Just War and Human Rights

Todd Burkhardt

Description

Warfare in the twenty-first century presents significant challenges to the modern state. Serious questions have arisen about the use of drones, target selection, civilian exposure to harm, intervening for humanitarian reasons, and war as a means of forcing regime change. In Just War and Human Rights Todd Burkhardt argues that updating the laws of war and reforming just war theory is needed. A twenty-year veteran of the US Army, Burkhardt claims that war is impermissible unless it is engaged, fought, and concluded with right intention. A state must not only have a just cause and limit its war-making activity in order to vindicate the just cause, but it must also seek to vindicate its just cause in a way that yields a just and lasting peace. A just and lasting peace is motivated by the just war tenet of right intention and predicated on the realization of human rights. Therefore, human rights should not only dictate how a state treats its own people but also how a state treats the people of other countries, insulating them and protecting innocent civilians from the harms of war.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Right Intention and a Just and Lasting Peace

2. Reasonable Chance of Success: Analyzing Postwar Requirements in the Ad Bellum Phase

3. Post Bellum Obligations of Noncombatant Immunity

4. Negative and Positive Corresponding Duties of the Responsibility to Protect

5. Justified Drone Strikes are Predicated on Responsibility to Protect Norms

6. Updating the Fourth Geneva Convention

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Vita

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• International relations
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 21 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438464046
• Langue: English

Extrait

JUST WAR AND HUMAN RIGHTS
JUST WAR AND HUMAN RIGHTS
FIGHTING WITH RIGHT INTENTION
Todd Burkhardt
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Burkhardt, Todd, 1969– author.
Title: Just war and human rights : fighting with right intention / Todd Burkhardt.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031449 (print) | LCCN 2016049368 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438464039 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464046 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Just war doctrine. | Responsibility to protect (International law) | War—Protection of civilians. | Human rights.
Classification: LCC U22 .B88 2017 (print) | LCC U22 (ebook) | DDC 172/.42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031449
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Eileen, Missy, Abigail, and Ellie
A special thank you to David Reidy for his support, guidance, and mentorship
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Right Intention and a Just and Lasting Peace
Chapter 2. Reasonable Chance of Success: Analyzing Postwar Requirements in the Ad Bellum Phase
Chapter 3. Post Bellum Obligations of Noncombatant Immunity
Chapter 4. Negative and Positive Corresponding Duties of the Responsibility to Protect
Chapter 5. Justified Drone Strikes are Predicated on Responsibility to Protect Norms
Chapter 6. Updating the Fourth Geneva Convention
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Vita
Preface
Over the last twenty-five years, I have served the citizens and the government of the United States. I have been a soldier (a private, a noncommissioned officer, and an officer) in the U.S. Army. My assignments have been unique, enriching, and demanding. As a teenager, I enlisted for three years as an M1 tank crewman (loader and gunner). After my enlistment, I returned to college and enrolled in ROTC. Upon graduation, I was commission as an infantry officer.
As an infantry officer, I have served in mechanized and light infantry assignments (as a rifle platoon leader, support platoon leader, headquarters and headquarters company executive officer, company commander, and division G3 assistant planning and operations officer). I also have had the opportunity to train both U.S. and foreign soldiers. As an active component/reserve component observer controller, I trained and evaluated U.S. Army Reserve and National Guard units. As an infantry battalion executive officer I assisted, planned, and resourced training for a fourteen-week infantry soldier course. In addition, I have conducted security forces assistance for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and for the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
In Saudi Arabia, I spent a year as an advisor to two Saudi motorized infantry battalions. I assisted these units in becoming more efficient, effective, and lethal. My first two months in Afghanistan were focused on garrison life support activity and sustainment (food, security, potable water, electricity, and sewage treatment and removal) for a 2,500 Afghan soldier base. The remaining ten months of my deployment, as the G3 operations officer and then later as the deputy commander of a special operations advisory group, I oversaw the planning, resourcing, and execution of operations and intelligence, human capital, and logistics and sustainment of the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command. This is a ten thousand-plus force of Afghan Commando and Special Forces that work all across Afghanistan from its cities to its hinterlands in order to defeat nonstate actors (Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIL, etc.) in order to secure and protect its citizens and the legitimate governance of Afghanistan. While in Afghanistan for a year, I worked with U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine special operations forces as well as Canadian and Slovakian special operation forces.
In addition to the assignments listed above, I have also had the opportunity to earn my masters and doctorate in philosophy. With this undertaking came the opportunity to teach political and just war philosophy to cadets—our Army’s future leaders—attending the United States Military Academy, West Point. In addition, to the robust ethics of war class that I had the opportunity to teach to almost six hundred cadets over the course of five years, I had the opportunity to engage with and learn from other distinguished military and civilian professors (who teach at the academy, who visit the academy in order to present their ideas, or from conferences that I attended across the country), and they are just as deeply passionate and even more insightful about the ethics of war than I. West Point has been an incredibly enriching assignment. Nonetheless, I am currently the Professor of Military Science at Indiana University—Bloomington, which will continually afford me the opportunity to train, educate, and (hopefully) inspire young men and women cadets who will become Army officers and future leaders. To say the least, I am incredibly thankful for the experiences and opportunities that I have had and to my future as a Hoosier.
The book that you are about to read is not autobiographical. It is philosophical. However, I do feel the need to explain my background. Although I have spent many years in college as a student learning philosophy and a few years teaching philosophy, being in the military for more than twenty-five years informs my perspective and worldview. Although academically trained as a philosopher, my experiences (stateside and abroad) as a soldier—pure joy, thrill, accomplishment, brotherhood, camaraderie, love, humility, disappointment, fear, anger, pain, sorrow, and extreme grief—inform (whether for good, bad, or indifferent) my views, my beliefs, and what I trust is worth arguing for. That being said, if the goal of just war theory “is to restrain both the incidence and destructiveness of warfare,” 1 then it is the synthesis of my military and academic backgrounds that enlightens and compels me—which I attempt to pursue and articulate in the following chapters—to argue for necessary changes in just war theory so that civilians can, as they should, be better protected from the harmful effects of war.
Acknowledgments
Chapter 2 (“Reasonable Chance of Success: Analyzing the Postwar Requirements of Jus Ad Bellum ”) was originally published in Routledge Handbook of Ethics and War (Just War Theory in the 21st Century) , edited by Fritz Allhoff, Nicholas Evans, and Adam Henschke, (Routledge: London), 2014.
Chapter 3 (“ Post Bellum Obligations of Noncombatant Immunity”) is derived in part from an article published in the Journal of Military Ethics (JME), June 2016, copyright Taylor Francis, available online: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15027570.2016.1178471 .
Chapter 5 (“Justified Drone Strikes are Predicated on Responsibility to Protect Norms”) was originally published in the International Journal of Applied Philosophy (IJAP), February 2016, available on line: www.pdcnet.org//pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform fp=ijap id=ijap_2015_0029_0002_0167_0176 onlyautologin=true . It was also published in The Army Press, March 2016, available on line: armypress.dodlive.mil/2016/03/01/dealing-with-drone-ethics/ .
The views and ideas expressed within this book are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Army.
Introduction
The nonideal conditions we face often involve conditions or circumstances of unjust international attacks and/or unjust domestic institutions that might seem to call for war as a just response. While war might be permissible as a response to severe injustice, there are limits on the conduct of war even when it is permissible (or even required) as such. A state pursuing a just war must do so with “right intention.” The idea of right intention is the overarching constraint on war; a right intention aims at a just and lasting peace. A lasting peace is not possible unless certain standards of basic justice are secure. Although this concept has been around since at least St. Augustine’s work in the fourth century AD, it has lost momentum over the years, but has resurfaced over the last century.
The aim of this book is to explore certain key elements of the claim that a just war is one fought with the right intention of not only vindicating a just cause and doing so in a just manner but also reliably serving as a means to a just and lasting peace. Fighting with right intention and establishing conditions for a just and lasting peace demand certain reforms to just war theory. Establishing a lasting peace is predicated on safeguarding basic human rights, fidelity to the principle of noncombatant immunity, political self-determination and international toleration, and the recognition of the international responsibilities to protect. I argue further that these norms governing right intention should be realized as international legal norms.
Just war theory has been a part of Western political philosophy for the past two thousand years. Theologians such as St. Ambrose, St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Francisco de Vitoria as well as the jurist Hugo Grotius and the philosopher Emmerich de Vattel have been the frontrunners in advancing moral ar