CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

2.2.4 Reordering the Value Set: New World Order and Continued Failing of the
Paradigm
Given the background against which its establishment was set, it is hardly surprising
that the legalist paradigm established by the UN Charter sets the maintenance of order
as the highest principle, to which all others must play a secondary role. Although not
specifically of the UN’s making, a clear example of this value-ordering is the principle
of uti possidetis. In point of fact the principle considerably predates the Charter
paradigm, emerging in the early nineteenth century as the new states of Latin America
established their independence from Spain and Portugal and accepted as their frontiers
the former administrative boundaries of the colonial rulers. 99 In the UN Charter era uti
possidetis has been widely applied in the post-war decolonisation of both Asia and
Africa. The UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence to
Colonial Countries and Peoples (UNGA Resolution 1514(XV), 14 Dec 1960) whilst
strong in its support of the principle of self-determination, nevertheless treads a careful
balance between this and territorial integrity of all states: ‘Any attempt at the partial or
total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is
incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.’ 100
At its second summit, in Cairo in 1964, the Organisation of African Unity explicitly
adopted the principle of uti possidetis, establishing it as an important principle of
African politics. 101 Yet despite the apparent stability of borders that the principle
ensures, the evidence of recent years, most especially in Sudan and in the Great Lakes
region, has demonstrated the fragility of a construct that ignored tribal loyalties and
ethnic distribution. Indeed, Basil Davidson has gone so far as to suggest that the attempt
to impose a European-style states system in Africa may be the final curse left behind by
the imperial powers. 102
Today we can see a substantial re-ordering of values that places justice at the top. As
early as 1990, American international legal scholar Thomas Franck was putting forward
a view that extended the use of force to uphold the rights of the individual:
Whatever decent instincts came to cluster around the magnet of ‘self
determination,’ creating a widely accepted exception to Article 2(4), must now
carry forward, in the post-colonial era, to imbue a new internationally
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