because it addresses the issue of preventive military force in the global war on terror. "The debate has proceeded within the confines of a rarely stated framing assumption: that the key question is whether to abandon the JWN [Just War Norm "according to which war is permissible only in response to an actual or imminent attack"] in favor of a more permissive norm regarding the use of force. I shall argue that the assumption that the choice between competing norms is mistaken. The proper choice is between adherence to the JWN and the creation of new institutions that would allow for a more permissive norm. Not just alternative norms but also alternative combinations of norms and institutions need to be evaluated." Buchanan also addresses the issue of whether and under what institutional conditions interventive wars of "forced democratization" may be justifiable; so, it also belongs in the following section (though you won't find it there). I strongly agree with Buchanan's general claim that just war theory, broadly construed as ethical theorizing about the restraint of warfare, cannot simply invoke a priori intuitive principles, but must consider possibilities for normative change that might follow from changes in global institutions. But I'm not convinced by the suggestion that we can achieve adequate institutional restraints in the absence of an authoritative global juridical body like the ICC. There is, of course, no a priori reason for thinking that human rights will be protected best by the ICC as currently established. But what global system of checks and balances can adequately restrain putatively preventive and democratizing wars in the absence of juridical institutions for the enforcement of international human rights law? It sounds like a good start to require that perpetrators of unjust regime changes "must bear a greater proportion of the costs of the war and of post-war reconstruction and / or have less of a say in how the reconstruction is carried out." But why not also add courts of universal jurisdiction to the mix? (Posted 7/30/06)
• In "Killing Naked Soldiers: Distinguishing between Combatants and Noncombatants," Ethics & International Affairs Volume 19, Issue 3, December 2005, Larry May critically examines and reformulates the traditional principle of discrimination that informs both just war theory and international humanitarian law. (Posted 8/15/06)
• Check out Robin Frost's reasoned assessment of "Nuclear Terrorism Post-9/11: Assessing the Risks," Global Society, Volume 18, Number 4, October 2004. Registration required for free access. (Posted 8/16/06)
• In "The Failures of Just War Theory: Terrorism, Harm & Justice" (2003), F. M. Kamm critically examines the doctrine of double-effect and specifies conditions under which terrorism may be justifiable. (Posted 9/3/06)
• In "Pyrrhus on the Potomac: How America's post-9/11 wars haveundermined US national security," Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Report, number 18, September 5, 2006, Carl Conetta argues persuasively that "measured in the coin of long-term security and stability, post-9/11 policy has cost more than it has gained." (Posted 9/8/06)
• Is the "hunt" for Osama bin Laden a ruse? Michel Chossudovsky argues that it is in "Where was Osama on September 11, 2001?," Center for Research on Globalization, September 9, 2006. (Posted 9/14/06)
• The latest buzzword for bipartisan collaboration in counter-terrorism is "Energy Security," which is increasingly conceived as requiring U.S. independence from foreign oil, but especially from "rogue nation" oil. This means that we can effectively resist terrorism by developing biofuels and other alternative energy sources; but it also means that one of the American casualties of the war on terror may be the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. (Posted 9/22/06)
• In "How to Deal with Terrorism," The Economists' Voice, Vol. 3: No. 7, Article 4, 2006, Bruno S. Frey argues that "terrorism has been fought in the wrong way. Instead of focusing on deterrence and preemptive strikes, we should: (1) Reduce vulnerability by decentralizing society; (2) Strengthen positive incentives to leave the terrorist camp; and (3) Divert media attention from terrorist groups." Registration with this journal is free. (Posted 10/10/06)
• In "Peace Cops? Christian Peacemaking and the Implications of a Global Police Force," Sojourners Magazine, March 2006, Tobias Winright explores the prospects for Christian participation in a globalized "community policing" approach to counter-terrrorism. Thanks to Tobias for sharing the link. (Posted 10/20/06)
• Kenneth Anderson outlines a congressional agenda for counter-terrorism legislation in "Law and Terror," Policy Review, volume 139, October/November 2006. The judiciary can only be expected to play a marginal role in the task of specifying the limits of executive power, and so far the legislative branch has offered very little in the way of clear and effective checks and balances. (Posted 10/21/06)
• C. A. J. Coady's "Defining Terrorism," from Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, Igor Primoratz ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 3-14, is available online courtesy of the publisher. (Posted 10/28/06)
• "The Terrorism Index," Foreign Policy, July/August 2006, asks "Is the United States winning the war on terror?" Answer: "Not according to more than 100 of America's top foreign-policy hands. They see a national security apparatus in disrepair and a government that is failing to protect the public from the next attack..." (Posted 11/10/06)
• Whitley Kaufman's "What's Wrong with Preventive War? The Moral and Legal Basis for the Preventive Use of Force," Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 19, Number 3, Fall 2005, argues that "Both under Just War Doctrine and common sense morality, preventive war is indeed justifiable, so long as it satisfies the basic requirements for going to war such as necessity and proportionality. However, under the current international law regime governed by the United Nations Charter, the use of preventive international force is restricted to the Security Council alone." (Posted 11/30/06)
• Bruce Ackerman argues for dealing with terrorist attacks in terms of "The Emergency Constitution," and argues that "This is not War," in Yale Law Journal, Volume 113, 2004. In his view, which is more reasonable than the conventional wisdom, terrorist attacks should be considered as constitutionally and temporally limited "states of emergency" short of war. (Posted 12/18/06)
• In "The 'War on Terror' and the Erosion of the Rule of Law:The U.S. Hearings of the ICJ Eminent Jurist Panel," Human Rights Brief, Volume 14, Issue 1, Winter 2006, Mark W. Vorkink & Erin M. Scheick look at the global war on terror as a "litmus test" for human rights and the rule of law. (Posted 1/21/07)
• William E. Scheuerman, "Rethinking Crisis Government," 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, August 29-September 1, 2002. Abstract: "The rush to broaden executive prerogative in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks rests on a series of traditional assumptions about the nature of executive power that no longer hold water. In particular, the conventional conception of the unitary executive as best suited to the demanding tasks of crisis government is subject to criticism." (Posted 1/25/07)
• In "Sending the Bureaucracy to War," Forthcoming in Iowa Law Review, Volume 92, 2007, Elena A. Baylis & David Zaring critically examine post-9/11 changes in U.S. administrative law that facilitate certain abuses of state and federal executive powers. (Posted 2/1/07)
• In section III of "Morality & Consequences," The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, May 1980, Jonathan Bennett examines the "oddness" of the doctrine of double effect that is often invoked to distinguish between justifiable tactical bombing and unjustifiable terror bombing. (Posted 2/3/07)
• Foreign Policy's "Terrorism Index," a bi-partisan study of 100 top national security experts, suggests that the global war on terror has made American's less secure. (Posted 2/16/07)
• In "A Matter of Pride," Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Winter 2007, Michael Lind & Peter Bergen argue that the "humiliation theory" of radical political violence explains "why so many terrorists come from middle-class or wealthy backgrounds." (Posted 2/18/07)
• In "Countering Global Insurgency," Small Wars Journal, November 30, 2004, David Kilcullen outlines a "disaggregation" strategy for managing the "ecosystem" of Islamist terrorism. See also his "Counterinsurgency Redux," Small Wars Journal, September 17, 2006. (Posted 2/27/07)
• In "The Bush Doctrine and Just War Theory", The Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution, volume 6, number 1, Fall, 2004, Dale T. Snauwaert argues that "In a number of ways the Bush Doctrine as a response to international terrorism is, tragically,undermining the international moral and legal order, thereby undermining the very order necessary for sustainable security against terrorism." (Posted 3/14/07)
• In "Assessing the Effectiveness ofthe UN Security Council's Anti-terrorism Measures: TheQuest for Legitimacy and Cohesion," The European Journal of International Law, Vol. 17, no.5, 2007, pp. 881-919, Andrea Bianchi "attempts to evaluate, primarily from the perspective of legal interpretation, how to reconcile the predominant security concerns underlying anti-terror measures with the cohesion of the international legal system." (Posted 6/9/07)
• In "Assassination and Targeted Killing: Law Enforcement, Execution or Self-Defence?" Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2006, Michael Gross argues that "While named killings might be defensible on the grounds that there are no other ways to disable combatants when they fight without uniforms, the costs, including the cost of targeted killing emerging as an acceptable convention in its own right, should be sufficient to view the practice with a good deal of caution." (Posted 6/17/07)
• In "Jus Ad Bellum After 9/11: A State of the Art Report" (pdf), The International Political Theory Beacon, Issue 3, June 2007, Mark Rigstad presents an overview and critical assessment of how just war theoretic principles of just cause, discrimination, and proportionality have been applied in the Global War on Terror. Also available here in html format. (Posted 4/30/07. Updated 6/17/07)
• Chet Richards has posted online a draft of the introduction to his next book, If We Can Keep It, in which he debunks our myths of national defense. (Posted 6/18/07)
• Richard Rorty recently died at 75, unleashing a torrent of reminiscence, criticism and encomium. On March 4, 2004, in Potsdam, Rorty concluded a lecture about "Anti-terrorism and the National Security State" with these ominous words: "In Europe and in North America elites have come to believe that they cannot carry out their mission of providing national security if their deliberations are carried out in public, and 9/11 only strengthened this conviction. Further attacks are likely to persuade those elites that they must destroy democracy in order to save it. Historians may someday have to explain why the West's golden age lasted only 200 years. The saddest pages in their books will be those in which they describe how the citizens of the democracies, by their craven acquiescence in governmental secrecy, helped bring about the disaster." Was he right? At this point, who knows? As Rorty himself once famously said, "Time will tell; but epistemology won't." Setting aside the question of the truth of Rorty's conclusion, I'm left simply with the desire that it should be proven wrong, and the desire to do something that might help to prove it wrong. Insofar as this appears to be the kind of response that Rorty wished to elicit, I guess I'm in accord. Follow these links to watch part one and part two of the video recording of Rorty's lecture. (Posted 6/21/07)
• In "The Legacy of Nuremberg: Confronting Genocide and Terrorism Through the Rule of Law," Gonzaga Journal of International Law, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2006, John Shattuck argues that the Bush Doctrine has undermined our most effective legal means of combating terrorism. (Posted 6/26/07)
• In "Criminal Defendants and Military Enemies: Defining the Terrorist Threat," FSU College of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 264, August 24, 2007, Benjamin J. Priester defends a way of integrating military and criminal models for defining transnational terrorist organizations. (Posted 9/1/07)
• David M. Lieberman examines the legal difference between terrorists and freedom fighters in "Sorting the Revolutionary from the Terrorist: The Delicate Application of the 'Political Offense' Exception in U.S. Extradition Cases," Stanford Law Review, Volume 59, Issue 1, pp. 181-212. (Posted 10/20/07)
• Neal Katyal addresses the constitutional 'equal protection' issues raised by the Military Commissions Act in "Equality in the War on Terror," Stanford Law Review, Volume 59, Issue 5, pp. 1365-1394. (Posted 10/20/07)
• In "Rendered Meaningless: Extraordinary Rendition and the Rule of Law," NYU School of Law Working Papers Number 43, November 20, 2006, Margaret L. Satterthwaite examines arguments in favor of outsourcing torture, and finds them wanting. (11/10/07)
• In "Terrorism and Just War," Philosophia, Volume 34, August 2006, pp. 3�12, Michael Walzer asks "What can go wrong in the �war� against terrorism, and is just war theory equally helpful in thinking about this �war� � where the scare quotes are always necessary?" (Posted 11/14/07)
• In "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 3, August 2003, Robert A. Pape argues that "Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. . . To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions." (Posted 12/26/07)
• In "Terrorism, Shared Rules and Trust," forthcoming in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Matthew Noah Smith argues that "terrorism is specially objectionable because terrorist acts threaten two very valuable things: valuable shared rules of war and valuable trusting relationships between both international allies and nations at war." (Posted 1/16/08)
• In "The Senses of Terrorism," forthcoming in Review Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 6, fall 2008, Mark Rigstad exposes "the methodological errors involved in attempting to value-neutralize the concept" of 'terrorism,' and defends "an effects-based approach to the taxonomy of �terrorism� that builds out from a central conceptual connection between the term�s negative connotation and a widely shared moral presumption against the killing of innocent non-combatants." (Posted 1/16/08)
• For a very good introductory overview of the philosophy of "Terrorism", see Igor Primoratz's entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Posted 2/10/08)
• In "They knew, but did nothing," an extract from his new book on the 9/11 Commission, Philip Shenon "uncovers how the White House tried to hide the truth of its ineptitude leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks." (Posted 3/10/08)
• In "Making War on Terrorists: Reflections on Harming the Innocent," Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 16, Issue 1, pp. 1-25, March 2008, Thomas Pogge asks "whether all this barbarity, much of it inflicted on innocents, is necessary to protect our societies from terrorist attacks." Good question. Pogge argues that "the vast majority" in the US & UK unthinkingly assume that our governments' "first responsibility" to protect its own citizens is not seriously constrained by "the interests of innocent people abroad." The upshot is a damning indictment: "This is a disastrous flaw in our public culture�one that, quite apart from its horrific effects, fundamentally undermines our ambition to be a civilization that strives for moral decency." (Posted 4/26/08)
• Karl Schmitt's "Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political" (1963) is available online from Telos 127, Spring 2004. The essay presents a historical analysis of the modern development of irregular troops (including what we would now call terrorists) as elements in the theory and practice of political strategy and military tactics. (Posted 7/25/08)
• Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress have released their 2008 Terrorism Index. The study records an emerging optimism that suggests that the GWOT is winning the hearts and minds of leading U.S. counter-terrorism industry experts. (Posted 8/20/08)
• In "The dangers of fighting terrorism with technocommunitarianism: constitutional protections of free expression, exploration, and unmonitored activity in urban spaces," Fordham Urban Law Journal, July 1, 2005, Marc Blitz argues that "Unlike modern Fourth Amendment case law, which gives short shrift to the importance of insulating public space from government control and design, modern First Amendment law places meaningful limits on the control that governmental authorities may exercise over streets, parks, and other public spaces central to urban life." (Posted 9/2/08)
• Thanks to Robert Chesney of the NationalSecurityLaw listserve and Chris Borgen at the Opinio Juris blog for giving notice of the online presence of South Texas Law Review's September 2008 symposium on "Law, Ethics, and the War on Terror," featuring Col. Fred L. Borch, Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., and many other experts on terrorism law. The program is here. Follow these links to view videos of part one and part two of the symposium. (Posted 11/19/08)
• The ForaTV video below presents an penetrating workshop on "State and International Legal Responses to Terrorism," held October 22nd, 2007 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. It features panelists Professor William Banks, Professor Claude Bruderlein and Colonel William Lietzau; and it is moderated by Victoria Holt. (Posted 11/25/08)
• In "Fatal Choices: Israel's Policy of Targeted Killing," Mideast Security and Policy Studies, No. 51, September 2002, Steven R. David argues that although targeted killings have "not appreciably diminished the costs of terrorist attacks and may have even increased them," nevertheless the practice is justifiable as a means of "providing retribution and revenge for a population under siege," and because it "may, over the long term, help create conditions for a more secure Israel." (Posted 11/25/08)
• In this online draft of "The Legality of Targeted Killing as an Instrument of War: The Case of Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi," prepared for the 5th Global Conference on War, Virtual War and Human Security, Budapest 2008, Avery Plaw argues that "while there is a strong case for the legality of the al-Harethi operation, this case relies on elements that may not apply to many other cases. The al-Harethi case thus helps to define the legal limits of targeted killing." (Posted 11/30/08)
• "On Wednesday, January 28, 2009, the University of Texas School of Law and the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law hosted a panel discussion about the task of reforming the government's approach to military detentions... The distinguished panel included John Bellinger, who served as Legal Adviser to the Secretary of State and to the National Security Council during the Bush Administration; Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institute, author of the book Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in Age of Terror; and Stephen Vladeck, professor of law at American University and coauthor of a brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of Guantanamo detainee Salim Hamdan. Professor Bobby Chesney, a Strauss Center fellow and visiting professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law, facilitated the discussion." Follow this link to see a video webcast of "The Post-Guantanamo Era: A Dialogue on the Law and Policy of Detention and Counterterrorism." (Posted 2/6/09)
• In "Terrorism and the Proportionality of Internet Surveillance," European Journal of Criminology, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2009, Ian Brown and Douwe Korff argue that the "disproportionate nature" of internet-based surveillance and profiling of terrorism suspects is "problematic for democracy and the rule of law, and will lead to practical difficulties for cross-border cooperation between law enforcement agencies." (Posted 2/10/09)
• In "Targeted Killing," Daniel Statman argues that "if one accepts the moral legitimacy of the large-scale killing of combatants in conventional (what may come to be called 'old-fashioned') wars, one cannot object -- on moral grounds -- to the targeted killing of terrorists in what are called wars against terror. If one rejects this legitimacy, one must object to all killing in war, targeted and non-targeted alike, and thus not support the view, which is criticized here, that targeted killings are particularly disturbing from a moral point of view." (Posted 2/15/09)
• In "Can Terrorism Be Justified?" Ethics in International Affairs, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001, Andrew Valls argues that "terrorism, understood as political violence committed by nonstate actors, can be assessed from the point of view of just war theory and that terrorist acts can indeed satisfy the theory's criteria." Although I have argued in "The Senses of Terrorism" that Valls' semantic methodology is fundamentally flawed, I nevertheless recommend the article. (Posted 2/26/09)
• In "War About Terror: Civil Liberties and National Security after 9/11," a Council on Foreign Relations working paper, February 2009, Daniel B. Prieto argues that "sharp disagreements over national security and civil liberties, as well as errors and overreach in U.S. counterterrorism practices, have stood in the way of America�s ability to forge a critical and sustainable foreign policy accord on how to address terrorist detention and trials, as well as domestic intelligence policies. The study recommends that the United States reexamine the scope and limits of its war against al-Qaeda, treating national security and the protection of individual liberties as coequal objectives." (Posted 3/25/09)
• In "Playing by the Rules: Combating Al Qaeda within the Law of War," Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper No. 16, April 7, 2009, David W. Glazier argues that "Good faith application of law of war rules . . . offers better protections for civil liberties than currently proposed solutions such as national security courts offering less due process than regular federal trials." (Posted 5/13/09)
• In this excerpt from Philosophy in a Time of Terror, Giovanna Borradori interviews Jurgen Habermas and Jaques Derrida on 9/11 and the problem of global terrorism. (Posted 6/24/09)
• In "Barbarians and the International Law: Beyond the Gates of Liberty?", a paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th Annual Convention, Bridging Multiple Divides, Hilton San Francisco, CA, March 26, 2008, Daniel Brunstetter examines the place of "barbarians" in Renaissance and Early Modern sources of international legal theory -- from Vitoria to Kant -- as a way of shedding light on the war on terror. Brunstetter takes the idea of the evil of terrorism seriously, yet gives Las Casas the final word of warning: "every nation, no matter how barbaric, has the right to defend itself against a more civilized one that wants to conquer it." (Posted 10/26/09)

INVASION & OCCUPATION OF IRAQ: (scroll down for the most recent posts)

• David M. Ackerman offers a useful analysis of "International Law and the Preemptive Use of Force against Iraq" for the Congressional Research Service.
• Look to Centcom's Multinational Security Transition Command website for the success stories of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
• In the fall of 2002 and spring of 2003, the vocabulary of just war theory was often heard accompanying the drums of war. Yet, the cosmopolitan principles that have traditionally given those words some semblance of ethical meaning were strangely and sadly silent. Follow these links to find out in what ways the invasion of Iraq violated both the letter and (especially) the spirit of Hugo Grotius' just war theory, as presented by Dean G. Falvy & Martha Nussbaum respectively. (Posted summer 2004)
• The primary putative justification for pre-emptive invasion of Iraq was based upon what the U.S. Senate has since discovered were "overstated", "unsupported" and "micharacterized" intelligence reports about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. All the declassified parts of the Committee on Intelligence report are available here for downloading. (Posted summer 2004))
• What role did the media play in misrepresenting the scope and immediacy of the threat that Saddam Hussein's regime presented to the U.S.? Susan D. Moeller gives a thorough answer to this question in her analysis of Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction for the University of Maryland's Center for International and Stragetic Studies. (Posted summer 2004)
• One of the enduring basic principles of just war theory is the principle of discrimination, which enjoins the commanders of armed forces to take positive steps to protect non-combatants. Yet, the use of cluster munitions in Iraq, especially in densely populated areas, constitutes a clear violation of this principle. Unexploded cluster munitions now clutter Iraqi cityscapes like countless tiny but deadly landmines. (Posted summerr 2004)
• As with its physical environment, Iraq's political climate is also fraught with new and challenging perils (whether these will turn out to be better or worse than the old political perils remains to be seen). In "Humanitarian Action Under Attack: Reoections on the Iraq War," Harvard Human Rights Journal, Volume 17, Spring 2004, Nicholas de Torrente of Doctors Without Borders presents a revealing study of how the political climate in Iraq has added to the usual difficulties of humanitarian action. He argues that non-governmental humanitarian organizations need to maintain principled neutrality in order to fulfill their missions. In "Politicized Humanitarianism," Paul O'Brien offer a critical response to de Torrente's article. (Posted summer 2004)
• Does depleted uranium pose a serious health risk to both innocent Iraqis and unsuspecting coalition ground troops? Dan Fahey's June 2004 article, "The Emergence and Decline of the Debate over Depleted Uranium Munitions," is the most exhaustive and balanced assessment of the facts, fictions and uncertainties that I have found. It's available for downloading (pdf) from the Review of International Social Questions. (Posted 7/18/04)
• Cross-cultural incomprehension got the U.S. military into trouble in Vietnam (see, for example, Errol Morris's documentary film 'The Fog of War' which includes Robert MacNamara's tardy realization that the Vietnamese did not view us as liberators). Yet, the lesson did not take. In a similar fashion, the Bush administration, blaming Chalabi and other Iraqi ex-pats, has admitted that it was ill-informed about the disposition of the Iraqi people towards U.S.-sponsored regime change in their country. Better information was available, however. For starters, Juan Cole's Informed Comment is an excellent internet resource for making sense of Islamic politics in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. (8/26/04)

• Also worth mentioning when calculating the costs of the Iraqi invasion and occupation, over and above the countless and too often uncounted Iraqi casualties, are the thousands of U.S. casualties. Perhaps most alarming is that the U.S. casualty rate has actually increased since the president officially declared the 'end of combat operations'. For those interested in the numbers, the most accurate and detailed report of U.S. casualties in Iraq is the one presented by GlobalSecurity.org. (9/3/04)
• In the early spring of 2003, I argued that the most likely outcome of a U.S./British invasion of Iraq was the eventual "partitioning" of that country. I imagined at that time a process over which the "coalition" forces had more control than the process currently unfolding. "Partitioning" no longer seems the appropriate word for the potential demise of Iraq's national integrity. In this connection, Chatham House has now published a relevant report (pdf) characterizing "civil war" and "fragmentation" as the "default scenario" in Iraq. The Chatham House scholars present two other well-drawn alternative scenarios for Iraq "holding together" or undergoing a unique sort of "regional remake". (9/04/04)
• Adam Roberts of the International Humanitarian Law Research Initiative (a site with free, no-strings registration) attempts to answer a swarm of pesky questions about the occupation of Iraq, including the following: "What does the law of war, and international practice since 1945, say about how occupations end? What does 'sovereignty' mean both in general, and with reference to the Interim Government of Iraq? Is the continuing presence of foreign forces compatible with Iraqi sovereignty?" (Posted 10/26/04)
• A new Johns Hopkins University study puts the civilian toll in Iraq at over 100,000 and climbing. This is an important figure given that apologists for the war, such as Gerard Alexander, have argued erroneously that the invasion and occupation has probably SAVED civilian lives because "the [Hussein] regime was killing civilians at an average rate of at least 16,000 a year between 1979 and March 2003." To be sure, the ongoing hybrid Iraqi insurgency/civil war is the cause of most of these civilians deaths. But it remains important to construct normative and policy arguments in light of the facts, not in the face of them. Fact: the rate at which civilians are killed in Iraq has more than tripled since regime change commenced. (Posted 10/30/04)
• David Luban tackles the central philosophical issue raised by the putative justification for invading Iraq in his scholarly examination of "Preventive War". This piece is a must-read for serious just war theorists. (Posted 11/23/04)
• Jeff McMahan's "Moral Case Against the Iraq War" is available for dowloading courtesy of The Leiter Report. (12/1/04)
• Many liberals who originally supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq are now feeling embarrassed and angry at having been duped. It's in this spirit that the New Republic now presents a daily critical BLOG called IRAQ'D. (Posted 12/30/04)
• Bradford Plumer of MotherJones interviews Noah Feldman, former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, "on the ethics of nation-building and the promise and perils of Iraqi elections." (Posted 1/21/05)
• The International Crisis Group makes constructive recommendations for the resolution of Turkish-Kurdish tensions in Kirkuk. (Posted 1/29/05)
• Susie Linfield's refreshing and insightful "The Dance of Civilizations:The West, the East, and Abu Ghraib," is available from the Winter 2005 edition of Dissent magazine. (Posted 2/9/05)
• "There are things I have to do out here that I can't explain to my chain of command, and that the American people would never understand," says Sgt. First Class Glenn Aldrich in a Knight Ridder interview that probes deeper than most mainstream media coverage into the ethical and strategic difficulties that U.S. troops are facing in Iraq. (Posted 2/19/05)
• In "Going to War with the Army You Have", Michael Schwartz casts doubt on the prevailing American "command and control" theory about the Iraqi resistance. The CIA seems to agree with Schwartz. (Posted 3/8/05)
• Mapping the Oil Motive (from the Global Policy Forum): "Michael T. Klare (TomPaine) writes that the Bush administration's choice to invade Iraq stemmed from "a combination of contributing factors," including control of the country's oil resources. But "it appears that the US incursion into Iraq [...] has largely failed to achieve its intended purposes." The insurgency has crippled the country's capacity to export more oil, and "no one is willing to predict when, if ever, the country will reach the fabled level of 6 million barrels per day" that US officials confidently spoke of after the invasion." (Posted 3/25/05)
• H. C. Graf Von Sponek's "Iraq and the United Nations, Post-War and Pre-Peace: The Dilemma of the Future" (pdf) is available for downloading from The Essex Human Rights Review, vol. 2, no. 1. The article examines why UN sanctions against Iraq were deemed "necessary in the name of international peace and security despite their negative humanitarianconsequences," it attempts to identify the "institutional failings which contributed towards such a policy," and it recommends "alternative approaches". (Posted 3/30/05)
• Naomi Klein offers some astute observations and analyses in "How To End The War", In These Times. Klein went to Iraq to cover the reconstruction and was surprised by what she found: "...I saw bulldozers in the Green Zone, where a huge amount of construction was going on, building up Bechtel's headquarters and getting the new U.S. embassy ready. There was also a ton of construction going on at all of the U.S. military bases. But, on the streets of Baghdad, the former ministry buildings are absolutely untouched. They hadn't even cleared away the rubble, let alone started the reconstruction process... The one crane I saw in the streets of Baghdad was hoisting an advertising billboard. One of the surreal things about Baghdad is that the old city lies in ruins, yet there are these shiny new billboards advertising the glories of the global economy. And the message is: 'Everything you were before isn't worth rebuilding.' We're going to import a brand-new country. It is the Iraq version of the 'Extreme Makeover'..." May 5, 2005. (Posted 5/6/05)
• The "Downing Street memo" contains the minutes of July 23, 2002 meeting in which British officials discussed talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. The memo was leaked to The Times of London, and it confirms that the Bush administration deliberately falsified its case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As it states, British officials knew that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." (Posted 5/17/05)
• 'Vicious Circle: The Dynamics of Occupation and Resistance in Iraq', by Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA), is a new, informative online report, based upon Iraqi public opinion surveys. It suggests that U.S. withdrawal is probably the best way to quell the growing insurgency. (Posted 5/21/05)
• In "Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq War: Realism Versus Neo-Conservatism," from OpenDemocracy.net, John Mearsheimer argues that the influential American realist would have opposed the occupation of Iraq the way he opposed the war in Vietnam. (Posted 5/21/05)
• James Turner Johnson's approach to just war theory offered strong support in December 2002 for waging a punitive and democratizing war in Iraq. His "Using Military Force Against the Saddam Hussein Regime:The Moral Issues" is available courtesy of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. (Posted 6/11/05)
• The texts of numerous presentations at the ongoing World Tribunal on Iraq are available for viewing online. (Posted 6/25/05)
• As a follow up to 'Vicious Circle' (my 5/21 post above), the PDA presents '400 Days and Out', a report outlining a withdrawal process for U.S. troops in Iraq by september 2006. (Posted 7/18/05)
• James B. Rule's "'Above All, Do No Harm': The War in Iraq and Dissent" is available online in the summer 2005 edition of Dissent Magazine. (Posted 8/9/05)
• In a recent edition of Michigan International Lawyer, John M. Hilla addresses the question of whether the invasion of Iraq has reshaped the norms of international customary law relating to the use of force. (Posted 8/15/05)
• Jeffrey Laurenti of the Century Foundation examines the implications of putting the US occupation to a vote in the anticipated Iraqi constitutional referendum. (Posted 8/25/05)
• Sami Zubaida examines the difficulties a workable Iraqi constitution will have to address. The author fears these difficulties may be too great for constitutional stability in Iraq. (Posted 8/25/05)
• Mary Ellen O'Connell presents a helpful analysis of the issues of legality surrounding the war in Iraq in her "Addendum to Armed Force in Iraq", American Society of International Law Insights, April 2003. (Posted 10/26/05)
• Once officially denied, the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi insurgents is now admitted as fact. Accordingly, George Monbiot observes in yesterday's Guardian, "Saddam, facing a possible death sentence, is accused of mass murder, torture, false imprisonment and the use of chemical weapons. He is certainly guilty on all counts. So, it now seems, are those who overthrew him." Click here to read more of Monbiot's account of the use of phosphorus and napalm in Iraq. And click here to read Paul Reynolds circumspect account of the controversy for today's BBC news. (Posted 11/16/05)
• War is hard on the body. In a brief reflection on "Stoic Warriors" (an offshoot of her book by the same title), Nancy Sherman addresses the questions of ethical philosophy that might be asked by soldiers returning home from active duty after suffering disabling bodily injuries. (Posted 12/06/05)
• Michael Walzer's article on "Just and Unjust Occupations", Dissent winter 2004, was inspired by the case of Iraq, though it has wider application. (Posted 12/11/05)
• It once made sense to speak of "civil war" as a possible scenario in Iraq, but now it seems the only term that can adequately capture present conditions in that country. Paul Starobin 12/9/05 commentary in the National Journal brings this point home. (Posted 12/13/05)
• In "Iraq and the Use of Force: Do the Side-Effects Justify the Means?", Theoretical Inquiries in Law 7(1), 2005, Robert Cryer and A.P. Simester address the question of whether the moral argument for positive humanitarian consequences in Iraq could (if convincing on its own terms) provide a defense against the charge that the invasion was illegal. (Posted 12/23/05)
• In "'Preventive War' and International Law After Iraq," Duncan E. J. Currie finds "that any members of the 'coalition of the willing' may be responsible for compensation, including direct loss, damage, including environmental damage and the depletion of natural resources, or injury to foreign Governments, nationals and corporations... Under Security Council resolution 1483 (2003), no protection is given to Member States or their officials from liability under the Geneva Conventions, Hague Regulations or other provisions of international or national law including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court." (Posted 12/25/05)
• The Grotian Moment is a good blog on the trial of Saddam Hussein hosted by the Case School of Law. (Posted 1/1/06)
• Too little open-minded attention was paid to critics of the proposed invasion of Iraq prior to its commencement. Indeed, such critics were often intimidated and accused of being anti-American or seditious. Even critical arguments about U.S. national interests were given too little notice. Yet, wouldn't the U.S. and the rest of the world be better off today if the Bush administration had taken the advice of, say, Richard Falk back in the fall of 2002? If so, then should we also follow his more recent advice and declare defeat? (Posted 1/14/06)
• The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) "aims to record the severe wrongs, crimes and violations that were committed in the process leading up to the aggression against Iraq, during the war and throughout the ensuing occupation, that continue to be widespread to this day... In the end, the evidence gathered and presented will serve as a historical record that breaks the web of lies promulgated by the war coalition and its embedded press." Visit the WTI here. (Posted 1/14/06)
• Activist-artists Sally Marr and Peter Dudar, in coordination with the Santa Barbara chapter of Veterans for Peace have produced "Arlington West," a compelling documentary film whichs pays tribute to those who have died in the war, mourns with those who have lost loved ones, and acknowledges the sacrifices of those who have returned physically or psychologically wounded. (Posted 1/16/06)
• In "Reporting from Iraq" (A Century Foundation Report), Johanna McGeary of Time's Bagdad bureau explains what we don't know about what going on in Iraq and why we don't know it. (Posted 1/20/06)
• Click here to watch streaming video (asx) of Noam Chomsky's 1/17/06 lecture at University College Dublin, in which he addresses the question of whether the promotion of democracy truly was one of the chief goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. (Posted 1/22/06)
• In "Friends, Enemies and the War in Iraq: A View from the Founding," Scot J. Zentner suggests "a clarification of just war theory, one which does not require an imminent threat... The American Founders, especially Alexander Hamilton, provide a better,more realistic approach to the question of Iraq than do those who reject out of handthe justice of preventive war." (Posted 1/24/06)
• Francis Fukuyama's neoconservative criticisms of the Iraq war came as a surprise to many of his former philosophical allies. His latest book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2006), further expounds his position: "In its decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration failed in its stewardship of American foreign policy. First, the administration wrongly made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign policy. In addition, it badly misjudged the global reaction to its exercise of 'benevolent hegemony.' And finally, it failed to appreciate the difficulties involved in large-scale social engineering, grossly underestimating the difficulties involved in establishing a successful democratic government in Iraq." (Posted 3/2/06)
• Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz provide a careful, detailed and authoritative review of "The Economic Costs of the Iraq War" (pdf). (Posted 1/19/06) Stiglitz follows up in "The High Cost of the Iraq War", The Economist's Voice, Berkeley Electronic Press, March 2006. Or construct your own economic estimate of the war by adjusting various factors here. (Posted 3/15/06)
• In the midst of an ongoing slow civil war "U.S. military airstrikes have significantly increased in Iraq: "A review of military data shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year..." (Posted 3/16/06)
• In "Power in War," Theoretical Inquiries in Law 7(1), December 2005, Martin van Creveld argues, contrary to traditional realpolitik assumptions, that "in a long conflict, in which the strong beat down the weak, the former will lose strength, whereas the latter will gain it. This logic has profound implicationsfor counterinsurgency operations, including those ongoing in Iraq." (Posted 3/23/06)
• Follow these links to watch the (RealPlayer) videos of Seymour Hersh's lecture on "The War in Iraq: Bush's Democracy and the Real Thing", and/or Noah Feldman's lectures on "The Ethics of Nation-Building: What We Owe Iraq," Part 1,Part 2, and Part 3.These and other video links are available from Princeton WebMedia.(Posted 4/24/06)
• In the February 2006 edition of the Boston Review, Barry R. Posen offered an "Exit Strategy" for Iraq. Responses from Senators Feingold and Biden, along with several others, are also included here. (Posted 5/17/06)
• Christian Eckhart writes about "Saddam Hussein's Trial in Iraq: Fairness, Legitimacy & Alternatives, Legal Analysis," Cornell Law School Papers Series, 2006, No. 13. (Posted 5/25/06)
• In "Ending Tyranny in Iraq," Ethics in International Affairs, 19(2), Summer 2005, Fernando Teson endeavors to show that "the war was morally justified as humanitarian intervention." (For further background, jump down to Teson's theory of humanitarian intervention below.) Critics have largely, if not completely, discredited claims that the invasion and occupation of Iraq were justfiable for the sake of self-defense and counter-terrorism. So, the humanitarian justification remains the last one standing, and it makes the issue of withdrawal particularly thorny. Teson notes that, "It is a mistake to believe that the determination and ferocity of the enemy is the yardstick for the legitimacy of war." So, looking beyond the mere fact of opposition, and leaving aside the traditional but (arguably) dubious question of good intentions, we must now think carefully and critically about how successful the war and the pre-war sanctions have been as putatively humanitarian endeavors. In light of this record, we must then assess the prospect of future humanitarian success by means of military occupation in Iraq. Where Teson sees partial completion of good works, critics see inhumane aggression at worst or humanitarian failure at best. On the question of success or failure, empirical measures of human flourishing and well-being in Iraq are ultimately determinative. (6/5/06)
• Anthony Cordesman updates his analysis of how the Iraqi insurgency is changing and veering towards increasingly intense civil conflict in the 4/26/06 version of 'Iraq's Evolving Insurgency'. In the first version of this evolving report, Cordesman concluded that "The Iraqi Government and U.S. can scarcely claim that they are clearly moving towards victory." Now perhaps the most important question has become whether and, if so, when the U.S. can start withdrawing its troops, even without having achieved civil pacification. Recent polling data suggests that Iraqis are somewhat divided over this question: "Almost all Iraqis wanted US-led forces to leave Iraq: 35% wanted withdrawal by July 2006, and 70% wanted withdrawal in two years. Once again, however, there are striking differences. Only 22% of Arab-Shiites wanted the US to withdraw in six months, although 71% wanted withdrawal in two years. Some 13% of Kurds wanted the US to withdraw in six months, and only 40% wanted withdrawal in two years. In the case of Sunnis, however, 83% wanted the US out in six months and 94% in two years." (Initial version posted 6/21/05. Updated version posted 6/6/06)
• According to an unclassified intelligence overview the U.S. has discovered in Iraq 500 "pre-Gulf War chemical munitions" containing "degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent." Given the incredibly broad meaning of "WMD", critics of the invasion of Iraq cannot simply say that "no WMD have been found." But neither do the WWI and WWII era chemical munitions that have been found give much credence to the pre-invasion arguments that Colin Powell presented to the United Nations, which were all about high tech mobile facilities for the ongoing production of far more serious anthrax-based biological WMD. (Posted 6/24/06)
• The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a detailed report demonstrating the grim prospects for success in "Rebuilding Iraq" in accordance with existing strategy. (Posted 7/12/06)
• The U.S. National Strategy for Victory in Iraq describes the "progress" of the occupation and sets official conditions for withdrawal. Read alongside the GAO assessment (above), the NSC's "Strategy" appears to be largely an exercise in wishful thinking. (Posted 7/27/06)
• For a phenomenologically powerful description of how the geography of fear has taken new shape in post-Saddam Iraq, see Kirk Semple's "Where the Collateral Damage is in the Mind," in yesterday's New York Times. (Posted 7/31/06)
• The 21 Billion dollar Iraqi reconstruction plan is looking more and more like a scam perpetrated against American taxpayers by multinational corporations and the politicians who do their bidding. As Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) put it, "We paid for air conditioning and ended up with a ceiling fan. . . You had a big pot of money and you had a lot of hogs in the creek wallowing and shoving and grunting, trying to get some of it. It looks like they were a lot more effective at getting the money than they were at doing reconstruction." Stuart Bowen, the inspector general for U.S. reconstruction projects in Iraq, maintains that the path to corruption was paved by poor planning: "We weren't systematically prepared to do the kind of contracting necessary at the time of the invasion. That's the cold reality.... They were just operating under their own regulations that they wrote up. It was ad hoc. And that's why people described it as the Wild West." Or was that just part of the plan? Read more from the Washington Post. (Posted 8/9/06)
• Check out Dissent, Summer 2006, for an exchange between Michael Walzer and Jean Bethke Elshtain on the question of whether regime change justifies the war in Iraq. (Posted 8/22/06)
• In "Saddam Hussein's Trial in Iraq: Fairness,Legitimacy & Alternatives, a Legal Analysis," Cornell Law School Paper Series, number 13, 2006, Christian Eckart argues that the Bagdad court proceedings demonstrate the advantages of referring such cases to the International Criminal Court. (Posted 9/7/06)
• Wars waged without just cause still give rise to occasions for the justifiable use of arms. Case in point of such just conduct in an otherwise largely unjust war is the 6/7/06 airstrike that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. See Anthony Dworkin's argument in "An Acceptable Case of Targeted Killing," Crimes of War Project, June 8, 2006. (Posted 10/05/06)
• Epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University and Al Mustansiriya University estimate that Iraq's "excess" death toll has now reached 665,000. This figure seriously undermines the credibility of humanitarian justifications of the war. (Posted 10/15/06)
• "Many active duty, reserve, and guard service members are concerned about the war in Iraq and support the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Appeal for Redress provides a way in which individual service members can appeal to their Congressional Representative and US Senators to urge an end to the U.S. military occupation." (Posted 10/26/06)
• The report of the Iraq Study Group indicates that the situation in that country is "grave and deteriorating," and recommends (1) transitioning U.S. forces from combat/security to training/advisory operations, (2) making further aid conditional upon progress towards settling sectarian strife, and (3) engaging in constructive diplomacy with Syria and Iran as a means of stabilizaing the region. (Posted 12/7/06)
• In "Can't Stay the Course, Can't End the War, But We'll Call it Bipartisan," Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver offer a cogent critical review of the Iraq Study Group report. (Posted 12/9/06)
• "Iraqi Refugees: Critical Needs Remain Unmet," Refugees International, December 11 2006, reports that "Over 1.8 million Iraqi refugees are currently spread throughout the Middle East, with the largest concentrations in Syria and Jordan and sizable populations in Lebanon and Egypt..." A war putatively justified on humanitarian grounds (it's the last justification still almost standing -- see Teson's humanitarian justification below) would need to provide adequate care to its refugees. Again, as in so many other ways, this war is failing to live up to the reasons and standards commonly invoked on its behalf. (Posted 12/12/06)
• In "Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth," NY Times, 1/5/07, Slavoj Zizek argues that Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, the notoriously ridiculous Iraqi information minister, was actually telling the truth (in a sense). (Posted 1/7/06)
• An initial draft of Iraqi oil contract legislation appears to challenge the notion that the occupation is designed to serve fundamentally humanitarian purposes. But this controversial piece of legislation may not pass any time soon in its present form (75% of profits to foreign/U.S./British oil companies for 30 years, followed by 20% of profits in perpetuity, which is twice the rate that prevails in free and open markets). In order to ensure that the U.S.-led corporate alliance lives up to the standards of a humanitarian military intervention, deliberations and negotiations about Iraqi oil contract legislation should be as open, transparent and cautious as possible. The Iraqi's are not able to negotiate on a normal equal footing with Western big oil. But publicity may help to check the rush to close a deal that would give the lion's share of benefits to Exxon, BP, etc. at the expense of the Iraqi people. (Posted 1/12/07)
• Carl Conetta carefully and systematically debunks the latest troop "surge" in Iraq in "More troops for Iraq? Time to just say 'No'," Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute Project on Defense Alternatives, Briefing Memo #39, January 9, 2007. (Posted 1/12/07)
• In "What Congress Can (And Can't) Do on Iraq," Washington Post, January 16, 2007, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, two former Justice Department Lawyers under Reagan and Bush, argue that congressional efforts to chastise the President for exercising his war powers are unconstitutional. John B. Judis responds in The New Republic by pointing out that, according to the third branch of our government, non-binding congressional resolutions do not encroach upon the powers of the executive. (Posted 1/18/07)
• Bruce Ackerman and David Wu propose a "Half-Trillion Dollar Solution," The American Prospect, February 27, 2007. The proposed solution is simple: "Want to end the Iraq war? Place a hard and fixed limit on the president's war appropriations." (Posted 3/1/07)
• "The Iraq Veterans Memorial is an online war memorial that honors the members of the U.S. armed forces who have lost their lives serving in the Iraq War. The Memorial is a collection of video memories from family, friends, military colleagues, and co-workers of those that have fallen." (Posted 3/17/07)
• In "Counterinsurgency 101," In These Times 3/5/07, Kristian Williams wonders whether Gen. Petraeus has done his homework. "General Petraeus says he thinks the war in Iraq is winnable. His recent manual suggests otherwise." (Posted 3/17/07)
• In an "After Action Report," based upon his March 9-16 visit to Iraq and Kuwait, retired General Barry R McCaffrey gives an authoritative account of the problems, the recent gains, and the way forward in Iraq. (Posted 3/31/07)
• Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (Ret.) argues that "Victory is Not an Option" in Iraq, Cato Institute podcast, March 16, 2007. (Posted 4/3/07)
• William Galston, Nancy Sherman and Richard Land discuss the ethics of troop withdrawal from Iraq in a video interview for PBS & the Religion & Ethics News Weekly, 3/23/07. (Posted 5/9/07)
• In "Iraq's Militias: The True Threat toCoalition Success in Iraq," Perameters, Spring 2007, Anthony J. Schwarz argues that militias "weaken government influence by providing unofficial (and effective) security in localized areas using illegal methods," and that they "can only be neutralized through state-sponsored Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) initiatives." (Posted 5/15/07)
• In "The Security Council, Democratic Legitimacy andRegime Change in Iraq," The European Journal of International Law, Vol. 17, no.3, 2006, pp. 531-551, Steven Wheatley "reviews the process of political transition in Iraq, examining the role of Security Council resolutions," and he concludes "that the process involved a violation of the right of the Iraqi people to political self-determination, creating a conflict between the Security Council resolutions adopted under chapter VII and an international norm of jus cogens standing." (Posted 6/9/07)
• David Mellow's "Counterfactuals and the Proportionality Criterion," Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 20, Number 4, 2006, pp. 439-454, has relevant implications for just about every category of issues in just war theory collected on this page. But I place it here for its apposite discussion of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Posted 6/22/07)
• In "The Legal War: A Justification for Military Action in Iraq," Gonzaga Journal of International Law, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2005, Adam P. Tait applies the "Caroline Test" in arguing that "the US-led coalition was justified, not only by existing Security Council resolutions, but also by the realities of preemptive self-defense after Sept. 11." Yet, the key claim, that the U.S. was under 'a necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, no moment for deliberation,' was highly doubtful in the spring of 2003, and has since been thoroughly discredited. Moreover, it is important to add that in the Caroline case the U.S. and Great Britain agreed upon the importance of distinguishing between, on the one hand, exceptional pre-emptive incursions into foreign territories to defend against particular, actively threatening forces, and on the other hand, genuine acts of war directed against foreign states. (On this point, see Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law, second ed., University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 48-51; and Christine Gray, International Law and the Use of Force, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 106, fn. 1.). (Posted 6/26/07)
• In the FORA.tv video embedded below, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, speaking at the Commonwealth Club of Carlifornia, April 13, 2007, recounts recent Iraqi history as set forth in his book, Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing The Peace, and raises pertinent questions about the way forward from both American and Iraqi points of view. (Posted 6/28/07)
• "Iraqi Refugees in the Syrian Arab Republic: A Field-Based Snapshot" by Ashraf al-Khalidi, Sophia Hoffmann and Victor Tanner for The Brookings Institution's University of BernProject on Internal Displacement, June 2006: "Of the estimated two million Iraqis who have sought protection in neighboring countries, at least 1.2 million to 1.5 million are presently in Syria..." (Posted 7/21/07)
• Don't miss the PBS Frontline documentary on The Gangs of Iraq, which is available online in its entirety (60 minutes). (Posted 8/2/07)
• Today's "Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq" recommends drawing down the U.S. presence in ways that will reduce the appearance of being a permanent occupation force, backing evident successes in the development of the Iraqi army's ability to handle major security problems, addressing corruption in the Ministry of the Interior, adopting a beefed-up "overwatch" strategy over Iraq's border regions, and much, much more. (Posted 9/6/07)
• Bruce Ackerman examines "The Risks of Playing Politics with the Military," Financial Times, 9/5/07. As he sees it, it is a violation of the U.S. constitutional principle of civilian control of the military for uniformed officers to assume, or to be pressed into, the role of defending or criticizing Presidential or Congressional war policies. To my mind, Ackerman's thesis is a stretch. To be sure, officers should avoid arguing with executives and lawmakers in excessively combative or defiant terms. But as long as the policy assessment of a military officer is given (and taken) not as a command, but merely as a recommendation of good counsel, civilian control of the military remains unscathed. (Posted 9/11/07)
• From Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute, "Redefining Success in Iraq," The American Prospect, January 15, 2008: "Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the surge. The only real change has been the way politicians talk about what defines success in Iraq. But are the American people buying it?" (Posted 2/4/08)
• In "The Myth of Sectarian Violence in Iraq," International Socialist Review January 8, 2008, Dahr Jamail debunks the conventional wisdom of U.S. military policy. (Posted 3/8/08)
• In "The $3 Trillion War," Vanity Fair, April 2008, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes argue that "the Bush administration has been concealing the full economic toll" of the war in Iraq. (Posted 3/17/08)
• There's some reason to think that, notwithstanding its public statements, the Bush administration secretly favors a gradual partitioning of Iraq. On this score, check out Reidar Visser's "Debating Devolution in Iraq," Middle East Report, March 10, 2008. For arguments defending the wisdom of "soft partition," see The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq," by Edward P. Joseph and Michael E. O'Hanlon for the Brookings Institution, June 2007. (Posted 3/17/08)
• Thanks to TomDispatch, we get a free look at the final chapter of Riding the Tiger: Muqtada al-Sadr and the American Dilemma in Iraq, by Patrick Cockburn. As Tom Engelhardt notes, "It's the perfect antidote to Petraeus's assessment of the Iraqi situation." (Posted 4/9/08)
• Peter Hitchens and Christopher Hitchens debate the war in Iraq in this series of videos, which were recorded 4/3/08 at Grand Valley State University's Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies. (Posted 4/16/08)
• In "Learning the Right Lessons from Iraq," Cato Institute Policy Analysis 610, February 13, 2008, Benjamin Friedman, Harvey Sapolski and Christopher Preble defend the following assessment: "Foreign policy experts and policy analysts are misreading the lessons of Iraq. The emerging conventional wisdom holds that success could have been achieved in Iraq with more troops, more cooperation among U.S. government agencies, and better counterinsurgency doctrine. To analysts who share these views, Iraq is not an example of what not to do but of how not to do it. . . The near-consensus view is wrong and dangerous. What Iraq demonstrates is a need for a new national security strategy, not better tactics and tools to serve the current one. . . The military gives us the power to conquer foreign countries, but not the power to run them. . . " (Posted 5/3/08)
• Now available online from Lessons From Iraq: Avoiding the Next War, edited by William D. Hartung and Miriam Pemberton, Paradigm Publishers, 2008, is a useful chapter by Hartung on war profiteering. It concludes with some policy recommendations: "competitive bidding... screening of bidders to rule out companies with no experience in the relevant area of work... auditors in the field from the outset of a conflict... A new 'Truman Committee'..." (Posted 6/1/08)
• We're now seeing the predictable long term negative effects of using white phosphorus and depleted uranium in Iraq: "Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say." (Posted 6/15/08)
• The Commonwealth Institute's Project on Defense Alternatives has just published its Report of the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq, entitled "Quickly, Carefully, and Generously -- The Necessary Steps for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq." The report "outlines 25 initiatives that the USA can take to reduce the potential for communal violence and regional instability after US troops leave Iraq. The report addresses those concerns often raised about the prospect of complete US troop withdrawal occurring within a relatively short period." As U.S. Congressional Representative James McGovern writes in the preface, the report outlines "what it would take to leave � what is required in terms of a cease-fire, reconciliation, recovery and security when the day comes for our troops to begin coming home." (Posted 7/4/08)
• "From the Swamp to Terra Firma: The Regional Role in the Stabilisation of Iraq" is a July 2008 report from the Oxford Research Group. "In April 2008, Gabrielle Rifkind took a group of senior influential US and European political voices to Riyadh for a meeting with senior Saudi officials to examine the challenge of finding a regional consensus for stabilising Iraq... This report grew out of that meeting. It provides a detailed synopsis of the discussions, in particular a number of important insights into the view from Saudi Arabia." (Posted 7/20/08)
• In "The End of the State of Exception in Iraq," TELOSscope, June 12, 2008, David Pan argues that "A new political consensus is emerging in Iraq that can form the basis of a "normal" situation of politics after the painful, prolonged, and unresolved state of exception that has reigned since the U.S.-led invasion. The testing of political wills and the consequent establishment of the Iraqi government's sovereignty in the fight against the Sadr army and al-Qaeda in Iraq should go a long way toward buttressing the stability of this new order." For a fuller account of the Schmittian theoretical basis of this (remarkably optimistic) assessment of the situation in Iraq, see Pan's "Liberalism as a Political Ideology in U.S. Foreign Policy," TELOSscope, March 22, 2008. (Posted 7/30/08)
• On July 25th the U.S. Institute of Peace held a panel on "The Future of the U.S. Military Presence in Iraq" featuring Kimberly Kagan, Charles Knight, Colin Kahl, and Rend al-Rahim. To listen to the podcast of this engaging panel, follow this link. (Posted 8/1/08)
• In "Discipline, Punishment & Counterinsurgency," Military Review September-October 2008, Scott Andrew Ewing makes a compelling case for the need to reform the culture of discipline within the U.S. Army. The illegal but common practice of using painful, harmful or humiliating punishments in military training - the practice of 'smoking' soldiers - is a poor means of preparing an army for the challenges of counterinsurgency: "Soldiers' actions and attitudes do not need to reach the headline grabbing levels of Abu Ghraib to seriously affect our ability to win the support of the local population. We can interact with Iraqi citizens and military personnel with professional courtesy or, alternatively, with a contemptuous air of superiority. Even when the most egregious abuses are avoided, the latter approach insults the honor of the people whose support we are trying to gain. The cultural currents that permit the widespread unlawful punishment of soldiers in the Army have contributed to attitudes and actions that fuel the insurgency and cost us lives." (Posted 9/10/08)
• In "An Unnecessary War," Foreign Policy, No. 134, Jan/Feb, pp. 50-59, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt made the case, contrary to the Bush administration's rush to war, for adopting a strategy of deterrence to contend with the menace of Saddam Hussein. (Posted 6/24/09)

WAR WITH IRAN?:

• Jacob Weisberg sees the Bush administration's belligerence towards Iran as "blustering" that is likely to produce the opposite of the desired effect in "The Two Clocks: Getting Iran Wrong, Again," Slate, Jan. 31, 2007. Rather than attack Iran for the sake of nuclear non-proliferation, we should wait for it to implode of its own corruption and repression. (Posted 2/2/07)
• In "From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq," Vanity Fair, March 2007, Craig Unger explains how "The same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq war have been using the same tactics: alliances with shady exiles, dubious intelligence on WMDs to push for the bombing of Iran. As President Bush ups the pressure on Tehran, is he planning to double his Middle East bet?" Unger thinks so, and he presents a decent case. Is the policy already set in motion? Now to fix the facts accordingly and await or create a suitable occasion? (Posted 2/2/07)
• Dick Morris says, "Don't Confuse Iran with Cambodia," Front Page Magazine, February 1, 2007. Instead, he thinks we should confuse it with Nazi Germany. That's dubious advice, but this is better: the President should not try to sell an attack on Iran as a means of winning in Iraq, because no one will buy it. Reminds me of an old Texas saying: "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." (Posted 2/2/07)
• For an intelligent and cautious assessment of the prospects for achieving nuclear non-proliferation in the Middle East by means of combined air and naval attacks against Iran, see Paul Roger's "Iran: Consequences of a War," Oxford Research Group, February 2006. Rogers et. al. at the ORG predicted grim prospects for a successful regime-change occupation in Iraq back in 2002. So, it's worth paying attention to what they now have to say about Iran. (Posted 2/2/07)
• In "The End of the 'Summer of Diplomacy'," The Century Foundation, 9/18/2006, Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner "warns that some in the Bush administration are making the case for air strikes aimed not only at setting back Iran's nuclear program, but also at toppling the country's government. He says that these officials are undeterred by the concerns of military leaders about whether such attacks would be effective." (Posted 2/2/07 from JWT Blog archive)
• The D5 missile project is part of the U.S. strategy for contending with Iran's nuclear ambitions. The plan is to remove nuclear warheads from "as many as two dozen" ICBMs that could be launched from Trident submarines for the purpose of penetrating the bunker complexes of Iranian nuclear facilities. The problem with this strategy, according to Ted Postol and Pavel Podvig, is that the launch of these ICBMs "will cause an automated alert of the Russian early warning system ... [which] ... will greatly increase the chances of a nuclear accident involving strategic nuclear forces." Read more... (Posted 2/2/07 from JWT Blog archive)
• In "Sanctions Against Iran: Key Issues," Century Foundation Report, February 1, 2007, Bruce Jentleson "provides a framework for assessing economic sanctions as part of the international community's non-proliferation strategy. His analysis, informed by key aspects of the Iran case and sanctions strategy more generally, presents the principal sanctions options and assesses their relative merits and risks." (Posted 2/8/07)
• Michael Ledeen is perhaps the most prominent and forceful advocate of going to war with Iran (and Syria). He has argued for some time, but most recently here and here for the National Review, that since Iran has been waging war against the U.S. since 1979 it is foolish and irresponsible not to respond in kind. (Posted 2/10/07)
• The Project on Defense Alternatives has gathered together a wealth of links to significant studies and critical perspectives on the current crisis in U.S.-Iran relations. Their Confronting Iran page includes many useful materials grouped under the following subtopics: the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Dispute; US Nonproliferation Policy; the Iran in Iraq Dispute; Regime Change Iran; US Regional Policy; Oil Geopolitics; US National Security Strategy; US Political Dynamics; Media & Public Discourse; War Plans & Scenarios; Costs & Consequences of War; and Crisis Resolution & Diplomacy. I highly recommend this resource. (Posted 2/19/06)
• In "Next We Take Tehran," Mother Jones, July/August 2006, Robert Dreyfuss argues that the U.S. confrontation with Iran has little to do with nuclear proliferation, and everything to do with the geopolitics of oil. (Posted 2/24/07)
• In "Redirection," Symour Hersh argues that a replay of Iran Contra weighed heavily in Negroponte's decision to resign from the CIA because the White House is funneling money without authorization or oversight to Sunni jihadist groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda. The idea is that shiite Iran, Syria and Lebanese Hezbollah are now enemies #1, #2 & #3 in the Middle East. Another possibility, however, is that Hersh's interpretation is too simple and the evidence that he adduces (or invokes) is part of a Red Harvest strategy in the region. (Posted 2/27/07)
• Dilip Hiro urges caution in "In the Case of Iran: Look Before You Leap," Peace, Conflict & Development, Issue 9, July 2006. (Posted 3/2/07)
• In "Getting to "Yes" with Iran," Christoph Bertram argues that an international inspection regime is a better way to deal with Iran's nuclear enrichment activities than economic sanctions or military strikes. Makes sense to me. (Posted 3/31/07)
• "The war in Iran has already begun," according to Shora Esmailian & Andreas Malm, "Iran: The Hidden Power," OpenDemocracy, 4/10/07. It's a class war: "The interests of power-elites in the west and those in Tehran are alike opposed to peaceful, democratic change in Iran." (Posted 4/15/07)
• Jonathan Kay and Leo Panich debate the issue of foreign policy towards Iran on Canada's The Real News. (Posted 11/24/07)
• The Real News presents a two part interview with Noam Chomsky on U.S. foreign policy towards Iran. Part I on Bush administration policy is here, and part II on the prospect of a Democratic alternative is here. (Posted 11/24/07)
• According to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities," the Bush administration's bellicose rhetoric has little basis in reality. (Posted 12/08/07)
• The Century Foundation presents a video luncheon roundtable from its Prospects for Peace Initiative on Tuesday, December 11, 2007. Topic: "Iran and Israel � An Irreversible Enmity?: Implications for the United States, the Region, and the Security Council," featuring Trita Parsi, Khaled Dawoud, and Daniel Levy. (Posted 12/13/07)
• In "Israel, Iran Practically At War," The New Republic, March 12, 2008, Yossi Klein Halevi argues that "A real solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict can only be reached by dealing with its primary instigator: Iran." (Posted 3/17/08)
• In an online video from Free Speech TV, Chris Hedges talks about "What Will Happen if the U.S. Invades Iran." (Posted 3/17/08)
• Justin Logan of the Cato Institute explains how "In Iran, Things Could Get Worse." The upshot: it might depend upon the 2008 U.S. presidential election. (Posted 7/13/08)
• Benny Morris' op-ed piece in the 7/18/2008 New York Times, "Using Bombs to Stave Off War," boldly predicts that "Israel will almost surely attack Iran�s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months," and then proceeds to offer reasons for thinking that such an attack would be a good idea. Morris' key assumption is that Iran would use a nuclear weapon for a first strike against Israel rather than as security against suffering an Israeli first strike. Why? Because the Mullah's are driven by ideology and fear. Perhaps so. But if Morris' piece shows anything, it's that Iran does not have a monopoly on ideology and fear. There is, of course, as Norman Geras points out, a serious asymmetry between an Israeli threat to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities and an Iranian threat to destroy the entire state of Israel. But this difference disappears as soon as one adds, as Morris does, that barring a successful surgical strike against Iran the only reasonable option is to turn the country into a "nuclear wasteland." As I see it, the best long term solution would be a nuclear-free Middle East (for starters), but that scenario is admittedly far less likely than what Morris predicts. (Posted 7/28/08)
• For in interesting entry into German political controversy over the Iran question, check out Mattias Kutzel's "Germany, Iran, and the Party of the Left: A Commentary Commissioned by Neues Deutschland, which it Refused to Publish," TELOSscope June 15, 2008. Kutzel's argument is a call for tougher economic and political sanctions. (Posted 7/30/08)

THE RIGHTS OF (SUSPECTED?) ENEMY COMBATANTS: (scroll down for the most recent posts)

• What rights should enemy combatants have in the eyes of U.S. law and in the hands of the U.S. military? The proposed trials of suspected terrorists before U.S. military commissions arguably fail to meet traditional standards of just war theory and the associated conventions of international human rights and humanitarian law (which have been formally adopted and signed into U.S. law). Click here to find the relevant arguments of international law set forth (6/17/04) by Douglass Cassel and Bridget Arimond of Northwester University School of Law.
• Also available for downloading is Jordan Paust's expert legal opinion regarding the full requirements of legal justice for the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
• For additional authoritative legal commentaries and reports on the treatment of detained enemy combatants from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, browse the website for theNational Institute of Military Justice.
• Follow these links to read the full texts of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the cases of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld & Rasul v. Bush.
• On January 9th, 2002, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a controversial or, even better, notorious memo (pdf) on the applicability of U.S. treaties and laws to Al Quaida and Taliban detainees. Jack M. Balkin of Yale Law School offers an astute legal analysis of the OLC's torture memo in his blog entries of 7/15/04 & 7/16/04. (Posted 7/25/04)
• Mark A. Bland presents a useful analysis of the United Nations International Tribunal to Adjudicate War Crimes Committed in the Former Yugoslavia. (Posted 10/20/04)
• Phillip Carter argues in Slate that "blowback" from the Bush administration's decision to "scrap Geneva" is "The real reason Guantanamo detainees have returned to the battlefield". (Posted 10/26/04)
• A soldier who served with the 320th Military Police Company at Abu Ghraib speaks out about the atrocities he witnessed in "In Good Conscience" By Scott Fleming, LiP Magazine. Available through Alternet.org. (Posted 1/10/05)
• Court puts off Guantanamo war-crimes case: "In declining to take up a potential landmark case challenging the legality of the Pentagon's terrorist tribunal process, the US Supreme Court may have delayed by as much as a year the commencement of war-crimes trials of suspected Al Qaeda members at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba." (Posted 1/22/05)
• Read testimony on detainees presented before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Stephen Schulhofer of NYU School of Law. (Posted 6/23/05)
• David A. Martin's articles on 'Offshore Detainees and the Role of Courts after Rasul v. Bush' and 'A New Era for U.S. Refugee Resettlement' are available for downloading from the Univeristy of Virginia Public Law and legal Theory Working Paper Series. Abstracts: The first article "sketches a workable and restrained regime for individualized consideration of challenges to detention, building on a structure already taking initial shape in the wake of Rasul and the companion Hamdi case. Such claims would be heard in military tribunals, subject to habeas review in federal court, according to a narrow and deferential standard of review..." The second "sets forth some of the principal analysis from a lengthy report chartered by the U.S. State Department that critically examined this country's refugee resettlement program, which has encountered serious difficulties since September 11, 2001..." (Posted 6/24/05)
• Follow this link to watch Democracy Now's presentation of Jamie Doran's documentary, "Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death". (Posted 10/26/05)
• As Josh White reports in today's Washington Post, "A federal judge in Washington ruled yesterday that the continued detention of two ethnic Uighurs at the U.S. prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is "unlawful," but he decided he had no authority to order their release." Read more... (Posted 12/23/05)
• If you've been following the news about Guantanamo, you know that in the absence of fair legal trial proceedings the justifiability of the detainments is being tried in the court of public opinion and unofficial, scholarly legal opinion. In this debate Mark Denbeaux's "Report on Guantanamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data" is especially important for showing how thin the cases for the prosecution would be against many of the detainees if they were granted rights to fair legal trials. (2/24/06)
• 'Epistemic Systems', Episteme: Journal of Social Epistemology 2(2), 2005, is a game-theoretic study showing that torture is a poor means of obtaining information because the tortured have no good reason to trust that the torture will stop if and when they tell the truth. Click on the link to download a .doc version of the paper from the homepage of the author, Roger Koppl. (3/7/06)
• Andrew Nathan's 15 minute RealVideo lecture "On Torture" (Columbia University 3/29/05) is a succinct summation of the U.S. departure from its international treaty commitments post-9/11. (Posted 6/8/06)
• The Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of Europe issued this report on "secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers." It does not paint a pretty picture. (Posted 6/16/06)
• In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld the U.S. Supreme Court declared (5-3) that Bush administration handing of Guantanamo detainees violates U.S. military law and legal commitments to the Geneva conventions. (Posted 7/11/06)
• In "Contract to torture," Salon, August 9, 2004, Osha Gray reveals that "inexperienced, under-supervised private-sector employees actively took part in horrifying prisoner abuse" at Abu Ghraib. Joshua Holland follows up on this issue more broadly in his report for AlterNet (9/7/06) on how "Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture." Writing for The American Prospect (9/7/06) Tara McKelvey calls these private contractors "The Unaccountables." And Peter W. Singer's article on "The Contract the Military Needs to Break," in the Washington Post (9/12/06) similarly finds that private contractors operate in an accountability vacuum. This is a good reason for thinking that employees of a privatized interrogation industry are even more likely to violate standards of international human rights law than traditional public officers of the state security/intelligence apparatus. (Posted 9/14/06)
• Margaret L. Satterthwaite's "Rendered Meaningless: ExtraordinaryRendition and the Rule of Law," NYU Legal Theory Working Papers, Number 43, 2006, examines relevant legal arguments and concludes that "a practice purportedly developed to uphold the rule of law against lawless terrorists -- rendition to justice -- has become a lawless practice aimed at perverting the rule of law in relation to terrorism -- extraordinary rendition." (Posted 1/12/07)
• In "Due Process and Empire's Law: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld," Dissent, Winter 2007, Margaret Kohn critically examines recent U.S. law pertaining to military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees. Although Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Military Commissions Act affirm a constitutional separation of powers, they do nothing to address the central problem, which is that empowering military commissions to try (or denial trial to) enemy combatants "violates the basic legal principle that no person can be a judge in his or her own case." (Posted 1/18/07)
• In Reinterpreting Torture: Presidential Signing Statementsand the Circumvention of U.S. and International Law," Human Rights Brief, Volume 14, Issue 1, Winter 2006, Erin Louise Palmer critically examines the history of Presidential signing statements and the legality of recent efforts to place the executive above the law. (Posted 1/21/07)
• Follow this link to view Witness.org's 27 minute long documentary, "Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the 'War on Terror'," produced and directed by Gillian Caldwell. (Posted 2/10/07)
• In "A Defense of Torture: Separation of Cases, Ticking Time-bombs, and Moral Justification," International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Volume 19, Number 2, 2006, Fritz Allhoff argues for "the permissibility of torture in idealized cases," which "paves the way for the justification of torture in the real world by removing some candidate theories (e.g., Kantianism) and allowing others that both could and are likely to justify real-world torture." (Posted 2/12/07)
• Naomi Klein reports for The Nation on how the trial of Jose Padilla is exposing U.S. torture practices to the harsh light of public scrutiny. (Posted 2/26/07)
• Stuart Taylor presents "The Case for a National Security Court," National Journal, February 26, 2007: "Congress has not yet devised a process that is either effective in catching and incarcerating bad guys or fair in the exacting eyes of world opinion... Creating a National Security Court, with repeat-player lawyers and judges, will change the entire dynamic, and help avoid the excessive rhetoric that has characterized both sides in the war on terror." (Posted 2/28/07)
• In this video interview with Bruce Fealk of Michigan Progress TV, James Yee, former U.S. Army Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, recounts details of the detainment, sensory deprivation and character assassination that he suffered upon falling under (ultimately unfounded) suspicion of being a "citizen enemy combatant." (Posted 4/22/07)
• John Yoo and Jesse Choper debate the legal issues surrounding the Military Commissions Act in this Federalist Society MP3 audio file, recorded at the Bankers Club of San Francisco, April 5, 2007. (Posted 6/9/07)
• In "The Military Commissions Act, Habeas Corpus, and the Geneva Conventions," Duke Law School Working Paper Number 96, June 1, 2007, Curtis Bradley argues that the Supreme Court is likely to uphold the habeas corpus rights of Guantanamo detainees, and that Congress had legitimate authority in enacting the MCA to narrow the means of U.S. enforcement of Geneva Conventions standards. (Posted 11/10/07)
• In the Cato Institute video embedded below, Timothy Lynch offers an illuminating examination of the legal issues in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, which "centers on the right of 'enemy combatants' being held in Guantanamo Bay to have their detention reviewed by American civilian courts."
• Follow this link for the oral arguments presented to the U.S. Supreme Court on December 5, 2007, as well as a Federalist Society debate of Boumediene v. Bush featuring Timothy Lynch, Brad Berenson, Andrew McBride, and Marty Lederman. Boumediene "arises on a writ of habeas corpus filed on behalf of Lakmar Boumediene and other detainees currently being held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. These detainees challenge the legality and constitutionality of their detention as enemy combatants pursuant to the Military Commissions Act of 2006." (Posted 1/28/08)
• The U.S. Supreme Court's majority (5-4) decision in Boumediene v. Bush confirms in principle that "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." Citing Marbury v. Madison, Justice Kennedy argues for the majority that "To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say what the law is'." Some "enemy combatants" in the GWOT have been detained without opportunity to challenge the factual grounds of their confinement for more than six years now. But in the Court's opinion, this procedural lacuna in the rule of law cannot persist: "The costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody." (Posted 6/12/08)
• In "Interrogation in a Post-9/11 World," University of Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series #87, Barbara E. Armacost argues that "senior officials who created the pressure for intelligence but failed to provide adequate guidance to those seeking to obtain that intelligence cannot escape responsibility by claiming that their subordinates were just a bunch of rogue soldiers." (Posted 6/19/08)
• In "Detention and Interrogation in the Post-9/11 World," University of Pennsylvania Law School, Paper 227, June 6, 2008, Kermit Roosevelt III offers a useful narrative and analysis of "the construction and implementation of executive detention and interrogation policy" after 9/11. (Posted 8/24/08)
• David Luban's "Unthinking the Ticking Bomb," Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 1154202, July 1, 2008, is an excellent, devastating dismantling of the standard philosophical justifications of torture. It's analytically acute, informative, and appropriately enlivened by humanitarian indignation. Read it! (Posted 8/26/08)
• Torturing Democracy is an excellent (but depressing) online documentary about U.S. treatment of detainees in the GWOT. The website also has a useful archive of relevant documents. I highly recommend both the film and the archive for purposes of classroom instruction. (Posted 10/20/08)
• In her Public Reason podcast, "Torture Lite and the Normalisation of Torture," Jessica Wolfendale argues that "that so-called torture lite techniques share certain features that tend to mask the effects of these methods on the victims and minimize the torturer�s role in causing the victims� suffering, and that this might play an important role in making such forms of torture seem more palatable to liberal democracies than would otherwise be the case." This online symposium also includes a readable version of the paper and comments by David Sussman. (Posted 11/9/08)
• In "The Story of El Masri v. Tenet: Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in the 'War on Terror'," Margaret Satterthwaite tells a harrowing tale of "mistaken identity" as it wound its way "from U.S. court to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights." The devil, as they say, is in the details. (Posted 12/18/08)

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION: (scroll down for the most recent posts)

• One form of military action that many just war theorists condone is the use of armed forces to stop ongoing genocide and supply aid to persecuted refugees. For a general philosophical account, download Terry Nardin's article on The Moral Basis of Humanitarian Intervention (pdf), courtesy of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies (CGPACS) at the University of California, Irvine. (Updated 9/2/05)
• In "Humanitarian Action Under Attack: Reflections on the Iraq War," Harvard Human Rights Journal, Volume 17, Spring 2004, Nicholas de Torrente of Doctors Without Borders argues that non-governmental humanitarian organizations must tackle the difficult task of maintaining principled neutrality in order to fulfill their missions. In "Politicized Humanitarianism," Paul O'Brien offers a critical response to de Torrente's article.
• Penelope Simons reviews the lessons of Kosovo to bring out the pitfalls of humanitarian intervention.
• Tufts University's Humanitarianism & War Project presents many careful and detailed studies of the problems associated with trying to intervene militarily for humanitarian purposes, as well as the problems of conducting effective unarmed humanitarian efforts in war zones.
• Look here for book reviews related to the topic of humanitarian intervention.
• The most important international collaborative work on humanitarian intervention is The Responsibility to Protect, a 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The report represents an emerging consensus in international ethics. (Posted 10/21/04)
• Carla Bagnoli takes a Kantian approach in "Humanitarian Intervention as a Perfect Duty". She argues that we should conceive of humanitarian intervention "as a duty rather than permission, and as a perfect duty rather than an imperfect one -- a duty that proceeds from respect for humanity rather than from charity." (Posted 10/21/04 thanks to Lawrence Solum)
• Anthony Dworkin of the Crimes of War website argues that neither just war theory nor the latest plan for the UN is capable of solving the intervention riddle. (Posted 2/2/05)
• Ethics and International Affairs, SPECIAL SECTION: Humanitarian Aid and Intervention: The Challenges of Integration. (Posted 2/2/05)
• In "Humanitarian Intervention and Just War", Mershon International Studies Review 42, 1998, pp. 283-312, Mona Fixdal and Dan Smith argue "that the Just War framework is able to encompass most of the main arguments in the current humanitarian intervention literature and, thus, that the debate on humanitarian intervention would benefit from more explicit use of this framework." (Posted 3/20/05)
• Watch a Real Player video of Michael Walzer's lecture on "The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention" (rpm), from the University of San Diego's Ethics accross the Curriculum Workshop, January 27, 2000. (Posted 7/27/05)
• T. Modibo Ocran examines legal criteria for distinguising between genuine humanitarian intervention and aggressive intervention masquerading as humanitarianism in the Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 25(1), 2002. (Posted 8/15/05)
• Fernando Teson's "The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Intervention" is available here for downloading. (Posted 9/2/05)
• Nicholas Onuf examines the early modern theory and practice of humanitarian intervention in "Humanitarian Intervention: The Early Years" (pdf). And Martha Finnemore examines more recent history in order to reveal the "Paradoxes in Humanitarian Intervention" (pdf). Both are available online courtesy of CGPACS. (Posted 9/02/05)
• David Rieff talks about his book, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, in this 05/04/05 Carnegie Council presentation. (Posted 10/26/05)
• Amitai Etzioni's "Sovereignty as Responsibility" (forthcoming in the Winter 2006 edition of Orbis) "examines the development of a new normative principle of international order, sovereignty as responsibility; its communitarian implications; and the ways that the newly conceived responsibility of the international community to protect the people of states failing to live up to their responsibilities as defined by international norms can come to terms with the notion of democratic self-government." (Posted 12/15/05)
• Although his "Marxo-Weberian" reflections on recent global patterns of warfare are more wide-ranging than their placement in this section may suggest, Alain Joxe issues a sweeping indictment of "The Humanitarianization of War" in this exerpt from The Empire of Disorder (Semiotext[e], 2002), online courtesy of Borderlands. (Posted 12/23/05)
• In his 2002 essay on "The Intervention Debate" for the Strategic Studies Institute (SST), John Garofano "argues that American policymakers must take an approach based on principled judgment when deciding on the use of force. He concludes with a discussion of Army roles and requirements for future contingencies." (Posted 12/25/05)
• Classic text: John Stuart Mill's "A Few Words on Non-Intervention" (pdf) is finally available online for free, courtesy of the new International Political Theory Beacon. (Posted 3/25/06)
• Max P. Glaser addresses the thorny practical problem of enforcing international human rights law in areas of conflict in "Negotiated Access: Humanitarian Engagement with Armed Nonstate Actors," Max P. Glaser. (Posted 7/19/06)
• Several articles on humanitarian intervention are collected in International Legal Theory, Vol. 7(1) Spring 2001. These include the following: "The Non-Intervention Principle and Humanitarian Interventions Under International law," by Jianming Shen; "There is No Norm of Intervention or Nonintervention in International Law," by Anthony D'Amato; Intervention, Imperialism and Kant's Categorical Imperative," by Maxwell O. Chibundu; "The Non-Intervention Principle and International Humanitarian Interventions," by Amy Eckert; "Humanitarian Intervention: A Response," by Bryan F. MacPherson; & "The Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention Under International Law," by Mortimer Sellers. (Posted 10/22/06)
• In "Humanitarian Intervention and the Distribution of Sovereignty in International Law," Patrick Macklem examines the legality and legitimacy of humanitarian intervention: "Legal debates about humanitarian intervention -- military intervention by one or more states to curb gross human rights violations occurring in another state -- tend to assume that its legitimacy is irrelevant to its legality. Debates among philosophers and political theorists often assume the inverse, that the legality of humanitarian intervention is irrelevant to its legitimacy. This paper defends an alternative account, one that sees the legality and legitimacy of humanitarian intervention as intertwined and ultimately tied to the justice of the distribution of sovereignpower that lies at the heart of the international legal order." (Posted 10/26/06)
• In "Contending Interventions: Coming to Terms with the Practice and Process of Enforcing Compliance," Human Rights and Human Welfare, Volume 6, 2006, Emilian Kavalski reviews Martha Finnemore's The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force and Michael C. Davis' (ed.) International Intervention in the Post-Cold War World: Moral Responsibility and Power Politics, and outlines an alternative approach. (Posted 10/31/06)
• A working version of Terry Nardin's "The Moral Basis of Humanitarian Intervention" is available for downloading from the UC Irvine school of social sciences where the paper was part of a 5/26/2000 symposium at the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. (Posted 11/7/06)
• Now available online courtesy of Tim Hayward and the International Political Theory Beacon is Kok-Chor Tan's chapter on "The Duty to Protect," from Terry Nardin and Melissa S. Williams eds., Humanitarian Intervention, NOMOS XLVII, NYU Press, 2005. (Posted 11/11/06)
• Ryan Goodman rebuts the "pretext" objection to the legalization of humanitarian interventions in "Humanitarian Intervention and Pretexts for War," American Journal of International Law, volume 100, number 1, January 2006, pp. 107-41. (Posted 11/11/06)
• In a preliminary draft of "Democracy, Prudence, Intervention," Jack Goldsmith examines certain tensions between the kinds of humanitarian interventions that some just war theorists favor and the pressures of instrumentally rational decision-making that are typical of democracies. (Posted 1/18/07)
• Oxfam's "Impact Measurement and Accountability in Emergencies: The Good Enough Guide," is designed "to improve the speed, quality, and effectiveness with which the humanitarian community saves lives, improves the welfare, and protects the rights of women, men, and children affected by emergency." (Posted 2/24/07)
• Peter Singer asks "Should Humanitarians Use Private Military Services?" Perhaps, but they should do so cautiously. (Posted 2/27/07)
• Michael Kocsis' Handy Links is a useful collection of links to articles from 2000 to 2006 on humanitarian intervention. (Posted 3/7/07)
• In "The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention," Peaceworks, United States Institute of Peace, July 2002, C. A. J. Coady cautiously examines the attractions and the pitfalls of "destruction and killing in defense of human rights and for prevention of human suffering." (Posted 3/21/07)
• "Humanitarian Intervention: The Utopia of Just War? The NATO intervention in Kosovo and the Restraints of Humanitarian Intervention," by Arkadiusz Domagala, Sussex European Institute working paper August, 2004. (Posted 8/7/07)
• There are a number of chapters that touch upon issues of humanitarian intervention in The Use of Force in International Relations: Challenges to Collective Security, Hans Kochler ed., International Progress Organization, 2006. (Posted 12/4/07)

NATIONALISM/COSMOPOLITANISM: (scroll down for the most recent posts)

• Read Paul Starobin's cover story on The Rise of Nationalism in the National Journal.
• Check out the Stanford Encyclopedia's philosophical introduction to nationalism.
• Peruse the bibliography and resources on nationalism available through the Global Policy Forum.
• The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Nationalism Project makes available a wide array of useful materials.
• This is the place for book reviews related to the topic of nationalism.
• In his comments on The Ethics of Secession Paul Treanor argues that "Secession is the only real method of new state formation, and a [general] prohibition of secession is equivalent to a veto on new states. There is no moral justification for such a veto. As a general principle every state-forming secession is legitimate, unless there are specific reasons to reject it." (10/2/04)
• M. Michael Schifff's "Histories and Theories of Nationalism: A Semiotic Reproach, follows Julia Kristeva's Nations without Nationalism in suggesting a post-Freudian critique of ethnic group formations as, of course, fetishistic. (11/16/04)
• Louis Pojman's unpublished 'Nationalism, Cosmpolitanism, and World Government' (PDF) is available for dowloading from this link to his homepage. (Posted 1/12/05)
• Edmond Wright's 'Patriotism or Nationalism: A Question of Epistemology?' is available for reading. (Posted 1/12/05)
• Martha Nussbaum's 'Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism' suggests that "the life of the cosmopolitan, who puts right before country, and universal reason before the symbols of national belonging, need not be boring, flat, or lacking in love." (Posted 1/13/05)
• "It is not uncommon to defend moderate forms of patriotism, but does such patriotism have positive moral significance? Igor Primoratz argues it does not, but he thinks we may sometimes have a moral duty to be patriots of a different sort: Ethical Patriots." (Posted 2/2/05)
• David Little of the U.S. Institute of Peace strives for balance and objectivity in "Belief, Ethnicity, and Nationalism," which explores the following questions: "...why does ethnic conflict and the struggle over national identity in so many places -- in Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tibet and China, Israel, India, Nigeria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, etc. -- have such a conspicuous and enduring religious component? Even if religion is used or manipulated for ulterior purposes, why, exactly, is it religion that repeatedly gets used for ethnic and nationalist purposes?" (Posted 2/17/05)
• In "Nationalism and Secession," Hans-Hermann Hoppe extols the benefits of secessionist movements. (Posted 3/31/05)
• Aleksandar Pavkovic wonders whether the idea of nationalist secession promises more than it delivers. His working paper is available through the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. (Posted 3/31/05)
• Howard Zinn asks "Is not nationalism--that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder--one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?" in "The Scourge of Nationalism", from the online pages of The Progressive. (Posted 5/17/05)
• Scott L. Pratt's article, "Jane Addams: Patriotism in Time of War" (pdf) (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol 28, Issue 1, pp. 102-118) is available for downloading coutesy of Blackwell-Synergy. (Posted 6/2/05)
• Richard Koenigsberg sees an essential connection between warfare and nationalism in his essay 'As the Soldier Dies, So Does the Nation Come Alive: The Sacrificial Meaning of Warfare'. (Posted 7/9/05)
• Thomas Hylland Eriksen's website contains a number of his works on ethnicity and nationalism, including 'Ethnic identity, national identity and intergroup conflict,' originally published in Social Identity, Intergroup Conflict, and Conflict Reduction, Ashmore, Jussim, Wilder (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2001. (Posted 7/18/05)
• A. C. Grayling offers 'The Last Word on Nationalism' (Posted 7/26/05)
• Shlomo Avineri's "Self-Determination and Realpolitik: Reflections on Kurds and Palestinians" is available from the online summer 2005 issue of Dissent Magazine. (Posted 8/1/05)
• Richard Koenigsberg offers a psychoanalytic acount of nationalism as a rapacious collective fantasy of immortality in "Awaking from the Nightmare of History: Psychological Interpretation of War and Genocide." (Posted 8/4/05)
• In "Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite," Samuel Huntington offers a pat analysis of American political culture as divided between cosmopolitan elites and the patriotic masses. (Posted 9/3/05)
• Classics: Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was the most compelling voice of a form of early modern English nationalism which was simultaneously patriarchal, Christian, elitist, and stridently dissenting. Bolingbroke's thought serves as a reminder of the tremendous variety of forms that a sense of national attachment and rootedness can take. Enjoining his reader to embrace the role of the critically engaged patriot, he asks "To what higher station, to what greater glory can any mortal aspire, than to be, during the whole course of his life, the support of good, the control of bad government, and the guardian of public liberty?" Voltaire's classic treatment of "Patrie" in The Philosophical Dictionary was famous in its day and still remains funny and relevant. Johann Gottfried von Herder may have had it in mind when he wrote this passage of his Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, in which he retorts that "The inundated heart of the idle cosmopolitan is a home for no one." All three texts are available courtesy of Fordham University's Internet Modern History Sourcebook. (Posted 9/3/05)
• "Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter" (Mother Earth, December 1915) is Emma Goldman's impassioned indictment of American nationalism: "The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave..." Continued reflections in a similar vein are presented in Goldman's "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty." Also relevant here, a recent useful analysis of the anarchist tradition's opposition to nationalism is presented by Lucien van der Walt, in "In This Struggle, Only The Workers And Peasants Will Go All The Way To The End: Towards a History of Anarchist Anti-Imperialism," from Against War and Terrorism: Anarchist Writings on the War, Dublin 2001. Thanks to Brett LeVesseur for submitting these links. (Posted 12/14/05)
• In "Globalization: The Dangers and The Answers" (openDemocracy.net), David Held argues that "Washington-led neo-liberalism and unilateralism has failed the world," and he sets forth a new "social democratic model" of globalization that might better serve common human interests. Thomas N. Hale and Anne-Marie Slaughter respond in "A Covenant To Make Global Governance Work" by arguing that Held's model "needs a detailed mapping of the kind of policies and outcomes that would make cosmopolitan global governance work," and by suggesting that in order for this map to guide real policy in, say, Washington, it will need to be articulated in terms of "a language that connects cosmopolitan goals to [American] Christian values." Held responds to the criticisms of Hale and Slaughter in "Building Bridges." (Posted 1/1/06)
• Kwame Anthony Appiah's "The Case for Contamination," an essay adapted for today's NY Times magazine from his forthcoming Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, argues that "A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan." (Posted 1/1/06)
• Follow this link to watch Kai Nielsen's video lecture on "Cosmopolitanism" at San Diego State University's Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, November 18th, 2003. (Posted 1/7/06)
• Moto Saji's "Revisiting Kant on Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism" examines Kant's cosmopolitan political thought in light of his Critique of Pure Reason. (Posted 1/19/06)
• The first chapter of Bernard-Henri Levy's American Vertigo presents a French perspective on American patriotism which, along with other parts of the book, is sure to garner inflated public attention in the coming weeks. (Posted 2/4/06)
• In "Cosmopolitanism is Not Enough: Why Nationalism and the Politics of Identity Still Matter," Craig Calhoun of the Social Science Research Council argues "(1) that cosmopolitan democracy is not as easy as much recent theory has suggested, (2) that it may be less a matter of global cultural uniformity than of local and regional mixtures that preserve some old differences and produce new ones, (3) that cosmopolitanism in itself is not basis enough for democracy or development and that people still need a sense and a reality of belonging to more particular social groups (including nations ..." (Posted 2/19/06)
• Samuel Scheffler's "Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism" (pdf), originally published in Utilitas 11/3 (November 1999): 255-76, is now available online. I highly recommend this article in which Scheffler, a very careful, balanced and perceptive philosopher, critically engages with the views of Rawls, Nussbaum, and others. (Posted 2/19/06)
• For an introductory historical overview, see Daniele Conversi's "Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism" from the Encyclopaedia of Nationalism, Athena Leoussi (ed.), Oxford: Transaction Books, 2000, pp. 34-39. (Posted 2/19/06)
• Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, volume 1, issue 3, summer 2002, is available online in its entirety. It includes David Held's "Cosmopolitanism and Globalization," Ian Lustick's "Nationalism in the Middle East," and more. Read on... (Posted 2/19/06)
• Michael Berube, who has somehow just been voted most dangerous professor, offers a surprisingly unmenacing account of post-9/11 "leftist" politics in "Nation and Narration," Context 10, 2002. (Posted 2/24/06)
• Takeshi Nakano offers "A Critique of [David] Held's Cosmopolitan Democracy" (pdf), in Contemporary Political Theory, Vol 5, 2006. (Posted 3/25/06)
• In "Nationalism and Rationality," Journal of World-Systems Research 6(2), summer/fall 2000, Michael Hechter defends the thesis that "the preponderance of nationalist violence seems to have strategic roots, and therefore can be regarded as the outcome of individually rational action. This means that certain kinds of social institutions can provide incentives that should contain nationalist violence." (Posted 4/11/06)
• Judith Lichtenberg asks "How Liberal Can Nationalism Be?" Philosophical Forum 28 (1996-97), 53-72; reprinted in Ronald Beiner, ed. Theorizing Nationalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). Answer: It depends. "If ... the commitment to diversity exists or can be made to exist, we might hope that it could be extended more broadly beyond state borders. If it can, then there is hope for the kind of global equality that is a moral prerequisite for liberal nationalism." (Posted 4/11/06)
• Follow these links to listen to Charles Taylor's lectures on "The Sources of Violence, Perennial and Modern" Part 1 and Part 2. In this lecture Taylor offers a series of historical reflections illustrating the role of "mimetic rivalry" (a la Rene Girard), "reversals of fear," and "purification rituals" in the production of extreme forms of political violence. These and more audio lectures are available courtesy of The Institute for Human Sciences at the University of Vienna. (Posted 4/20/06)
• Eric Kaufmann's "The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in the Twentieth Century West: A Comparative-Historical Perspective on the United States and European Union," Global Society, Vol. 17, no. 4 (2003), pp.359-83, is an illuminating study of divergent developments in political and cultural cosmopolitanism. (Posted 4/22/06)
• Check out "Realism vs. Cosmopolitanism," a debate between Barry Buzan and David Held, conducted by Anthony McGrew. (5/1/06)
• In his "Notes on Nationalism" George Orwell distinguished between a number of different forms of nationalism of particular importance in the context of 1945 Great Britain. He also drew an important distinction between nationalism and patriotism: "By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'. But secondly -- and this is much more important -- I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality." (Posted 5/9/06)
• Follow this link to find a free online copy of Louis Pojman's "Kant's Perpetual Peace and Cosmopolitanism," Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 36, Issue 1, Spring 2005. (Posted 5/21/06)
• Pauline Kleingeld's article on "Kant's Cosmopolitan Patriotism" (Kant-Studien 94, 2003: 299-316) challenges the common assumption that a cosmopolitan moral point of view is incompatible with patriotic attachments. In treating the broader historical context, Kleingeld also explains "Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late 18th Century Germany," Journal of the History of Ideas 60, 1999, pp. 505-524. (Posted 5/22/06)
• Debjani Ganguly examines contrasting visions of post-colonial transformation in India and across the globe in "Convergent Cosmopolitics in the Age of Empire: Gandhi and Ambedkar in World History," Borderlands, Volume 4, Number 3, 2005. (Posted 5/29/06)
• In this RealVideo installment of UC Berkeley's Conversations with History, Harry Kreisler prompts Sayla Benhabib to discuss the life experiences, historical observations and philosophical reflections that have shaped her cosmopolitan thinking about "the political" and "the right to rights." (6/8/06)
• Parts of Bernard Yack's current book manuscript are available from the University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop as "Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community". (Posted 6/23/06)
• Richard J. Arneson asks, "Do Patriotic Ties Limit Global Justice Duties?," and critically examines three standards arguments for the "patriotic priority thesis." (7/11/06)
• In "An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With," NY Times July 16, 2006, Robert Wright provides an outline of "progressive realism" that attempts to strike a liberal balance between cosmopolitan and nationalist concerns. (Posted 7/19/06)
• In "Globalisation and Capitalist Property Relations: A Critical Assessment of Held's Cosmopolitan Theory," forthcoming in Historical Materialism, Tony Smith argues that "without a radical break from the social forms of global capitalism the dreams of cosmopolitan democratic theorists are doomed to disappointment." (Posted 9/1/06)
• Both Daniele Conversi's "Demo-skepticism and Genocide," and Roger Eatwell's "Explaining Fascism and Ethnic Cleansing: The Three Dimensions of Charisma and the Four Dark Sides of Nationalism," Political Studies Review, Volume 4, 2006, critically engage with Michael Mann's recent work on fascism. (Posted 12/13/06)
• In "Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State," Philosophy & Public Affairs, volume 35, number 1, 2007, Andrea Sangiovanni argues that global justice requires, not a sense of cosmopolitan citizenship, but an "internationalism" in which citizens of separate nation states accept that they have special obligations towards their compatriots. (Posted 3/21/07)
• In "Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determination and Cosmopolitan Norms," Tanner Lectures on Human Values, March 15-19, 2004, Seyla Benhabib argues that "since the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 we have entered a phase in the evolution of global civil society that is characterized by a transition from international to cosmopolitan norms of justice." (Posted 5/8/07)
• In this draft of Love, Idolatry, and Patriotism," Social Theory and Practice, Volume 32, Number 4, 2006, Eamonn Callan argues that although one is under no obligation to love one's country, it is a bad mistake to repudiate patriotism outright. Check back soon for a free copy of the published version courtesy of the The IPT Beacon here. (Posted 6/20/07)
• In "The Borders of Just War Theory," British International Studies Association 2006 conference, John Williams questions assumptions about the centrality of nation states, borders and territoriality in the work of Jean Bethke Elshtain and others in the field of JWT. (Posted 8/7/07)
• "The Return of Patriotism," Phlip R. Abbott's introduction to the essays collected in The Many Faces of Patriotism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), presents a useful overview of theoretical discussions of patriotism from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the aftermath of 9/11. (Posted 9/10/07)
• In "Unlearning American Patriotism," Theory and Research in Education, Volume 5, 2007, pp. 7-21, Richard Miller argues that "moral sensitivity to the wrongs of American foreign policy" should lead teachers in the U.S. to educate in ways that undermine the civic project of instilling patriotic attitudes in students. (Posted 1/4/09)
• In "Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: "Irreconcilable Differences or Possible Bedfellows?," National Identities, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2003, Brett Bowden argues that the nationalism/cosmopolitanism dichotomy is "derived from competing conceptions of human nature" and that its "resolution" is to be sought within "the individual mind-set or psyche." Thanks to Dan Hocking for the link. (Posted 1/30/09)

GLOBAL SOCIETY/HEGEMONY/EMPIRE:

• Tim Dunne's "Social Hierarchy in International Relations," International Relations 17(3), 2003, pp. 303-320, raises the questions of whether and in what ways the English School of IR theory is remains relevant post-9/11. (Posted 5/25/06)
• Frank J. Garcia, "Globalization and the Theory of International Law," Boston College Law School Faculty Papers, No. 55, June 13, 2005, challenges the "society of states" model of the basis of international law in favor of a "global society" model. (Posted 5/25/06)
• The Journal of World-Systems Research, Volume XI, Number 2, December 2005, is a special issue devoted to "Globalization from 'above' and 'below': The Future of World Society." Contents include the following: Christopher Chase-Dunn's "Social Evolution and the Future of World Society"; George Modelski's "Long-Term Trends in World Politics"; Joachim Karl Rennstich's "Chaos or ReOrder? The Future of Hegemony in a World-System in Upheaval"; Alberto Martinelli's "From World System to World Society?"; and more. (Posted 5/25/06)
• "The Real World of Global Democracy," by Daniel M. Weinstock and other selected articles are now available online for a limited time (3 months) courtesy of the publishers and the International Political Theory Beacon. (Posted 5/25/06)
• In "American Hegemony and the Future of East-West Relations," International Studies Perspectives Volume 7, 2006, pp. 23-30, David Lake argues that if recent trends continue China will rival the U.S. in terms of hard power. The U.S. might however constrain Chinese power by repairing and building its authority within the international legal order. This manuscript copy is online courtesy of the author. (Posted 5/27/06)
• In "Good Governance at the Supranational Scale: Globalizing Administrative Law," Yale Law Journal, Vol. 115, 2006, pp. 1490-1562, Daniel C. Esty "examines the tension between the demonstrable need for structured international cooperation in a world of interdependence and the political strain that arises whenever policymaking authority is lodged in global institutions." (Posted 5/27/06)
• In a well-known article entitled "Benevolent Empire" (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1998) Robert Kagen argues that "continued American dominance" is essential for "the preservation of a reasonable level of international security and prosperity." In a like-minded article, Kagen envisions the emergence of a "League of Dictators" (Washington Post 4/30/06) under the more or less independent protections of Russia and China. Accordingly, he sees the future of global politics as a complex struggle between American style Western "liberalism" and various brands of Eastern "autocracy." The Cold War didn't end, it merely became more confusing. Perhaps far more confusing than Kagen allows. To my mind, the rise of American autocracy threatens to strain this semi-Manichean understanding of contemporary geopolitics to the point of incoherence. (Posted 5/30/06)
• In "A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?," University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop, Fall 2005/2006, Jurgen Habermas explores the possibilities for and obstacles to fulfillment of the Kantian project of transforming international law into a constitutional framework for a truly cosmopolitan global polity. (Posted 6/23/06)
• In "The Remaking of a Unipolar World," The Washington Quarterly 29:3, Summer 2006, pp. 7-19, Robert Jervis explains "why the United States is a revisionist hegemon seeking a new and better international system rather than a status quo power continuing the order in which it now wields significant power and exercises great influence." (Posted 7/19/06) Also available online is Jervis' "Understanding the Bush Doctrine", Political Science Quarterly, Volume 118, Number 3, 2003. (Posted 7/23/06)
• In "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere," Republicart.net, March 2003, Nancy Fraser argues that, although problematic, the notion of a transnational public sphere "is indispensable, I think, to those of us who aim to reconstruct democratic theory in the current 'postnational constellation'." The task, as she sees it, is not to jettison the notion in light of its problems, but to reconstruct it along with our "conceptions of validity and communicative power." (Posted 7/19/06)
• In a working paper presented last August as part of the Princeton Project on National Security, G. John Ikenberry explains Why Bush Grand Strategy Fails and recommends merging American hegemony with international law in an alternative world order of "liberal unipolarity." (7/23/06)
• In "Human Rights in the Post-September 11th Era: Between Hegemony and Emancipation," Muslim World Journal of Human Rights Vol. 3, No. 1, 2006, Shadi Mokhtari shows how the customary contrast between a universalizing west and a relativizing east is no longer straightforwardly true. (Posted 8/16/06)
• In "Gramsci and Globalisation: From Nation State to Transnational Hegemony," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Volume 8, Number 4, December 2005, William I. Robinson argues that "An emergent global capitalist historical bloc, lead by a transnational capitalist class, rather than a particular nation?state, bloc of states, or region, is pursuing a hegemonic project." Registration required for free access. (Posted 8/16/06)
• In "The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction: Risking Judicial Tryanny," Foreign Affairs, July / August, 2001, Henry Kissinger argues against empowering institutions like the ICC on grounds that "historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inquisitions and even witch-hunts." (Posted 8/27/06) In "The Case for Universal Jurisdiction," Foreign Affairs, September/October 2001, Kenneth Roth offers a rebuttal. (Posted 11/10/06)
• In "Empires and International Relations Theory," Harriman Institute Lecture, 2/3/06, Daniel H. Nexon and Thomas Wright argue that "Empires have different structures than unipolar and hegemonic systems; they display significantly different dynamics than those stressed in balance-of-power and hegemonic-order theory. These differences have implications for the conduct of world politics, and for the question posed by 'American Empire'." (Posted 8/29/06)
• In "Hierarchy in International Relations: Authority, Sovereignty, and the New Structure of World Politics," Harriman Institute Lecture, 2/3/06, David Lake argues that "hierarchy matters and subordination pays; states appear to trade some portion of their sovereignty for protection from external security threats." (Posted 8/29/06)
• In "State Sovereignty, International Legality, and Moral Disagreement, APSA 9/2005, Brad R. Roth defends the customary Westphalian understanding of the principles of international sovereign equality and non-intervention against a swarm of critics, including liberal cosmopolitans, conservative realists, and neoconservative unilateralists. This piece also arguably belongs in the Humanitarian Intervention section (above), though you won't find it there. (Posted 8/30/06)
• According to Immanuel Wallerstein's argument in "US Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony," Monthly Review July/August 2003, American "imperial" aggression has less to do with its preeminent power than with the last 40 years of economic backsliding. (Posted 9/3/06)
• In "The Transformational Perspective and the Rise of a Global Standard of Civilization," International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, volume 1, 2001, Mehdi Mozaffari argues that "a meaningful analysis of contemporary international politics needs to consider seriously questions related to the identities of actors and the quality of anarchy... [and] ... only a truly democratic culture is able to construct durable, peaceful and generative co-operation." (Posted 10/19/06)
• Nadia Urbinati asks, "Can Cosmopolitical Democracy Be Democratic?" in Debating Cosmopolitics, Daniele Archibugi ed., Verso, 2003. The central problem is that the deliberative/participatory dimension of democratic political practice is in tension with the institutional/representative dimension, because the latter distances public legislative authority from local, grassroots tributaries of power. As a consequence, postnationalist global democratic politics can only embrace very weak centralized agencies of global legislative authority. (Posted 10/20/06)
• The entire text of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000, is available online for free, courtesy of neo-Marxism. (Posted 11/10/06)
• In an excerpt from his latest book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson examines the fragility of American imperial overreach. If the shortcomings of simultaneous campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan reveal that our empire is already stretched too thin, what will happen if we continue to strive for even greater expansion of our foreign military commitments? Can such expansion effectively promote the global common good and/or the interests of American citizens? (Posted 2/19/07)
• Although the debate cuts across several of the categories included on this webpage (counter-terrorism, Iraq, nationalism/cosmopolitanism, etc.), I post Michael Lind's response to critics of his conception of "The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy" in this section because much of the debate hinges upon questions about the current and likely future shape of geopolitics. (Posted 3/14/07)
• In "For Global Federation," Concerned Philosophers for Peace Newsletter, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring-Summer 2004, Thomas Magnell outlines a neo-Hobbesian approach to cooperative global security. WMD proliferation places nation states in conditions much like those envisioned in Hobbes's conception of the state of nature. Under such conditions we have strong prudential reasons for pursuing our realistic national security aims through cooperative federation with other states. (Posted 4/22/07)
• In "Civil Society and the Problem of Global Democracy," Democratization 12(1), February 2005, pp. 1-21, Michael Goodhart "criticizes the increasingly popular idea that global civil society (GCS) represents anappealing model of or strategy for global democracy." (Posted 10/17/07)
• Alex Bellamy's "Introduction: International Society and the English School," from International Society and its Critics, Bellamy (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2004, touches upon a number of pertinent issues for our understanding of hegemony and global society, canvasses recent challenges to the assumptions of so-called "political realism," and outlines some IR research that is highly relevant for purposes of thinking about the prospects for normative restraint in the transnational deployment of armed forces. (Posted 1/12/08)
• In "What�s at Stake in the American Empire Debate?," American Political Science Review, Vol. 101, No. 2, May 2007, Daniel H. Nexon and Thomas Wright distinguish between unipolarity, hegemony and empire, and conclude that the U.S. is less imperial now than it was during the Cold War. (Posted 7/20/08)
• In "Benhabib on Democratic Iterations in a Global Order," Yossi Dahan & Yossi Yonah critique Benhabib's "Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms." (Posted 10/6/08).
• In "Whose Sovereignty? Empire Versus International Law," Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 18, no. 3, 2004, Jean Cohen argues against both Schmittian realism and post-national cosmopolitanism in championing the possibility of "a global rule of law" that safeguards both human rights and the idea (suitably revised) of state sovereignty. (Posted 12/26/08)

CIVIL WAR:

• In "Democracy after Civil War: A Kantian Paradox," New York University, November 16, 2002, Leonard Wantchekon presents a theory of "post-civil war democratization" which draws upon the model of political order among rational demons as well as sources from "classical political theory, contemporary democratic theory, and the state-building literature." (Posted 7/20/06)
• Nicholas Sambanis discusses "Using Case Studies to Expand Economic Models of Civil War," PPS, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2004. He shows that we cannot adequately understand civil war as an economic phenomenon without also understanding micro-level political motivations. (Posted 7/20/06)
• In "Horizontal Inequalities and Civil Conflict," Gudrun Oestby presents a quantitative model of case studies data to confirm and elaborate Kofi Annan's observation that "simple inequality between rich and poor is not enough to cause violent conflict. What is highly explosive is 'horizontal' inequality: when power and resources are unequally distributed between groups that are also differentiated in other ways -- for instance by race, religion or language." (Posted 7/20/06)
• The myths of the "liberal peace thesis" cloud awareness that war can be formative as well as ruinous, says Christopher Cramer, author of "Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing". (Posted 10/05/06)
• In "Making War and Building Peace:The United Nations since the 1990's," Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis ask why some post-civil war transitions succeed where others fail, and they "consider the implications of theories of civil war for the design and effectiveness of peacebuilding operations." (Posted 10/22/06)
• In "The Logic of Violence in Civil War," Stathis N. Kalyvas challenges "thewidespread perception of civil war violence as a random, chaotic, and anarchical process (first suggested by Thucydides and Hobbes) or a phenomenon better (or even exclusively) approached from the perspective of passions and emotions." (Posted 12/15/06)
• In "Jus ad Bellum, Jus in Bello and Non-International Armed Conflicts, Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, Volume VI, 2003, Francois Bugnion examines the question of whether the principles of just war theory, as articulated in public international law, apply in civil war contexts. The article is available online from the International Committee of the Red Cross. (Posted 1/13/07)
• In an online draft of "Coercive Capacity and Institutional Authority: The Relationship between State Strength and Civil War," Bethany Lacina looks at how different dimensions of state strength affect the likelihood of symetric and asymmetric civil conflicts. (Posted 3/10/07)
• A preliminary draft of David A. Lake's "Building Legitimate States After Civil Wars:Order, Authority, and Institutions" is available on the www. (Posted 3/10/07)
• In "Modeling civil violence: An agent-based computational approach," Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, 2002, Joshua M. Epstein analyses the dynamics of state suppression of "decentralized rebellion" and "communal violence between two warring ethnic groups." (Posted 3/10/07)
• Nichoas Sambanis asks, "Do Ethnic and Non-Ethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes?" World Bank, January 24, 2001. (Posted 4/2/07)
• Gudrun Ostby's article on "Polarization, Horizontal Inequalities and Violent Civil Conflict," Journal of Peace Research, vol. 45, no. 2, 2008, pp. 143�162, challenges some recent conventional wisdom: "Recent large-N studies of civil war conclude that inequality does not increase the risk of violent conflict. This article argues that such conclusions may be premature because these studies, which usually test the conflict potential of �vertical inequality� (i.e. income inequality between individuals), tend to neglect the group aspect of inequality. Case studies suggest that what matters for conflict is a concept closely linked to both economic and ethnic polarization: �horizontal inequalities�, or inequalities that coincide with identity-based cleavages. Horizontal inequalities may enhance both grievances and group cohesion among the relatively deprived and thus facilitate mobilization for conflict..." (Posted 8/8/08)
• In "Growth, Democracy, and Civil War," a working paper from SSRN, November 6, 2007, Antonio Ciccone and Markus Bruckner find that "lower international commodity price growth has no effect on civil war in democracies, but raises the likelihood of civil war incidence and onset in non-democracies." (Posted 9/9/08)
• In "Ethnic Diversity, Civil War and Redistribution," SSRN, March 4, 2008, Thomas Tangeras uses game theory to model the relationship between ethnic diversity and civil war: "The risk of civil war is comparatively high at intermediate levels of ethnic diversity. It is low if either society is very homogeneous or very diverse." (Posted 12/29/08)

WAR CRIMINALS:

• The complete text of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is available here courtesy of the University of Minnesota's Human Rights Library. (Posted 5/15/07)
• In "Justice in Times of Violence," European Journal of International Law, Volume 14, Number 2, Article 8, 2003, Frederic Megret examines the question of who should judge the war crimes of terrorists. On one hand, the "cosmopolitan" effort to try terrorists before the ICC is "unlikely to convince many and probably has more to do with liberalism's need to revitalize its programmatic promise in times that seem to profoundly challenge its globalizing logic." But on the other hand, "the notion, implemented in the United States, that terrorists should be judged by military commissions... betrays a regression of international law and can only be properly understood if viewed in the larger context of a crisis of liberalism." (Posted 5/15/07)
• In "Donald Rumsfeld: The War Crimes Case," Jurist, November 9, 2006, Marjorie Cohn argues "that although Donald Rumsfeld is resigning as US Secretary of Defense, steps should be and will be taken to hold him accountable for breaches of international law and even war crimes sanctioned in Iraq and Guantanamo during his tenure..." (Posted 5/16/07)
• Follow this link for a background brief on "The Case Against Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et. al. filed in Germany on November 14, 2006... a request for the German Federal Prosecutor to open an investigation and, ultimately, a criminal prosecution that will look into the responsibility of high-ranking U.S. officials for authorizing war crimes in the context of the so-called 'War on Terror. The complaint is brought on behalf of 12 torture victims -- 12 Iraqi citizens who were held at Abu Ghraib prison and one Guantanamo detainee -- and is being filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Republican Attorneys' Association (RAV) and others..." (Posted 5/15/07)
• In "Jus Post Bellum: The Importance of War Crimes Trials," Perameters, August 2002, Davida Kellogg makes the case for post-war criminal justice on both retributive and forward-looking grounds: "Declining to do full justice for those who have been most grievously wronged by aggression, whether from without or within their national borders, leads to the perpetration of further moral injustice..." (Posted 5/15/07)
• In "Fair Trials for War Criminals," International Commentary on Evidence, Volume 4, Issue 1, Article 6, Patricia Wald "examines the extent to which different national, international and hybrid courts have been able to ensure that accused persons obtain a fair trial." (Posted 5/15/07)
• In "Advocacy and Scholarship in the Study of International War Crime Tribunals and Transitional Justice, Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 7, 2004, pp. 345-62, Leslie Vinjamuri and Jack Snyder offer a very useful survey of the literature. (Posted 5/15/07)
• Ernesto Verdeja's chapter on "Institutional Responses to Genocide and Mass Atrocity," from Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity, Adam Jones (ed.), Zed Books, 2004, "discusses the normative underpinnings of tribunals and truth commissions" and "identifies factors that affect the viability of commissions and tribunals, and emphasizes the importance of contextual constraints on their implementation and use." (Posted 5/15/07)
• In "Objective Responsibility: Show Trials and War Crimes Trials," International Commentary on Evidence, Volume 4, Issue 1, Article 2, Gerry Simpson "challenges the new international criminal tribunals to distinguish and differentiate their procedures from those of 'show trials'." (Posted 5/16/07)
• In "War Crimes and Reconciliation after Conflict," chapter 6 of Morality and Contemporary Warfare, Yale University Press, 1999, James Turner Johnson argues that "the case for war crimes proceedings against persons responsible for atrocities during a conflict outweighs the argument for ending the armed stage of the conflict on a no-fault basis." (Posted 6/5/07)
• In "Universal Jurisdiction and the Dilemmas of International Criminal Justice: The Sabra and Shatila Case in Belgium," from Human Rights Advocacy Stories, Deena Hurwitz, Margaret L. Satterthwaite, Doug Ford, eds., Foundation Press, 2009, Hurwitz examines the state-specific politics of war crimes prosecution efforts. (Posted 12/21/08)
• In "Beyond Retribution and Impunity: Responding to War Crimes of Sexual Violence," GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 104, SSRN, August 26, 2004, Naomi Cahn "discusses the contemporary Congolese conflict, providing the context for the sexual violence that has occurred during the war" and "provides a fuller development of the principles that should guide any response to the sexual violence, surveying the possible approaches." (Posted 12/29/08)
• In "Living Up to Rules: Holding Soldiers Responsible for Abusive Conduct and the Dilemma of the Superior Orders Defence," McGill Law Journal, Volume 52, 2007, Martha Minow "examines the degree to which holding individual soldiers legally responsible for their actions can be seen to be an effective strategy for the prevention of atrocities and explores complementary strategies aimed at the prevention of abusive conduct by soldiers."
• In "The Hamdan Case and the Application of a Municipal Offence: The Common Law Origins of �Murder inViolation of the Law of War�," Journal of International Criminal Law, Volume 7, 2009, John C. Dehn argues that this municipal common law invoked in Ex parte Quirin "was not an attempt to articulate a crime defined or made punishable by the law of nations or positive IHL [International Humanitarian Law], but rather to implement punishment permitted by it. Municipal law in that regard may, to a certain extent, go beyond the scope of IHL and criminalize conduct that is not made directly punishable by the laws of war." (Posted 5/13/09)

GENERAL PEACE & WAR RELATED WEB RESOURCES:

• Sound ethical judgments about warfare need to be based upon good information. For authoritative reporting on current issues of concern to everyone who cares about just and humane use of military force, check out the Human Rights Watch website.
• To keep abreast of the legal news pertaining to the U.S. war against terrorism, the Human Rights First website is the place to go.
• Looking for coverage that might counterbalance the biases of mainstream corporate media? Then the American Library Association's comprehensive list of alternative resources is the best place to start looking for the reports that you don't see on the nightly news and the arguments that you don't hear from TV pundits.
• For exhaustive lists of political science & war-watching internet resources, check out Craig McKie's Research Resources for the Social Sciences. (Posted 7/18/04)
• Jonathan Dohenty's RadicalAcademy.com hosts a plethora of philosophical materials and many useful alternative resources in political thought. (Posted 7/19/04)
• The Global Policy Forum "monitors policy making at the United Nations, promotes accountability of global decisions, educates and mobilizes for global citizen participation, and advocates on vital issues of international peace and justice." They provide numerous links to timely reports and to organizations that address international justice, security, disarmament and peacemaking problems. (Posted 7/20/04)
• The website for The Crimes of War Project compiles text and photo journalism of the highest quality covering issues in international humanitarian law. (Posted 8/29/04)
• The University of Minnesota's Human Rights Library hosts a number of valuable publications on War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity, Genocide, and Terrorism. (Posted 10/20/04)
• Paul Martin Lester maintains a very useful website devoted to Ethics on the World Wide Web. JWT.com readers will be particularly interested in his Military Ethics page. (Posted 12/07/04)
• Anup Shaw presents several interesting war-related pages, full of useful links, in the Geopolitics section of Globalissues.com. (Posted 12/09/04)
• The Project on Defense Alternatives is an excellent and rapidly growing compendium of studies on military strategy. (Posted 11/23/05)
• The National Security Archive at George Washington University is the best source for declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. (Posted 12/05/05)
• The Institute for Theology and Peace maintains a useful Online Bibliography containing "148,000 titles" relevant to research in "peace ethics." References are to monographs and print journals. (Posted 3/2/07)

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