Abstract
Under the George W. Bush administration, the post-9/11 War on Terror “drive” saw an immense challenge to long-standing pillars of international law that included the legal justification for military engagement -specifically on the conditions for the use-of-force — and the nature in which prisoners of war could be captured, questioned and tried.1 In appearing to “straighten up” the United States’ international reputation, the election of Democratic candidate Barack Obama in 2008 as the 44th president of the United States “sought nothing less than to bend history’s arc in the direction of justice, and a more peaceful, stable global order.”2 Having lost much credibility during the Bush tenure in office, the electoral victory of Obama promised a “realignment”3 in which “hopes were raised in the US attitude towards international law.”4 In evaluating the transition from the Bush and Obama administrations in the context of international law, and specifically their respective approaches to the use-of-force, this foundational chapter provides an overview and evaluation of the international legal paradigm as seen through the UN Charter jus ad bellum regime. It will be argued that both the Bush and Obama doctrines were neither created nor exist in a legal vacuum, but were incorporated, or perhaps even entwined, in a comprehensive system of normative rules leading the use-of-force in international relations — that being, the UN Charter jus ad bellum regime.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Aiden Warren, The Obama Administrations Nuclear Weapon Strategy: The Promises of Prague (London: Routledge, 2013): 3.
Amitai Etzioni and Alexandra Appel, “Book Review: Martin S. Indyk, Kenneth G. Liberthal, and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy,” Society 49, no. 5 (2012): 477.
David E. Sanger, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (London: Bantam Publishers, 2009): 447.
Shirley V. Scott, International Law, US Power: The United States’ Quest for Legal Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 6.
Anthony C. Arend, “International Law and the Preemptive Use of Military Force,” The Washington Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2003): 91.
Cited in Ibid., 100. A jus cogens rule is a peremptory norm of general international law, that is, “a norm accepted and recognised by the international community of States as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.” See “Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties,” 23 May 1969, Article 53, http://www.worldtradelaw.net/misc/viennaconvention.pdf. Other examples of jus cogens rules that the ILC mentions include the prohibitions on genocide, slavery and piracy. Cited in Malcolm N. Shaw, International Law, 4th ed. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 97.
Yoram Dinstein, War, Aggression, and Self-Defense, 3rd ed. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 163–165.
Ian Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963): 274.
David John Harris, Cases and Materials on International Law, 5th ed. (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1998): 901.
Thomas M. Franck, Recourse to Force: State Action against Threats and Armed Attacks (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 49.
Abid Qureshi, Francis Chang, Peter Copeland, Jasminka Kalajdzic, Paul Michell, “A Memorial for Bosnia: Framework of Legal Arguments Concerning the Lawfulness of the Maintenance of the United Nations Security Council’s Arms Embargo on Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Michigan Journal of International Law 16, no. 1 (1994): 60.
Albrecht Randelzhofer, “Article 2(4),” in Bruno Simma and Hermann Mosler (eds.), The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994): 111–112.
Myres S. McDougal and Florentino P. Feliciano, Law and Minimum World Public Order: The Legal Regulation and International Coercion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961): 234.
Oscar Schachter, “The Legality of Pro-Democratic Invasion,” American Journal of International Law, 78, no. 3 (1984): 647.
W. Michael Reisman, “Coercion and Self-Determination: Construing Charter Article 2(4),” American Journal of International Law, 78, no. 3 (1984): 643.
See also W. Michael Reisman, “Sovereignty and Human Rights in Contemporary International Law,” American Journal of International Law, 84, no. 4 (1990): 866.
Anthony D’Amato, “The Invasion of Panama Was a Lawful Response to Tyranny,” American Journal of International Law 84, no. 2 (1990): 519.
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 5th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006): 87–91.
Christine D. Gray, International Law and the Use of Force (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 43.
Simon Chesterman and Michael Byers, “Changing the Rules about Rules? Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention and the Future of International Law,” in J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert Owen Keohane (eds.), Humanitarian Intervention. Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 178.
Sean D. Murphy, Humanitarian Intervention: The United Nations in an Evolving World Order (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996): 11–12.
Combining the term humanitarian with intervention has been subject to its fair share of criticism from a range of actors, for example, from humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, which did not want their work to be associated with the use of military force. Compare Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007): 10–11. Coining the “responsibility to protect” therefore represented a means to move toward a less objectionable term.
Ibid., 11; Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 45–87.
Thomas G. Weiss, David P Forsythe, Roger A Coate, Kelly-Kate Pease, The United Nations and Changing World Politics (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 2007): 65–9.
Ryan Goodman, “Humanitarian Intervention and Pretexts for War,” American Journal of International Law, 100, no. 1 (2006): 108.
Gray, International Law and the Use of Force, 39–41; and Ian Brownlie and C. J. Apperley, “Kosovo Crisis Inquiry: Memorandum on the International Law Aspects,” International & Comparative Law Quarterly, 49, no. 4 (2000): 881.
Brownlie and Apperley, “Kosovo Crisis Inquiry,” 878, 885; “Thoughts on Kind-Hearted Gunmen,” in Ian Brownlie (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973): 146.
Randelzhofer, “Article 2(4), “ 106, 123; Gray, International Law and the Use of Force, 42–44; and Hugh M. Kindred, International Law: Chiefly as Interpreted and Applied in Canada, 6th ed. (Toronto: Emond Montgomery Publications, Limited, 2000).
Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 4.
W. Michael Reisman, “International Incidents: Introduction to a New Genre in the Study of International Law,” in W. Michael Reisman and Andrew R. Willard (eds.), International Incidents: The Law That Counts in World Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988): 12–13.
Jean Allain, “The True Challenge to the United Nations System of the Use of Force: The Failures of Kosovo and Iraq and the Emergence of the African Union,” in Armin von Bogdandy and Rüdiger Wolfrum (eds) Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, Volume 8 (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2005), 240.
Michael Byers, “Book Review: Franck, Thomas M. Recourse to Force: State Action Against Threats and Armed Attacks,” American Journal of International Law, 97, no. 3 (2003): 721.
Michael Byers, War Law: Understanding International Law and Armed Conflicts (New York: Grove Press, 2006): 4.
Oscar Schachter, “The Right of States to Use Armed Force,” Michigan Law Review, 82, no. 5/6 (1984): 1620–1646.
Dinstein, War, Aggression, and Self-Defense; Peter Malanczuk, Akehurst’s Modern Introduction to International Law, Michael Barton Akehurst (ed.), 7th. rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1997): 311.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Aiden Warren and Ingvild Bode
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Warren, A., Bode, I. (2014). The International Legal Paradigm: The UN Charter jus ad bellum Regime. In: Governing the Use-of-Force in International Relations. New Security Challenges Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411440_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411440_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48925-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-41144-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Intern. Relations & Development CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)