Abstract
This book provides a multidisciplinary assessment of the concept of self-defense with the purpose of exposing the relationship between power politics and international law. The dual lenses of international relations theory and international law are employed to exhibit the need to combine theory and practice, law and politics, in any assessment of world politics. Any work that neglects this link is doomed to be flawed or incomplete. This study uses the case study of the US use of force in Iraq and Afghanistan to demonstrate the relationship between law and politics in the backdrop of unipolarity.
… the deficiencies of the American response to September 11 were not a result of stupidity or negligence. These deficiencies are directly a result of a deliberate expansion of US foreign policy goals so as to merge the megaterrorist challenge with preexisting geopolitical ambitions to exert global dominance… In short, September 11 posed and intensified two severe challenges to world order: the threat of megaterrorism and the threat of global empire-building.1
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Notes
Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003), p. 83.
Steven R. Ratner, Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello after September 11, The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 96, No. 4, October 2002, pp. 905–921.
Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003), p. 179.
Quincy Wright, “International Law and the Balance of Power,” The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 37, No. 1, Jan 1943, pp. 97–103, p. 99.
According to Christopher Layne, “Grand strategy is a three-step process: determining a state’s vital security interests; identifying the threats to those interests; and deciding how best to employ the state’s political, military, and economic resources to protect those interests.” Christopher Layne, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy,” International Security, 22, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 86–124, at 88.
Robert J. Art, “Geopolitics Updated: The Strategy of Selective Engagement,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 3, Winter 1998/1999, pp. 79–113. Robert Art suggests seven alternative strategies namely dominion, global collective security, regional collective security, cooperative security, containment, isolationism and selective engagement of which the US chooses the strategy of dominion.
Benjamin Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), pp. 37–38.
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “American Primacy in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81 (4), July/August 2002, pp. 20–33, p. 21.
Krieger, David (2003) “The Bush Administration’s Assault on International Law,” in Richard Falk and David Krieger (eds), The Iraq Crisis and International Law: A Briefing Booklet, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, January 2003, p. 13.
Thomas M. Franck, “Is Anything ‘Left’ in International Law?” Unbound, Vol. 1, 59, 2005, pp. 59–63, p. 61.
Thomas M. Franck, “The Power of Legitimacy and the Legitimacy of Power: International Law in An Age of Power Disequilibrium,” The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 100, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 88–106, p. 98.
Benjamin Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), p. 28.
Arend, Anthony Clark and Robert J. Beck, International Law and the Use of Force. (Routledge Publishers, 1993), p. 102.
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© 2009 Ruchi Anand
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Anand, R. (2009). Conclusion. In: Self-Defense in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245747_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245747_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36537-1
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