A Duty to Prevent

Morality, care, and international law

“…The Security Council has been considered dysfunctional, incapable of doing its job, or as having a 'propensity for paralysis'. 43 Again, many disagree, but how the Security Council functions has depended more on political realities than on legal, never mind moral, norms. But this could change under the influence of enhanced respect for international law.…”

Space, scale and Just War: meeting the challenge of humanitarian intervention and trans-national terrorism

“…Again, the reaction has been to augment, refine, adjust and revisit the ideas of just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, proportionality, non-combatant immunity and so on. Ideas such as preventive war 11 and the notion of 'illegal combatants' as a new, ethically laden, category into which transnational terrorists fall, 12 16 Feinstein and Slaughter also deploy notions of just cause, proportionality, legitimate authority, right intention and last resort from Just War's lexicon. 17 Buchanan and Keohane's influential defence of preventive war also utilises Just War criteria and extends this line of ethical reasoning.…”

“…Ideas such as preventive war 11 and the notion of 'illegal combatants' as a new, ethically laden, category into which transnational terrorists fall, 12 16 Feinstein and Slaughter also deploy notions of just cause, proportionality, legitimate authority, right intention and last resort from Just War's lexicon. 17 Buchanan and Keohane's influential defence of preventive war also utilises Just War criteria and extends this line of ethical reasoning. They assume an unproblematic conflation of, firstly, cosmopolitan ethical concern with human rights and, secondly, a straightforward statement that cosmopolitanism of this stripe is 'central to the just war tradition and the current international legal order's allowing human rights to limit state sovereignty.'…”

From Democratic Peace to Democratic Distinctiveness: A Critique of Democratic Exceptionalism in Peace and Conflict Studies

“…There is no easy way out of probing a democratic exceptionalism and at the same time having to avoid reinforcing a political dichotomy of regime types in world politics. Modest as it may sound, we plead for introducing more self-criticism and self-reflection into research and for refraining from constructing overly 26 See, for example, Feinstein/Slaughter (2004), in critique of a liberal international law see Reus-Smit (2005) and Smith (2007: chap. 6).…”