Introducing Jus ante Bellum as a cosmopolitan approach to humanitarian intervention

Abstract

Cosmopolitans often argue that the international community has a humanitarian responsibility to intervene militarily in order to protect vulnerable individuals from violent threats and to pursue the establishment of a condition of cosmopolitan justice based on the notion of a ‘global rule of law’. The purpose of this article is to argue that many of these cosmopolitan claims are incomplete and untenable on cosmopolitan grounds because they ignore the systemic and chronic structural factors that underwrite the root causes of these humanitarian threats. By way of examining cosmopolitan arguments for humanitarian military intervention and how systemic problems are further ignored in iterations of the Responsibility to Protect, this article suggests that many contemporary cosmopolitan arguments are guilty of focusing too narrowly on justifying a responsibility to respond to the symptoms of crisis versus demanding a similarly robust justification for a responsibility to alleviate persistent structural causes. Although this article recognizes that immediate principles of humanitarian intervention will, at times, be necessary, the article seeks to draw attention to what we are calling principles of Jus ante Bellum (right before war) and to stress that current cosmopolitan arguments about humanitarian intervention will remain insufficient without the incorporation of robust principles of distributive global justice that can provide secure foundations for a more thoroughgoing cosmopolitan condition of public right.

Paradox of humanitarian intervention: A critical analysis of theory and practice

“…There are three collective moral normative commitments derived from cosmopolitanism's ethical considerations: 1) cosmopolitanism is a reflection of the humanitarian spirit that is universal in its spheres, perpetuating inclusive equality for all humans in their moral principality, this moral principality belongs to all regardless of any differences universally since all humans are citizens of the world, 2) cosmopolitanism believes that individual human beings are the fundamental standard of moral concern, instead of states, political associations or forms of community, and 3) cosmopolitans manage the aforementioned moral concern toward individuals in order to impartially devote themselves to treating all human beings regardless of any limits (Pogge 1992b, Brown & Bohm 2016. It allows scholars to prove that cosmopolitanism as a theoretical paradigm can be illustrated as egalitarian, universal, and individualist.…”

The Responsibility to Protect in a world of already existing intervention

“…In this paper, we argue that existing literature has not adequately recognised the implications that already existing intervention has for the legitimacy and likely effectiveness of military intervention. As a result, it is not clear whether those who contribute to the emergence of atrocity crimes through their non-military interventions have additional duties of military intervention (Fabre, 2012), whether they ought to engage in humanitarian disintervention (Nili, 2011), or whether already existing intervention has different implications still (Brown and Bohm, 2016).…”

“…This dichotomy assumes that would-be interveners ‘bear no responsibility for the injustice at hand: someone else is committing shameful acts; we are merely considering whether or not we have a positive duty to do something about it’ (Nili, 2011: 33; see also Orford, 1997). Despite the intention of the architects of R2P to avoid this framing of atrocity by focusing on a wider array of preventive measures and forms of international assistance, the sense that would-be interveners bear no responsibility for humanitarian crises remains (Brown and Bohm, 2016; Whyte, 2017).…”

“…Even under the second pillar, on international assistance, capacity-building and prevention, the R2P:locates the blame for crises with the government of the state that is perceived to be unable or unwilling to protect its population, providing for the ‘international community’ of willing states to exercise a secondary … responsibility towards distant strangers. (Brown and Bohm, 2016: 909)…”

The Limits of Kant’s Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Practice, and the Crisis in Syria

“…We safeguard our rights more effectively if we also protect ourselves against aggression from other countries, and we maintain a more stable system of international relations if we work to prevent other countries from collapsing into despotism or chaos. The latter, preventative measures are preferable to armed conflict, of course, and contemporary cosmopolitans such as Garrett Wallace Brown and Alexandra Bohm have drawn on Kant to claim that we are obligated to promote global economic and social justice, which would help us avoid war and prevent crimes against humanity, and to engage in military intervention as a last resort and only to establish a more peaceful condition (Brown and Bohm 2015; Bohm 2013).…”