This book aims to examine the conditions under which the decision to use force can be reckoned as legitimate in international relations. Drawing on communicative action theory, it provides a provocative answer to the hotly contested question of how to understand the legitimacy of the use of force in international politics. The use of force is one of the most critical and controversial aspects of international politics. Scholars and policy-makers have long tried to develop meaningful standards capable of restricting the use of force to a legally narrow yet morally defensible set of circumstances. However, these standards have recently been challenged by concerns over how the international community should react to gross human rights abuses or to terrorist threats. This book argues that current legal and moral standards on the use of force are unable to effectively deal with these challenges. The author argues that the concept of 'deliberative legitimacy', understood as the non-coerced commitment of an actor to abide by a decision reached through a process of communicative action, offers the most appropriate framework for addressing this problem. The theoretical originality and empirical value of the concept of deliberative legitimacy comes fully into force with the examination of two of the most severe international crises from the post Cold War period: the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo and the 2003 US military action against Iraq. This book will be of much interest to students of international security, ethics, international law, discourse theory and IR. Corneliu Bjola is SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow with the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, and has a PhD in International Relations.

Examines the difficulties in applying international law to recent armed conflicts known as 'new wars'.

The international system is becoming increasingly legalized, with legal arguments and legal advisors playing an increasingly important part in the state policymaking process. Presenting a practice-oriented theory of compliance with international law, this book shows how international law affects the behavior of increasingly lawyerized states in an ever more legalized world. By highlighting the legalization of international legitimation and the lawyerization of policymaking as the new engines of compliance, the book’s analytical framework rethinks the relationship between state behavior and international law, and provides an empirical focus on security through the study of NATO’s military intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 and the changes in the US detention and interrogation programs in the "War on Terror." Relying on primary sources, the author demonstrates the effect of lawyerized decision making on international law compliance, reconstructing the strategies of (de-)legitimation used to show that international law is the hegemonic frame of reference in interstate debates. This book will be of interest to scholars of international relations, government studies, foreign service studies and lawyers employed in government work.

When is the use of force for humanitarian purposes legitimate? The book examines this question through one of the most controversial examples of humanitarian intervention in the post Cold War period: the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. Justifying Violence applies a critical theoretical approach to an interrogation of the communicative practices which underpin claims to legitimacy for the use of force by actors in international politics. Drawing on the theory of communicative ethics, the book develops an innovative conceptual framework which contributes a critical communicative dimension to the question of legitimacy that extends beyond the moral and legal approaches so often applied to the intervention in Kosovo. The empirical application of communicative ethics offers a provocative and nuanced account which contests conventional interpretations of the legitimacy of NATO’s intervention.

This volume analyses the historical background of violent international conflicts. Starting with an analysis of the conflict and cooperation structures in post-communist Eastern Europe and the eastern expansion of the European Union, the author discusses the problem of acts of intervention in response to severe human rights violations, taking Kosovo, Libya and in a further text also Darfur, as examples. To analyse the subject of ethnonational autonomy and independence movements, the author presents case studies on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Belgium, Cyprus, on the Kurdish areas of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, on Israel/Palestine, on China with regard to Tibet and Xinjiang, and on the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The classic subjects of inter-state security and armament policy include the controversy over the nuclear policies of Iran and North Korea, while the analysis of the changes in Russia’s political system focuses on their far-reaching consequences for international politics. This book will appeal to students and scholars of international relations and peace and conflict studies, as well as to practitioners and decision makers in the field of peace politics.

A detailed and carefully structured study of Soviet/Russian attitudes and responses to military interventions. It explores cases from the Gulf War in 1990 to the intervention led by Western states in Libya in 2011.

This book offers compelling answers to the question of how global governance can and ought to effectively address serious global problems, such as financial instability, military conflicts, severe acts of distributive injustice and increasing concerns of ecological disasters, through argumentation research.