What Constitutes acceptable use of Force?

Intro­duc­tion to IJWP, March 2008

“What Con­sti­tutes the Legit­i­mate Use of Force?” is a thorny and much debated ques­tion in mod­ern polit­i­cal the­ory and just war doc­trine. Under what con­di­tions is the use of force moral? When is it immoral? How much force is enough? What is exces­sive use of force? Do some types of gov­ern­ments, by virtue of their struc­ture, have a greater right to use force than oth­ers? How much force against indi­vid­u­als should be allowed to secure some greater good?  The arti­cles in this issue each address this issue of the legit­i­mate use of force, directly or indi­rectly, from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives.

Use of force by peace­keep­ers
Since World War II, and espe­cially after the Cold War, intra-state con­flicts have esca­lated as tribal, national, cul­tural, and ide­o­log­i­cal groups have sought to com­man­deer the power of the state for their own pur­poses. This has led to increased pres­sure to send in United Nations peace­keep­ing forces into areas of con­flict within states to pre­vent vio­lence and geno­cide. The United Nations is a rel­a­tively recent cre­ation and its inter­na­tional peace­keep­ing, where sol­diers from third-party states are sent to keep peace between war­ring groups, is a non-traditional role for sol­diers.
Our first arti­cle, by Paolo Tripodi looks at the moral respon­si­bil­ity of sol­diers in peace­keep­ing oper­a­tions. He exam­ines two seri­ous aban­don­ments of that responsibility—Srebrenica and Rwanda. In Sre­brenica, peace­keep­ers allowed killing of those they were sup­posed to pro­tect. In Rwanda, peace­keep­ers evac­u­ated, know­ing thou­sands of civil­ians they were pro­tect­ing would be killed. He argues that the peace­keep­ers had a moral oblig­a­tion to defend those depend­ing on them, even though com­man­ders ordered them out. When small detach­ments of peace­keep­ers are put in areas where there are stronger forces, as was the case in Sre­brenica, there must be a clear sig­nal that the peace­keep­ers are backed up by a greater inter­na­tional mil­i­tary force.

Teach­ing about the use of force in reli­gious and social insti­tu­tions
Reli­gions, schools, and other insti­tu­tions are in the posi­tion to teach about the use of force to mem­bers and stu­dents. Too often such insti­tu­tions adopt posi­tions that are not in the inter­est of peace and jus­tice, for exam­ple by teach­ing doc­trines of absolute paci­fism as one extreme or by advo­cat­ing holy war on the other. In the case of paci­fism one ends up with morally jus­ti­fy­ing stand­ing by while human beings are slaugh­tered. In the case of holy war, peo­ple are killed in the name of God by those who claim a favored sta­tus with God, yet are vio­lent in the eyes of the world. Yet if the tak­ing of human life is wrong, as most peo­ple believe and most reli­gions teach, then both of these posi­tions are unjus­ti­fi­able.
The Chris­t­ian Churches, through­out the last two mil­len­nia, have oscil­lated between these extremes. Early Chris­tian­ity in the Roman Empire pro­moted paci­fism. Chris­tians were often for­bid­den to join in mil­i­tary ser­vice and often will­ingly went to their deaths as mar­tyrs, singing praises to God. After the Catholic Church became the offi­cial church of the Roman Empire and com­manded great power, it did not con­tinue to behave the same way. It often attempted to use that power to force oth­ers to con­form to the “truth” and prac­tices it pro­moted. The Cru­sades and pogroms of the Mid­dle Ages are his­tor­i­cally remem­bered as a dark period in the his­tory of the Catholic Church. In our sec­ond arti­cle, “Saint Peter Sheathes His Sword,” Peter Huff describes a reac­tion against this mode of oper­a­tion as his analy­sis of the teach­ing of the Catholic Church shows a swing back toward pacifism.

Force nec­es­sary to keep peace treaties
Sign­ing a peace treaty makes a lot of peo­ple happy, but mak­ing it work requires enforce­ment. Old hatreds die hard and the killing will not stop sim­ply because a treaty is signed. New states can­not be cre­ated unless there is enough force to defend them from aggres­sion by their neigh­bors, and keep war­ring groups at bay. In his arti­cle, “Why Plans for a Two-State Solu­tion in the Mid­dle East Have Failed,” Mor­ton A. Kaplan argues this is  one rea­son for the fail­ure of peace in the Mid­dle East. The cre­ation of a Pales­tin­ian state, while desired by many, has not been pos­si­ble because no Pales­tin­ian gov­ern­ment has been strong enough to either pre­vent vio­lent attacks by Pales­tini­ans on Israel, or to pre­vent inter­ven­tion of mil­i­tant groups from neigh­bor­ing countries.

The force to main­tain legit­i­mate sov­er­eignty
Legit­i­mate sov­er­eignty refers to sov­er­eignty that is rec­og­nized, not imposed. Most imposed regimes claim sov­er­eignty based on their con­trol by force. How­ever, such regimes are inher­ently unsta­ble. A sta­ble régime is rather one in which those under its rule view it as legit­i­mate. Inas­much as most peo­ple have an innate desire to live their own lives and pur­sue their own dreams, they see legit­i­mate sov­er­eignty in the social insti­tu­tions that enable peo­ple to live out those dreams. This leads to the con­clu­sion of Yossef Ben-Meir’s arti­cle, “National Sov­er­eignty through Decen­tral­iza­tion: A Community-Level Approach.”
Ben-Meir argues that a strong state is a decen­tral­ized state, a state built upon the smaller build­ing blocks of fam­ily, com­mu­nity, and lower level insti­tu­tions that can per­son­ally assist indi­vid­u­als and com­mu­ni­ties in their employ­ment and wel­fare. Attempts to cre­ate states from the top-down, through plans devel­oped from out­side, like most inter­na­tional or regional plans for devel­op­ment, are doomed to fail. Despite the fact that many peo­ple desire states to care for them, cen­tral­ized states are inher­ently weaker and less able to do so.
Decen­tral­iza­tion advances local and national self-reliance, which is, in turn, asso­ci­ated with increases in inde­pen­dence from exter­nal con­trol. “Issues of national sov­er­eignty are the very rea­son for the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict, the con­tin­u­ing war­fare in Iraq, and the con­flict in the West­ern Sahara involv­ing Morocco, Alge­ria and Mau­ri­ta­nia.” Ben-Meir argues that strate­gies for devel­op­ment and peace in these areas must empha­size bottom-up, rather than top-down solu­tions, or mar­gin­al­ized groups will view the imposed sov­er­eignty as illegitimate.

The force of struc­tural vio­lence
Struc­tural vio­lence is a term devel­oped by Johan Gal­tung to explain indi­rect vio­lence to peo­ple that results from social struc­tures that pre­vent peo­ple from liv­ing har­mo­niously. This type of vio­lence is often related to the impo­si­tion of unjust social struc­tures by those in power, or by laws that favor some groups of peo­ple over oth­ers. In the 1980s it was com­mon for social­ists to point at the struc­tural injus­tice inher­ent in the inter­na­tional order in which the West con­sti­tuted a “cen­ter” and the rest was on the “periph­ery.”  Régime lead­ers in many Third World coun­tries were con­sid­ered as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the cen­ter placed in the periph­ery, rather than gen­uine rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the peo­ple liv­ing in the nations they ruled.
While many peace activists rec­og­nized the power of Galtung’s analy­sis, they advo­cated var­i­ous forms of rev­o­lu­tion designed to impose other cen­tral­ized struc­tures of gov­er­nance that they would lead. They devised plans in which they claimed to know what was bet­ter for those on the periph­ery. Such forms of régime change inevitably con­tained hubris, blind­ness, and struc­tural vio­lence them­selves. They were also guilty of impos­ing for­eign ideals and ille­git­i­mate sov­er­eignty on local peo­ples. As Ben-Meir’s arti­cle argues, the free­dom of indi­vid­u­als and local com­mu­nity groups that comes with decen­tral­iza­tion is a more legit­i­mate basis for state sov­er­eignty.
Lisa Reber’s arti­cle, “Build­ing Cul­tures of Peace in The World: One Peace Cen­ter at a Time,” argues that we must tran­scend the attacks on struc­tural vio­lence and develop struc­tural peace. She argues that some of the older peace rhetoric, like “fight for peace,” con­tains con­cep­tual vio­lence. Any fight means win­ners and losers and does not lead to a way for oppo­nents to live together with one another.  Cit­ing the “Seville Dec­la­ra­tion” of 1986 (Inter­na­tional Jour­nal on World Peace, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 90–92), she argues that “peace begins in the minds of men” and that it is impor­tant to develop peace­able­ness as a qual­ity of thought and cul­ture. She advo­cates the cre­ation of local peace cen­ters as places where peace­able­ness can be devel­oped from the bot­tom up by cre­at­ing cen­ters for edu­ca­tion and dialogue.