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.     

“The major prize”: apartheid South Africa’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1988–91

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the final years of South Africa’s nuclear-weapon program, particularly on the decision-making process leading up to the signature of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) by the South African government in 1991. In August 1988, after two decades of defiance, negotiations between the apartheid government and the NPT depository powers (the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union) ensued at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Despite South Africa being the only state to give up its indigenously developed nuclear weapons and subsequently join the nonproliferation regime, little is known about how the national position on NPT accession and IAEA safeguards evolved. Research carried out in multiple archives using hitherto untapped primary sources and interviews with key actors from several countries show how domestic and regional political dynamics influenced Pretoria’s position on entering the nonproliferation regime. In the process, the F.W. de Klerk government managed to skillfully exploit international proliferation fears to advance its own agenda, thereby connecting South African NPT accession with that of the neighboring Frontline States coalition of Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.     

General Zuo’s counter-insurgency doctrine

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the career of one of the most notable of Chinese state officials in the mid-nineteenth century, General Zuo Zongtang (1812–1885) at a time when the Qing Empire was beset by enemies on all sides along with the massive Taiping Rebellion (1851–65). The paper explores how Zuo created a coherent and flexible counter-insurgency doctrine that underpinned his suppression of the Taipings, the Nian, Muslim rebels of the northwest and the defeat of a massive Sufi revolt in Central Asia. The paper also shows how Zuo helped convince the Russians to return territory they occupied in Central Asia, thereby preserving the territorial integrity of the Qing Empire in the region.     

Level product form QSF processes and an analysis of queues with Coxian interarrival distribution

In this article, we study a class of Quasi‐Skipfree (QSF) processes where the transition rate submatrices in the skipfree direction have a column times row structure. Under homogeneity and irreducibility assumptions we show that the stationary distributions of these processes have a product form as a function of the level. For an application, we will discuss the ‐queue that can be modeled as a QSF process on a two‐dimensional state space. In addition, we study the properties of the stationary distribution and derive monotonicity of the mean number of the customers in the queue, their mean sojourn time and the variance as a function of for fixed mean arrival rate. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logisticsxs 66:57–72, 2019