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CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

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Society<br />

Group-affiliations<br />

Individual<br />

Figure 3-1 Competing Conceptualizations of the Place of the Individual in Rights-Systems. 122<br />

If the universality of human rights cannot be taken for granted, still less can be universal<br />

acceptance of human rights violations as justification for armed intervention.<br />

Unsurprisingly, then, non-Western states are both sceptical and wary of Western<br />

attempts to frame a doctrine of intervention based on Western democratic principles and<br />

conceptualisation of human rights.<br />

We must also consider the extent of human rights breaches that might be necessary in<br />

order to justify armed intervention. When Stanley Hoffman 123 refers to the ‘mischief’<br />

that nations may do within their borders that might justify intervention, he surely means<br />

‘mischief’ only of the gravest kind. Just war can, of course, offer the guidance here of<br />

proportionality. Armed intervention in the affairs of another state is, in essence, a bad<br />

thing. However, it can be justified when it is necessary in order to stop a worse thing.<br />

Genocide is clearly bad enough to justify intervention; a punitive tax regime, however<br />

undesirable, is not. The issue then is how ‘mischievous’ (in Hoffman’s terms) a<br />

government must be in order to justify its being the target of intervention. The ICISS<br />

recognised this explicitly. Firstly it argues that military intervention must be limited to<br />

‘extreme and exceptional cases’ 124 . Furthermore, it took the view that<br />

203<br />

Individual<br />

Society<br />

Western-liberal Islamic<br />

God

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