Just war theory and private security companies

This article examines the ethics of using private security companies to undertake combat operations in modern conflict zones. Previous studies on this topic, including those that have drawn on the principles of just war theory, have, out of necessity, been highly speculative because they lacked a strong empirical basis on which to evaluate the behaviour of private security personnel during their operations. Indeed, most scholarship on the ethics of private security companies has relied on a handful of anecdotal examples that happened to receive extensive media coverage. In contrast, this article undertakes the first quantitative analysis of how well the employees of a dozen private security companies adhered to the jus in bello tenets of just war theory and also how their degree of adherence to these tenets affected their tendency to suffer friendly casualties during their security operations in Iraq. It finds that the employees of most of the firms under study exhibited a moderate or high level of adherence to the jus in bello principles of proportionality and discrimination during their security operations in Iraq. Moreover, it also finds that close adherence to these principles did not necessarily expose private security personnel to greater risk of suffering harm.     

Vattel's law of nations and just war theory

It has often been said that Vattel's treatise on the law of nations breaks with the tradition of modern natural law and just war theory. Based on a closer examination of Vattel's justification of preventive war and of his assessment of the balance of power in Europe, the paper argues that this criticism is greatly exaggerated, if not entirely misleading.     

A challenge to the reigning theory of the just war

Troubled times often gives rise to great art that reflects those troubles. So too with political theory. The greatest work of twentieth century political theory, John Rawls's A theory of justice, was inspired in various respects by extreme social and economic inequality, racialized slavery and racial segregation in the United States. Arguably the most influential work of political theory since Rawls—Michael Walzer's Just and unjust wars—a sustained and historically informed reflection on the morality of interstate armed conflict—was written in the midst of the Vietnam War. It should be no surprise, then, that the bellicose period of the past 20 years should give rise to a robust new literature in political theory on the morality of armed conflict. It has been of uneven quality, and to some extent episodic, responding to particular challenges—the increased prevalence of asymmetric warfare and the permissibility of preventive or preemptive war—that have arisen as a result of specific events. In the past decade, however, a group of philosophers has begun to pose more fundamental questions about the reigning theory of the morality of armed conflict warfare—just war theory—as formulated by Walzer and others. Jeff McMahan's concise, inventive and tightly argued work Killing in war is without doubt the most important of these challenges to the reigning theory of the just war. This review article discusses McMahan's work, some of the critical attention it has received, and its potential implications for practice.     

如菊（外三首）

悠然南山，我离得太远。 但我知道，我是南山的一坯黄土，裹着腐朽的草叶，情愿在九月守候成那一派萧瑟，就你的韵香，望着蓝天。     

Just War-Just Sanctions

Abstract

The use of economic sanctions steadily increased during the twentieth century. Politically, sanctions seem to offer a safe alternative to armed conflict. International chastisement on a nation's unacceptable behaviour is often dealt with by imposing sanctions, the late twentieth-century version of ‘gun boat diplomacy’. However, little account appears to be taken of the devastating humanitarian impact that sanctions can have on the innocent victims of their Government's policies. This article considers the ethical implications of sanctions, using as an example the United Nations' sanctions against Iraq. The possibility of Just Sanctions is discussed against the background of Just War criteria, and questions the assumption that sanctions are a safe and reasonable alternative to conflict.     

Playing war

This paper argues that war video games are transitional spaces that connect players to the ‘war on terror’. It explores the pervasive influence of militarism in video games and how the US Army is enlisting play as an active force in blurring the distinctions between civilian and soldier. The paper begins by theorizing what exactly it means to ‘play’, and settles on the concept of ‘transitional space’ provided by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. It then investigates the ‘military entertainment complex’, an assemblage of institutions and sites that produce military video games for commercial release. Next, the paper looks at the aesthetics of video games, revealing an entrenched colonial logic instrumental for military recruitment and consent. The final section pulls all of this together to argue that video games are transitional spaces instrumental to understanding the everyday geographies of violence, terror, and warfare.     

Intimate war

Contending that domestic violence and modern international warfare are part of a single complex of violence, this paper identifies their shared intimate dynamics. Both violences operate through emotional and psychological registers that are as central to their effectiveness as incidents of direct physical harm. While these dynamics are intimate, they are present across scale, and read here through a feminist lens on intimacy-geopolitics where neither framing has primacy. Research on the connections between domestic violence and international warfare is longstanding, most recently highlighting how intimate violence is produced within warzones. The analysis here begins instead from intimate dynamics, to draw out the warlike nature of domestic violence in peacetime. Tactics of modern warfare are juxtaposed with the dynamics of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes: shock and awe, hearts and minds, cultural and psychological occupation, just war and collateral damage. Resisting the temptation to regard domestic violence as everyday militarism, the relation is rotated: both violences continuously wind through the intimate-geopolitical. This spatial reconfiguration is structured by gender, race, class, nation and citizenship, resulting in uneven impacts from all kinds of intimate war. The interweaving of military and intimate themes is intended as a casting-off point for progressing political geographies that are attentive to intimacy as foundational in the workings of power across scale.     

Italians at war: war and experience in Fascist Italy

This article examines Fascist violence in war from the perspective of the strategies employed by the Italian army. Focusing on the military’s use of violence from the re-conquest of Libya to the civil war in Italy, the article argues that Fascism systematically employed forms of violence that were both typical and original.     

Aiming for a Just Society

Abstract

I think it is time that theologians, as well as the Church at large, speak up and speak to the social injustice we are faced with because of the economical collapse in Iceland in autumn 2008. If we think theology (i.e. the discourse about God) does not happen in a vacuum, if we think it is affected by, and is also affecting its context, then theology must have a part to play in the political discourse. If we think everything related to our human condition is affecting our understanding and our talk about God, then all theology has to be political in the most inclusive sense of the word. In this article the intention is to test major theological terms against the situation we are faced with in our society, which is recovering from an economic collapse. Thus the question: to what extent are key theological terms useful when we need to address the outgrowth of social injustice and self-inflicted economical catastrophe?     

The German politics of war: Kunduz and the war in Afghanistan

This article analyses the way in which Germany's participation in the international intervention in Afghanistan has shaped and transformed the country's politics of defence and deriving policies. It argues that in the wake of operational challenges posed by the insurgency in northern Afghanistan since 2007, and in particular the increasing rate of German combat fatalities, established post‐Cold War dogmas of German politics are becoming subject to erosion. Developments in the Kunduz region of northern Afghanistan, with the tanker bombing of 4 September 2009 as its apex, have had a catalyst function in this process. In particular, strategic, operational and tactical requirements for counterinsurgency operations have had significant politico‐strategic repercussions for the country's defence and security policy more generally. As a result, in recent years the Bundeswehr has begun to undergo a far‐reaching structural process of military adaptation and innovation. The article explains and analyses this phenomenon of political change and military learning in the context of political paralysis.     

The hospitality of war

In considering some of the issues raised by the troubling and troublesome thesis of ‘the barbarization of warfare’, this review article reflects briefly on civilization and barbarism on the battlefield, and in the imagination, calling in aid an unholy alliance of Joseph Conrad, Norbert Elias, Basil Liddell Hart among others, and pitting the idea of a ‘civilizing process’ against a barbarizing one. From 2003 to 2006 UN Secretary General Kofi Annan pursued an agenda that went far beyond budget, personnel and management issues, and included proposed changes to existing institutions in peacebuilding, disarmament and non‐proliferation, human rights, and counterterrorism. The overhaul was prompted by fear that in the aftermath of its invasion of Iraq, the United States might walk away from the United Nations. By showing that the UN system could be strengthened to address the new threats of the twenty‐first century, Kofi Annan hoped that the United States could be convinced to re‐engage. Despite polarization and mistrust among member states, the effort created new intergovernmental organs to address key problems, gained universal endorsement for the responsibility to protect, and established new offices in the Secretariat to make it more effective. That more was not accomplished was a result of spotty American engagement and the performance of the US ambassador, as well as hesitation among many member states that would rather have an ineffective UN than an effective one that advanced the goals of American primacy.