Finlay, Christopher J. (2022) 'Assisting rebels abroad: the ethics of violence at the limits of the defensive paradigm.', Journal of applied philosophy., 39 (1). pp. 38-55.
Abstract
In this article, I analyse the theory and practice of interventions in foreign civil wars to assist rebels fighting against violently oppressive government. I argue that the indirect nature of this kind of intervention gives rise to political complications that are either absent from or less obvious in humanitarian interventions aimed chiefly at defending human rights from imminent threats. An adequate theory must therefore accommodate three additional components. First, it requires a theory of indirect warfare accounting for how the ends of the interveners’ added violence relate to those of the rebels’ violence. Second, it requires a theory of indirect political leadership, paying careful attention both to the political status of the rebel leaders vis‐à‐vis the people on whose behalf they fight and to the relationship between those leaders and the interveners. Third, the peculiarities of indirect military intervention mean that the violence it introduces isn’t easily explained purely in terms of defensive goals. An adequate account needs additionally to pay attention to the role of violence in shaping new political movements and institutions. The value of such goals is less easily quantified than those of humanitarian intervention, making it harder to set upper limits on permissible ‘proportionate’ harm.
Item Type: | Article |
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Full text: | Publisher-imposed embargo (AM) Accepted Manuscript File format - PDF (403Kb) |
Full text: | (VoR) Version of Record Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution. Download PDF (Advance online version) (139Kb) |
Status: | Peer-reviewed |
Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12456 |
Publisher statement: | © 2020 The Authors. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Date accepted: | 22 June 2020 |
Date deposited: | 02 July 2020 |
Date of first online publication: | 17 November 2020 |
Date first made open access: | 19 November 2020 |
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