Introduction to Symposium on Unauthorized Military Interventions for the Public Good

Bibliographic Data

ID16960936
AuthorsMonica Hakimi (0009-0001-8135-5633, University of Michigan, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume111
Pages284-286
Publication date2017-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAJIL Unbound (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2398-7723 • E-ISSN: 2398-7723
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/aju.2017.76
OpenAlexW2763793437
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited6

On April 6, 2017, the United States launched fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles against an air base in Syria, after evidence surfaced that Bashar Al-Assad's regime had again used chemical weapons against its people. 1 President Trump announced that the strikes were intended "to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons." 2 But as of this Symposium's publication, the United States has not articulated a formal legal justification for the strikes. Instead, it reportedly circulated a document that listed several case-specific considerations that, in its view, justified the use of force. 3 Yet the global reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Many states openly supported the U.S. strikes; very few condemned them. 4 This Symposium uses that incident as a springboard for asking a more general and fundamental question about the jus ad bellum: how should we assess military interventions that lack Security Council authorization but are, or are claimed to be, taken for a public good? The public good might be halting an ongoing humanitarian crisis, supporting a people's right to self-determination, deterring conduct that is widely believed to be unlawful, enabling the transfer of power after a democratically sound election, or helping to stabilize a "failing" state. The majority view is that such interventions are unlawful, unless they can be justified in self-defense or by the territorial state's consent. As a practical matter, this means that they are often unlawful-or at least, legally dubious. Although some actors might try to justify them in defensive or consensual terms, such claims typically rely on legal theories that are controversial and not widely endorsed

Advertising · Business · Computer security · Internet privacy · Physics · Political science · Computer Science · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Mathematics

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access