Doing Away with “Legitimate Authority”

ABSTRACT

I argue in this article that traditional just war theory did allow private, indeed even individual war, and that arguments in support of a legitimate authority criterion, let alone in support of the “priority” of this criterion, fail. I further argue that what motivates the insistence on “legitimate authority” is the assumption that doing away with this criterion will lead to chaos and anarchy. I demonstrate that the reasoning, if any, underlying this assumption is philosophically confused. The fact of the matter is that wars need not necessarily be authorized by some higher authority (such as a king, president, or parliament) in order to be justified, and this moral fact does not need to lead to chaos and anarchy. Accordingly, the criterion of legitimate authority cannot be relied on to delegitimate individual war, private war, guerrilla war, or even terrorism. Finally, I consider some other defenses of authorization and demonstrate that the “authorization” these accounts defend is either not needed for justification or already provided by other just war criteria or, indeed, entirely fictitious.     

Introduction: Exploring the jungle of terminology

When twentieth-century authors wrote about ‘partisan warfare’, they usually meant an insurgency or asymmetric military operations conducted against a superior force by small bands of ideologically driven irregular fighters. By contrast, originally (i.e. before the French Revolution) ‘partisan’ in French, English, and German referred only to the leader of a detachment of special forces (party, partie, Parthey, détachement) which the major European powers used to conduct special operations alongside their regular forces. Such special operations were the classic definition of ‘small war’ (petite guerre) in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries. The Spanish word ‘la guerrilla’, meaning nothing other than ‘small war’, only acquired an association with rebellion with the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon. Even after this, however, armies throughout the world have continued to employ special forces. In the late nineteenth century, their operations have still been referred to as prosecuting ‘la guerrilla’ or ‘small war’, which existed side by side with, and was often mixed with, ‘people's war’ or popular uprisings against hated regimes.     

The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad factor in the Mali crisis

Mali has been a battleground for more than a year now. While the armed conflict came in the aftermath of the Libyan crisis that left the regional security environment depleted, it also served as a catalyst for the collapse of state authority in Mali. This created conditions conducive for the proliferation of, and attacks by, radical religious armed groups in the northern regions of the country, including the Tuareg armed movement: the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). But, far from being a new phenomenon, the Tuareg-led armed insurrection in the northern regions is as old as the post-colonial Malian state, and continues to pose tremendous challenges in West Africa and the Sahel region for both regional and extra-regional actors. The recent crisis in the Sahel region is seen as one of the most serious since the end of the Cold War, with anticipated dire long-term impacts on the security of the region and beyond. While attention is predominantly focused on defeating the jihadist groups that have threatened the survival of the Malian state, one must not lose sight of the fact that the ‘Tuareg Factor’, as represented by the rebellion launched by MNLA, remains critical both in terms of appreciating the deterioration of the situation and attempting to frame long-lasting solutions. The paper argues that the Tuareg's persistent recourse to rebellion against Bamako needs to be understood within a historical trajectory that takes into consideration three key parameters: firstly, the post-colonial state in Mali and its African leadership's relations with the descendants of the Tuareg communities; secondly, the amalgamation created by the so-called war on terror; and, finally, the contradictions of the democratisation process of the 1990s.¹1 This article is based on field research carried out between 2008 and 2013 on the ‘Resurgence of Tuareg-led Rebellions’.     

How do sources of traditional legitimacy constrain popular uprisings? The case of the Kingdom of Swaziland

ABSTRACT

Research concerning authoritarian stability and peace usually investigates co-optation and repression. Recently, several studies argue that traditional legitimacy is also important for stability in monarchies. However, existing research rarely considers how legitimacy constrains rebellions and help the royal family to stay in power. Hence, this article explores the causal links between sources of traditional legitimacy and absence of uprisings. The study investigates the relationship with a case study of the Kingdom of Swaziland. In line with my expectations, I find a causal relationship between sources of traditional legitimacy and absence of popular uprisings. First, the royal family actively uses traditional legitimacy to justify their rule. Second, the Afrobarometer indicates that the Swazi people trust the King more than citizens in other African countries trust their head of state. Third, opposition actors have limited opportunities to mobilize the broader population against the monarchy. Fourth, traditional legitimacy dampens ongoing protests and thereby hinders their escalation into popular uprisings or political violence. Repression is clearly an important explanation for limited rebellion in Swaziland, but this article shows that also traditional legitimacy sources play a role.     

In Defense of Mercy

ABSTRACT

Though it is legally permissible to kill combatants in war, unless they are rendered hors de combat, the existence of “Naked Soldiers” raises an important moral question: should combatants kill vulnerable enemy combatants or show mercy towards them? Most philosophers who address this question argue that it is morally permissible to kill the Naked Soldier given the extended notion of self-defense during war. They ground their arguments in a form of collectivism. In this article, I use Larry May’s argument. He offers an approach that extends the principle of discrimination that would apply also to combatants. Instead of assuming all combatants are de facto dangerous, this approach would allow for nuance in targeting the enemy and showing mercy when enemy combatants clearly pose no danger, in other words, when they are Naked Soldiers. I defend this view against two criticisms: Noam Zohar’s view of armies as complex collectives and Stephen Deakin’s view that a policy that spares Naked Soldiers would be open to abuse. I argue that it is not only morally suspect to kill Naked Soldiers, but also it is within the spirit of both international laws governing war and the just war tradition to offer mercy whenever possible.     

The Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (1996–2001): ‘War-Making and State-Making’ as an Insurgency Strategy

This paper examines the institutional and functional aspects of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). The Taliban’s coercive approach and its entire reliance on “war-making” to “state-making” shows the difficulty of the transformation of an insurgent group into a state structure. The Taliban was primarily capable of establishing a two-track system of governance. However, the assessment of the IEA’s institutional and functional capabilities shows that the military–political organization formed by the Taliban lacked statehood in all three areas of legitimacy, authority and capacity.     

Population transfers in counter-insurgency: a recipe for success?

Since control over the population constitutes the most crucial determinant for victory in irregular warfare, how should a state authority isolate the insurgents (the “fish” in Maoist terms) from the population (the “sea” in which the “fish” thrive)? Should a state authority simply drain the “sea” by diverting its “water” elsewhere? Does the forcible transfer of the local people who support an insurgency truly work? This article studies how the royalist regime of Greece forcibly transferred thousands of villagers (over 10% of the total population) to counter the communist insurgency during the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) and shows whether and how these deportations could be crowned with success.     

Reading the Riot Act: Toward a More Comprehensive Ban on Chemical Weapons

ABSTRACT

The recent use of chemicals in warfare in Syria and Iraq illustrates that, despite the important work of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the world has not yet been totally successful in stopping the use of indiscriminate toxic agents in conflicts, either by states or non-state actors. Michael Crowley's excellent and timely new book, Chemical Control, analyzes the use of “riot control agents” (RCAs) and “incapacitating chemical agents” (ICAs), including launch and dispersal systems, by police, paramilitary, and military forces over the last decades and raises the challenging question about where the red line might be drawn between banned and permitted uses of chemicals. He discusses this problem not only in the context of the CWC, which allows use of RCAs for civilian riot control, but also in the context of international law, human rights, and criminal justice, including the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and other disarmament and abolition regimes. He proposes a “holistic, three-stage approach” to addressing this issue “for effective regulation or prohibition of the weapon or weapon-related technology of concern.” As we approach the global abolition of a whole class of weapons of mass destruction in the next decade or even sooner, Chemical Control is helpful in better understanding and solving the dilemma of what's actually banned or permitted under international law, and precluding states undermining the chemical weapons ban.     

The Changing Nature of Legitimate Authority in the Just War Tradition

ABSTRACT

The legitimate authority principle has become reduced to the issue of state authority. In its current formulation, the state has the sole authority to wage war, and because non-state actors, by their very definition, cannot satisfy this principle, their use of force is inherently unethical. This does not reflect the reality that non-state actors are increasingly engaging in the use of force, sometimes legitimately. As a result, the legitimate authority principle can and should look beyond the state. This article navigates a terrain in which non-state actors engage in the use of force, and in which revisionist just war thinking proposes that the concept of legitimate authority is irrelevant to thinking about the ethics of war. It proposes a principled approach to the inclusion of some non-state actors under the rubric of legitimate authority. This approach draws upon the historical development of the legitimate authority principle and incorporates the factors important to early writers on the subject.     

“Made in China”: an emerging brand in the global arms market

Possession of a brand is a sine qua non for economic success, not least because it connotes trust in delivering the value promised. Although Western arms exporters offer branded systems whose sales are influenced by price, there is a plethora of other economic variables, such as offset requirements and life-cycle support. Entrants to the international arms market will struggle without such arms “packages.” China’s entry, however, goes beyond the traditional economic paradigm. A four-stage historical model offers the backdrop for identifying the drivers that have forged its market entry into 55 countries worldwide. The strategy initially focused on sales of rudimentary military equipment for political purposes, but recently it has begun to commercialize exports, repositioning them from a low- to a high-tech sales trajectory. A Sino “brand” is thus emerging, reflecting both competitiveness and diplomatic considerations, especially non-interference in client state domestic affairs.     

A blunted spear: the failure of the African National Congress/South African Communist Party revolutionary war strategy 1961–1990

Following a classic Maoist revolutionary war strategy, with both Guevarian and Giapist elements, the African National Congress (ANC) attempted to overthrow, through revolutionary violence, the apartheid government of South Africa. This struggle, which began in 1961 and was eventually suspended in mid-1990, witnessed the general failure of the ANC strategy: for all intents and purposes – and despite all claims to the contrary – the ANC and its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’) failed to overthrow of the South African state by force, the purpose for which it was intended. The strongest indication of this was that the ANC was never able to establish (Phase One of revolutionary war) effective internal underground structures of any duration within South Africa. This much was clear when the ANC was unbanned in 1990, but was recognised long before: in October 1986, the ANC stated that ‘despite all our efforts, we have not come anywhere near the achievement of the objectives we set for ourselves’. The ANC's ‘use’ of the UDF structures inside South Africa, in this sense, was not the same thing as establishing effective internal ANC/MK structures in the way that they intended. The ANC/South African Communist Parry (SACP) also underestimated continuously the ability of the government to react strongly and viciously to the ‘Revolutionary Onslaught’: at least part of the blame for this underestimation lay with the promotion of the armed struggle over all other activities. In eidle, the ANC/SACP were unable to reach back effectively into the country to lead a revolution. In the end, the apartheid regime was defeated not by guerrilla action or by revolutionary overthrow, but through the mass action of millions of South Africans.     

New sources of military change – armed forces as normal organizations

The literature on how European states have adapted to the post-cold war security environment ffocuses invariably on different understandings of military transformation, a process which is seen as inherently different from other forms of organizational change. However, as this paper argues, new management practices, going back to the introduction of so-called New Public Management (NPM) reforms throughout Europe in the 1980s, have eventually penetrated also the last bastion of the old state – the defense sector. Taking a critical approach to the idea of military transformation and existing theories of military change, the paper demonstrates how other international developments have pushed towards what may be seen as a “normalization” of Europe’s defense sectors. This has important implications for how we approach and understand change in contemporary defense organizations.     

Dirty war: chemical weapon use and domestic repression

The utilization of chemical weapons to quash domestic rebellion is a drastic action for a regime facing domestic challengers to take, especially given the reputation costs and risk of international intervention. However, recent developments have illustrated that some regimes have contemplated and implemented extraordinary measures (including the use of chemical munitions) to quash rebellion. This study addresses the question of why some states utilize chemical weapons against domestic challengers while others refrain from this level of state repression. I argue that the utilization of chemical weapons has both domestic and international elements. Specifically, that ethnic cleavages that lead to secessionist challenges and factors associated with inter-state rivalry impact the likelihood that a state utilizes the employment of chemical munitions. I test my argument and other explanations regarding repression with a casestudy approach utilizing captured Iraqi Government documents comparing Iraq’s Al-Anfal campaigns with developments during the recent Syrian Civil War.     

Arrival and departure state distributions in the general bulk‐service queue

In this paper, we give an explicit relation between steady‐state probability distributions of the buffer occupancy at customer entrance and departure epochs, for the classical single‐server system G/G^[N]/1 with batch services and for the finite capacity case. The method relies on level‐crossing arguments. For the particular case of Poisson input, we also express the loss probability in terms of state probabilities at departure epochs, yielding probabilities observed by arriving customers. This work provides the “bulk queue” version of a result established by Burke, who stated the equality between probabilities at arrival and departure epochs for systems with “unit jumps.” © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 107–118, 1999     

The rise and fall of counterproliferation policy

The US government initiated a Defense Counterproliferation Initiative to address the concern that, in the post-Cold War years, the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons would be widespread and create a significant challenge to the US military’s combat operations. In particular, non-nuclear states might use chemical or biological warfare agents against US forces with the belief that nuclear weapons would not be used against them in retaliation. Following the events of September 11, 2001, defense strategy and policy shifted to a wider view of the threat of adversarial use of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) and the term “counterproliferation” was replaced by “combating” or “countering WMD.” Over time, the Defense Department increasingly moved away from counterproliferation principles with the detrimental effect of losing capabilities that US forces still need for contemporary adversaries. This shift has been aggravated by other US government agencies’ use of “counterproliferation” in lieu of what would have been termed “nonproliferation” activities in the 1990s. The loss of clarity within the US government on these terms has led to the inability to focus the “whole of government” on this significant national security challenge. To alleviate this challenge, the US government needs a top-down initiative to refocus policy on the distinctly different aspects of WMD with respect to military combat operations, combating terrorism, and homeland security.     

AMENDMENT TO THE AFRICAN UNION'S RIGHT TO INTERVENE

Heads of State and Government passed the first amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union within seven months of the launch of the organization. This article provides a legal analysis of the broadening of Article 4(h) of the Act, the right of intervention, to prevent a “serious threat to legitimate order”. It argues that this clause is inconsistent with the other grounds for intervention, which aim to protect African peoples from grave violations of human rights when their governments are unable or unwilling to do so. The amendment, by contrast, aims to uphold state security, rather than human security. The context in which this and other amendments were adapted from proposals by Libya in Durban 2002 is considered in terms of political implications for the African Union.     

THE AU MISSION IN BURUNDI

Abstract

Even though the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA) managed to take firm control of the state as the war ended in 2002, this article contends that its hegemony is not absolute. At the fringes of the state administration, emerging regional elites have established associations that seek to provide a remedy against the centralised system, which essentially deprives regions of political influence and sufficient economic resources. As in many other countries on the African continent, political identities that were legally enforced and institutionally reproduced in colonial times have hardly been transcended in the post-colonial period. Even if the associations' influence today does not yet reach further than bringing some insecurity to an otherwise secure polity dominated by the MPLA, the associations could play a role in reinforcing strong regional solidarity and give political expression to feelings of exclusion. Such sentiments could in turn lead to an increase of exclusivity ideas about citizenship, or even xenophobic violence. Much will depend on the strategies of the MPLA, and to what extent it will accommodate these emergent forces in the post-war era, not the least through the current sub-national state reforms.     

Transformation of Military Ethics During the Zhou Dynasty in Ancient China

ABSTRACT

The transformation of the governance model from a rule of virtue to political realism in China has been a topic of great interest to scholars. In this study, I examine military culture during the Zhou Dynasty and investigate the changes in ethics based on factors such as cultural values, social customs, and political structure to understand the process by which moral values have changed as the governance model transformed from rule of virtue to political realism. I found that military ethics have changed from governance through the use of rituals during the Western Zhou Dynasty to what was called “deception makes an army” during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty.     

On queues with dependent interarrival and service times

AnM/G/1 queueing system is studied in which the service time required by a customer is dependent on the interarrival time between his arrival and that of his predecessor Assuming the two variables are “associated,” we prove that the expected delay in this system is less than or equal to than of a conventional M/G/1 queue This conclusion has been verified via simulation by Mitchell and Paulson [9] for a special class of dependent M/M/1 queue. Their model is a special case of the one we consider here. We also study another modified GI/G/1 queue. where the arrival process and/or the service process are individually “associated”.