Rethinking Non-Intervention and Democratic Regime Change

example keyword,example keyword, example keyword

Book review: Conflict, war, and revolution: the problem of politics in international political thought by Paul Kelly

In Conflict, War, and Revolution: The Problem of Politics in International Political Thought – available open access from LSE Press – Paul Kelly offers a rich and engaging introduction to international political thought through ten key historical thinkers. Readers coming to political theory for the first time will find Kelly’s evident enthusiasm for these ideas deeply infectious and this book an exciting entrance to the field, recommends Christopher Finlay. Conflict, War, and Revolution: The Problem of Politics in International Political Thought. Paul Kelly. LSE Press. 2022

Book review: Conflict, war, and revolution: the problem of politics in international political thought by Paul Kelly

In Conflict, War, and Revolution: The Problem of Politics in International Political Thought – available open access from LSE Press – Paul Kelly offers a rich and engaging introduction to international political thought through ten key historical thinkers. Readers coming to political theory for the first time will find Kelly’s evident enthusiasm for these ideas deeply infectious and this book an exciting entrance to the field, recommends Christopher Finlay

Deconstructing Nonviolence and the War Machine: Unarmed Coups, Nonviolent Power, and Armed Resistance

Proponents of nonviolent methods often highlight the extent to which they rival arms as effective means of resistance. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, for instance, influentially compared civil resistance techniques favorably with armed insurrection as means of bringing about progressive political change. Ned Dobos cites their work in support of the claim that similar methods—organized in the form of Gene Sharp’s idea of ‘civilian-based defense’—may be substituted for regular armed forces in the face of international aggression. I deconstruct this line of pacifist thought by arguing that it builds on the wrong binary. Turning away from a violence/nonviolence dichotomy structured around harmfulness, I look to Richard B. Gregg and Hannah Arendt for an account of nonviolent power defined by not being coercive. Whereas nonviolent methods of coercion in the wrong hands still have the potential to subvert democratic institutions—just as armed methods can—Gregg’s and Arendt’s conceptions of nonviolent power identify a necessary bulwark against both forms of subversion. The effectiveness of non-coercive, nonviolent power is illustrated by the resistance of U.S. democratic institutions to largely nonviolent attempts at civil subversion by supporters of Donald Trump, during Trump’s attempts to overturn the election in 2020. By contrast, if coercive violence had any significance, it is visible not in the riotous behavior of the Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, but in the state’s deployment of force—especially the National Guard—to contain the chaotic destruction Trump’s supporters threatened

The concept of violence in international theory: a Double-Intent Account

The ability of international ethics and political theory to establish a genuinely critical standpoint from which to evaluate uses of armed force has been challenged by various lines of argument. On one, theorists question the narrow conception of violence on which analysis relies. Were they right, it would overturn two key assumptions: first, that violence is sufficiently distinctive to merit attention as a category separate from other modes of human harming; second, that it is troubling in a special way that makes acts of violence peculiarly hard to justify. This paper defends a narrow understanding of violence and a special ethics governing its use by arguing that a distinctive form of ‘Violent Agency’ is the factor uniting the category while partly accounting for the fearful connotations of the term. Violent Agency is defined first by a double intention (1) to inflict harm using a technique chosen (2) to eliminate or evade the target’s means of escaping it or defending against it. Second, the harms it aims at are destructive (as opposed to appropriative). The analysis offered connects the concept of violence to themes in international theory such as vulnerability, security, and domination, as well as the ethics of war

The Deadly Serious Causes of Legitimate Rebellion: Between the Wrongs of Terrorism and the Crimes of War

This article challenges the tendency exhibited in arguments by Michael Ignatieff, Jeremy Waldron, and others to treat the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) as the only valid moral frame of reference for guiding (and judging) armed rebels with just cause. To succeed, normative language and principles must reflect not only the wrongs of ‘terrorism’ and war crimes, but also the rights of legitimate rebels. However, these do not always correspond to the legal privileges of combatants. Rebels are often unlikely to gain belligerent recognition and might sometimes have strong moral reasons to exceed the rights of regular combatants. Where this gives rise to tensions between morality and the LOAC, a decision is needed to determine which to follow. Setting aside the idea of (a) suppressing just war theory altogether in favour of a more purely regulatory approach to war and (b) reforming law in the direct light of moral theory, I question the attempt by Waldron (among others) (c) to argue that moral weight of the legal conventions at the heart of the LOAC trump any moral reasons there might be for breaching them. Even if non-combatant immunity is, as Waldron suggests, a deadly serious convention, I argue that war is justified only if pursued for the sake of deadly serious causes which may even be serious enough to oblige agents to break the law. A political theory of the ethics of war is needed (d) to mediate between the moral and legal in such cases where they cannot be reconciled directly

Bastards, brothers, and unjust warriors: Enmity and ethics in Just War Cinema

How do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in the Second World War, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello that anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War-era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to

Gentrification and Local Restaurants: Chinatown District of Los Angeles In A Digital Age

This paper analyzes the effects of gentrification and the digital age on local restaurants, specifically those in the Chinatown District of Los Angeles, California. To examine the effects of gentrification on Chinatown’s local businesses, I interviewed Daniel Yin of Yang Chow restaurant over Zoom. Yang Chow has three locations, this research centers around their original location in Chinatown. Yin now manages all online communications and was previously an in-person manager. His experience in the Chinatown restaurant business provides insight into this cultural district’s changing business landscape, as his family has owned this restaurant since 1977