Humanitarian intervention and war (Just war, Part 2)

[Editor’s note: This is the second in the series on just war by Dr. Michael Corgan.]

The anguish for leaders of countries is never about right versus wrong. It’s usually about bad versus worse or right versus right. Nowhere is this anguish more sharply drawn than in the tension between legal war and just war as defined by just war theory.

To set the simplest case first, the current legal restrictions on the use of war are essentially the United Nations Charter, which all states have signed, and the attendant treaties and conventions that attempt to codify restraints on armed aggression.

Defendants at Nuremberg Trials
Nuremberg Trials: Defendants in their dock, circa 1945-1946. (National Archives photo in public domain; from Wikimedia Commons)

Basically, the only legal recourse to war is self-defense against aggression. The one addition is that a state may, if requested, come to the defense of another state that cannot defend itself against aggression.

The famous Nuremberg Trials following WWII brought the world’s attention to the issue of expanding the criteria for war beyond legally permitted war. Up to that point, international law had been guided by laws that had been agreed to and written down.

But what law had the Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg violated? Certainly no law of the Third Reich had stood in their murderous way. But just as clearly, “crimes against humanity” had been committed, as all civilized nations agreed, even if there were no legal protocols for addressing such crimes.

Enter the idea of “natural law” and the elaboration of just war doctrine, which rejected the prevailing assumption that recognized every state as sovereign and as inviolable for what it did within its own borders.

The new idea of humanitarian intervention as a justification for war was first called into play when NATO took military action in Kosovo in 1999. Was this a legal use of war? Not according to current interpretations of the treaties almost all nations had signed. Was it a just war? If the Nuremberg principles were valid, then it seems it was just, at least from the standpoint of having a just cause.

We will return to this dilemma later but subsequent just war posts will first look at the other five criteria for just war and the conundrums they raise.

Michael T. Corgan, Associate Chair and Associate Professor of International Relations, Boston University

What is a “just” war? (Just war, Part 1)

Judge's gavel
Photo by Avjoska (Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported; from Wikimedia Commons)

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: Today we welcome the first of several contributions by our guest contributor Michael Corgan. Dr. Corgan is Associate Chair of International Relations and Associate Professor of International Relations at Boston University. He is a specialist in international security, Icelandic government, and American governmental institutions. He has extensive government service in political and military planning (especially NATO) and is a media analyst on security and political affairs. He has collaborated with me on several research projects concerned with perspectives on war and peace. His most recent book is Iceland and Its Alliances: Security for a Small State (2002).]

What makes a war “just”?  Is a just war also a “legal” war?  Understanding the distinction is important as we begin to explore the topic of just war in this series of posts.

As generally accepted, just war theory imposes six criteria for identifying a war as just:

  1. The war must have a just cause
  2. It must be initiated by a proper authority
  3. It must be a last resort
  4. The use of force must be proportional to the object to be achieved
  5. There must be a chance of success when one uses force; and
  6. The ensuing peace, if attained, must also be just.

It is the first criterion, just cause, that leads to the tension between legal war and just war.

As defined in international treaties, war is legal only if it used in self-defense (of one’s self or others). Just war theory, however, goes beyond the legal mandate and seems to permit an additional use of force–specifically in the case of what we nowadays call humanitarian intervention.

Consider the wars with which you are familiar:

  • To what extent were they initiated for a just cause?
  • In which cases did the initiators claim a just cause that later proved to be not the real cause for the attack on another land?

In the next post on just war, we will give further consideration to the notion of humanitarian intervention as a justification for a “just” war.

Michael T. Corgan, Associate Chair and Associate Professor of International Relations, Boston University