Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Center for International Security and Cooperation Stanford University


Publications




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Humanitarian Intervention and Relation Sovereignty

Book Chapter

Authors
Helen Stacy - Stanford University
Steven P. Lee, ed.

Published by
Springer in "Intervention, Terrorism, and Torture: Contemporary Challenges to Just War Theory", 2006
Publication no. 9781402046773

Hardcover (978-1-4020-4677-3) - $74.95


Just war theory is the traditional approach taken to questions of the morality of war, but war today is far from traditional. War has been deeply affected in recent years by a variety of social and technological developments in areas such as international terrorism, campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the global human rights movement, economic globalization, and military technology. This book asks whether just war theory is adequate to the challenges these developments pose. Just war theory provides rules for determining when it is justified to fight a war. But some have argued that the nature of contemporary war makes these rules obsolete. For example, genocidal and aggressive regimes may require the use of military force that is not strictly in self-defense, as just war theory requires. In addition, the theory provides rules for determining what the limits are on justified conduct in war. But the random violence of terrorism and the deliberately inflicted violence of torture seem endemic to our age, yet take us beyond the limits set by these rules of conduct in war. By carefully examining the phenomena of intervention, terrorism, and torture from a number of different perspectives, the essays in this book explore this set of issues with insight and clarity.