Plausible Legality

Plausible Legality PDF Author: Rebecca Sanders
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190870575
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In many ways, the United States' post-9/11 engagement with legal rules is puzzling. Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations authorized numerous contentious counterterrorism policies that sparked global outrage, yet they have repeatedly insisted that their actions were lawful and legitimate. In Plausible Legality, Rebecca Sanders examines how the US government interpreted, reinterpreted, and manipulated legal norms and what these justificatory practices imply about the capacity of law to constrain state violence. Through case studies on the use of torture, detention, targeted killing, and surveillance, Sanders provides a detailed analysis of how policymakers use law to achieve their political objectives and situates these patterns within a broader theoretical understanding of how law operates in contemporary politics. She argues that legal culture--defined as collectively shared understandings of legal legitimacy and appropriate forms of legal practice in particular contexts--plays a significant role in shaping state practice. In the global war on terror, a national security culture of legal rationalization encouraged authorities to seek legal cover-to construct the plausible legality of human rights violations-in order to ensure impunity for wrongdoing. Looking forward, law remains vulnerable to evasion and revision. As Sanders shows, despite the efforts of human rights advocates to encourage deeper compliance, the normalization of post-9/11 policy has created space for future administrations to further erode legal norms.

Plausible Legality

Plausible Legality PDF Author: Rebecca Sanders
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190870575
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
In many ways, the United States' post-9/11 engagement with legal rules is puzzling. Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations authorized numerous contentious counterterrorism policies that sparked global outrage, yet they have repeatedly insisted that their actions were lawful and legitimate. In Plausible Legality, Rebecca Sanders examines how the US government interpreted, reinterpreted, and manipulated legal norms and what these justificatory practices imply about the capacity of law to constrain state violence. Through case studies on the use of torture, detention, targeted killing, and surveillance, Sanders provides a detailed analysis of how policymakers use law to achieve their political objectives and situates these patterns within a broader theoretical understanding of how law operates in contemporary politics. She argues that legal culture--defined as collectively shared understandings of legal legitimacy and appropriate forms of legal practice in particular contexts--plays a significant role in shaping state practice. In the global war on terror, a national security culture of legal rationalization encouraged authorities to seek legal cover-to construct the plausible legality of human rights violations-in order to ensure impunity for wrongdoing. Looking forward, law remains vulnerable to evasion and revision. As Sanders shows, despite the efforts of human rights advocates to encourage deeper compliance, the normalization of post-9/11 policy has created space for future administrations to further erode legal norms.

The United States and International Law

The United States and International Law PDF Author: Lucrecia García Iommi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220276
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
The United States spearheaded the creation of many international organizations and treaties after World War II and maintains a strong record of compliance across several issue areas, yet it also refuses to ratify major international conventions like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Why does the U.S. often seem to support international law in one way while neglecting or even violating it in another? The United States and International Law: Paradoxes of Support across Contemporary Issues analyzes the seemingly inconsistent U.S. relationship with international law by identifying five types of state support for international law: leadership, consent, internalization, compliance, and enforcement. Each follows different logics and entails unique costs and incentives. Accordingly, the fact that a state engages in one form of support does not presuppose that it will do so across the board. This volume examines how and why the U.S. has engaged in each form of support across twelve issue areas that are central to 20th- and 21st-century U.S. foreign policy: conquest, world courts, war, nuclear proliferation, trade, human rights, war crimes, torture, targeted killing, maritime law, the environment, and cybersecurity. In addition to offering rich substantive discussions of U.S. foreign policy, their findings reveal patterns across the U.S. relationship with international law that shed light on behavior that often seems paradoxical at best, hypocritical at worst. The results help us understand why the United States engages with international law as it does, the legacies of the Trump administration, and what we should expect from the United States under the Biden administration and beyond.

The Force of Law

The Force of Law PDF Author: Frederick Schauer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674368215
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Bentham's law -- The possibility and probability of noncoercive law -- In search of the puzzled man -- Do people obey the law? -- Are officials above the law? -- Coercing obedience -- Of carrots and sticks -- Coercion's arsenal -- Awash in a sea of norms -- The differentiation of law

International Organizations and Research Methods

International Organizations and Research Methods PDF Author: Fanny Badache
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472903543
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Scholars have studied international organizations (IOs) in many disciplines, thus generating important theoretical developments. Yet a proper assessment and a broad discussion of the methods used to research these organizations are lacking. Which methods are being used to study IOs and in what ways? Do we need a specific methodology applied to the case of IOs? What are the concrete methodological challenges when doing research on IOs? International Organizations and Research Methods: An Introduction compiles an inventory of the methods developed in the study of IOs under the five headings of Observing, Interviewing, Documenting, Measuring, and Combining. It does not reconcile diverging views on the purpose and meaning of IO scholarship, but creates a space for scholars and students embedded in different academic traditions to reflect on methodological choices and the way they impact knowledge production on IOs.

International Organizations

International Organizations PDF Author: Ian Hurd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009414070
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Leading textbook on modern international organizations that highlights the legal and political features of important global institutions.

The Post-American Middle East

The Post-American Middle East PDF Author: Laurent A. Lambert
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031299124
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
After two decades of War on Terror, it is particularly important, for both academic and policy purposes, to clearly understand why the US formidable mobilization of means and might has transformed into a such a blatant geostrategic defeat of the US and its allies in the broad Middle East. This is all the more paradoxical that the WOT achieved a series of tactical victories – such as the toppling of hostile regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; the crippling of the national economies of enemy states by sanctions; the successful targeted killing of lead terrorist Usama Bin Laden, ISIS cult leaders Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his successor, etc. So, why have these tactical victories not led to what was supposed to become, according to the US government, a ‘Greater Middle East’? With most authors being from or living in the Middle East, this book is unique as it brings perspectives and answers from the region. This is crucially important as we are entering, we argue, the era of a Post-American Middle East. Chapters 1 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

The War Lawyers

The War Lawyers PDF Author: Craig Jones
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198842929
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Over the last 20 years the world's most advanced militaries have invited a small number of military legal professionals into the heart of their targeting operations, spaces which had previously been exclusively for generals and commanders. These professionals, trained and hired to give legal advice on an array of military operations, have become known as war lawyers. The War Lawyers examines the laws of war as applied by military lawyers to aerial targeting operations carried out by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israel military in Gaza. Drawing on interviews with military lawyers and others, this book explains why some lawyers became integrated in the chain of command whereby military targets are identified and attacked, whether by manned aircraft, drones, and/or ground forces, and with what results. This book shows just how important law and military lawyers have become in the conduct of contemporary warfare, and how it is understood. Jones argues that circulations of law and policy between the US and Israel have bolstered targeting practices considered legally questionable, contending that the involvement of war lawyers in targeting operations enables, legitimises, and sometimes even extends military violence.

Humane

Humane PDF Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374719926
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"[A] brilliant new book . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides." —Jackson Lears, The New York Review of Books A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere. In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war. Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

Where the Evidence Leads

Where the Evidence Leads PDF Author: Robert C. Johansen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197586643
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
"This book develops an "empirical realist" theory to enable the United States to respond effectively to rising security threats and to seize new opportunities for global governance more successfully than have past policies. A synthesis of peace research and security studies shows that a global grand strategy for human security, with U.S. national security folded into it, is likely to produce more security for the United States than a grand strategy for national security pursued as an end in itself. More security advantages are likely to result from maximizing the "causes" or correlates of peace than from maximizing U.S. military power. Peace reigns when these correlates are present: all nations' security fears are addressed; people can meet basic needs; nations enjoy reciprocal rights and duties; they are treated equitably; their lives are predictable because the international system is governed by the rule of law; and they participate in the decisions that affect their lives through fair representation in democratic global governing processes. This approach revolutionizes thinking about national security policy by transforming it into human security policy. Evidence suggests that the anarchic, militarized balance-of-power system can be gradually changed with help from enhanced international lawmaking and enforcing capacities. To promote change, concerned policymakers and citizens could withdraw their support from U.S. policies that do not serve the common good and work to implement a global grand strategy for human security that would simultaneously serve U.S. security interests and uphold the value of human dignity for all"--

International Norm Disputes

International Norm Disputes PDF Author: Lisbeth Zimmermann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198873239
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
International Norm Disputes: The Link between Contestation and Norm Robustness offers a rich, comparative study of when and why contested international norms decline. It presents central findings on the link between contestation and norm robustness based on four detailed, contemporary case studies - the torture prohibition, the responsibility to protect, the duty to prosecute institutionalized in the International Criminal Court, and the moratorium on commercial whaling. It also includes two historical case studies - privateering and the transatlantic slave trade. This scholarly volume provides in-depth knowledge on contestation and robustness dynamics of central international norms. Having meticulously collected relevant data and conducted extensive qualitative coding, the authors clearly demonstrate that norms are likely to weaken when challengers contest the validity of a norm's core claims but remain robust when they contest a norm's application and contestation does not become permanent. These important findings, comparatively presented here for the first time, are crucial for understanding the much-discussed problems of the contemporary liberal international order. The insights provided establish how different types of challenges will affect global governance mechanisms and which conditions are most likely to create fundamental change.