Just Peace: How Wars Should End

261 Pages·2012·1.73 MB·English

by  Mona Fixdal (auth.)

Just Peace
Just Peace
How Wars Should End
Mona Fixdal
JUST PEACE
Copyright © Mona Fixdal, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-60034-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-36982-9 ISBN 978-1-137-09286-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137092861
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fixdal, Mona.
Just peace : how wars should end / Mona Fixdal.
p. cm.
1. War—Case studies. 2. Peace—Political aspects. 3. Peace-building.
4. Politics and war. 5. War—Moral and ethical aspects. 6. Strategy. I. Title.
U21.2.F59 2012
303.6(cid:2)6—dc23 2012004991
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents,
with gratitude and love
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction 1
2 Some Theoretical Considerations 23
3 Outcomes of Secessionist Wars 49
4 Outcomes of Territorial Wars 8 5
5 Outcomes of Wars over Government 1 21
Conclusion 153
Notes 163
Bibliography 219
Index 243
Acknowledgments
M
y parents, Eva and Jan Fixdal, grew up during the Second
World War in German-occupied Norway. When we were little,
my siblings and I heard stories of excitement about the war—
for instance, about how my father acted as a messenger for the
Norwegian resistance, delighting in outsmarting the Germans
by hiding secret papers in the handlebars of his bicycle. As we
grew older, we slowly came to understand more of the trauma that
the occupation had brought. My mother was not far away when
a bomb blew up on a tram in Oslo. My parents had been cut off
from their families—my father’s father was imprisoned, his older
brothers were in hiding, and my mother was sent away to live with
strangers on a remote mountain farm. In writing this book, their
experiences of war and peace have never been far from my mind.
I am grateful for their continuous, unconditional support and for
the many loving ways in which they take part in my life.
This book is based on a dissertation I wrote for the department
of political science at the University of Oslo. I owe a great debt of
thanks to Raino Malnes, my adviser, whose remarkable ability to
unsnarl tangled logic more than once saved me from getting lost
in my own argument. As I first started thinking about the subject
of just peace, I was helped by conversations with Dan Smith, then
the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He carefully
read early drafts of my work and offered suggestions that reflected
his unique perspective as both a researcher and a practitioner of
conflict resolution.
In the past few years, I have been lucky to be part of a research
project on the Norwegian peace tradition, hosted by the history
department at the University of Oslo. The department has been
nothing but supportive of my inquiries, however untraditional
x Acknowledgments
they seemed as history. I am grateful to its members and to my
peace project colleagues, in particular Helge Pharo, who with wis-
dom, grace, and humor has managed to be at once a friend, an
intellectual partner, and a boss. I have also been helped along the
way by Paul Kahn, Ian Shapiro, Robert Huseby, Greg Reichberg,
Elizabeth Cousens, and Henrik Syse. Anne Julie Semb deserves
special thanks for helping me to find the right track when I was
floundering. I have been fortunate, too, to have had the help of
James Turner Johnson, who generously read and commented on
several chapters and took the time to discuss a number of ques-
tions related to just war and just peace. I am indebted to Pablo
Kalmanovitz for valuable comments on drafts. In the final stages
of completing the manuscript I benefited from the help of Nayma
Qayum, who made many suggestions, both large and small, for
ways it could be improved.
At Palgrave Macmillan, Sarah Nathan, and Farideh Koohi-
Kamali have guided me gently and expertly through the process
of making the manuscript ready for publication.
For their enthusiasm and unwavering support, I thank my
parents-in-law, Jane and George Silver. Vigdis Cristofoli, Yvonne
Dehnes, Cleo Godsey, Benedicte Hoff, Line Lillevik, Danielle
Otis, and Tone Sollien have been loyal, wonderful friends. Hilde
Nagell deserves extra thanks for helping me to cope with academic
life. Weekly runs and wide-ranging conversations with Lori Troilo
have been a badly needed, and very enjoyable, distraction. And I
am hugely thankful for the companionship of my brothers, Martin
and Jon, and of my sister, Trude, without whom life would not be
half as good or half as fun.
My husband, Peter, and Celia and Tessa, our daughters, have
lived closer to this project than anyone—perhaps closer than they
would have wished, however seldom they complained. Peter lis-
tened patiently each time I needed to iron out a difficult passage in
the text, taking up endless questions of grammar and style. More
important, he offered me the blend of inspiration, encouragement,
and comfort that I needed to finish the project. Celia, Tessa, and
Peter have together given me more joy and affection than any one
person can reasonably ask for, and for that I am truly grateful.
1
Introduction
H
ow should a war end? This book is an attempt to answer that
question, and my answer has several parts. In the broadest sense,
I hold that any morally acceptable outcome to a war must strike a
balance between the goals of justice and of peace. The war should
end in a “better state of peace,” a peace that is more just and sta-
bler than that which held before it began. 1 To assert this, is to rec-
ognize that both justice and peace have inherent, obvious worth
and importance—neither can be established to the exclusion of
the other.
At the core of any conception of postwar justice must also
be an account of what we should consider just terms of peace.
Wars reflect a disagreement between adversaries on some funda-
mental question. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the Tamils fought
a long and bloody war for independence against the Sinhalese-
dominated government. The question of statehood was at stake,
too, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and South Sudan, to take
some other examples. Territorial disagreements have dominated a
number of conflicts—as in the war between Argentina and Great
Britain over the Falkland Islands and the long-standing conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians. And arguments about political
institutions and kinds of regimes are as explosive as ever, as recent
conflicts in Iraq, Libya, and Syria have shown. A war reflects a
disagreement of great importance, and we cannot begin to define
justice at its end without putting those disagreements at the very
heart of our analysis.
As a war ends, other moral questions arise as well. Contemporary
discussions of jus post bellum , or justice after wars, have focused
particularly on questions of war termination, reparations, war-
crime trials, postwar reconstruction, and occupation. These
studies ask: When should a belligerent terminate a war ? Does a
2 Just Peace
defeated state have a responsibility to pay the damages inflicted
by war? Does a victorious state have a responsibility to rebuild the
political institutions of a defeated one? How should violations of
the laws of war be punished? What are the rights and duties of an
occupying state? These are important questions, but they do not
alone define the scope of p ost bellum justice. In order to judge
whether a war ended justly, we also have to look at the point of
contention between the adversaries and to ask whether their dis-
agreement found a morally acceptable result. 2
Because I am interested in a war’s issue, or central problem,
I look both at international wars and internal ones, as well as
those that do not fit comfortably into either category. A conflict
over statehood is an internal war if the secessionist group is pre-
vented from seceding, but it will become an international conflict
once other states recognize the secessionist’s claim to statehood.
Conflicts over territory usually take place between two sovereign
states, but the administrative boundaries within a state can also be
contested. When it is the political system that is under dispute, the
conflict is usually internal, but as recent experiences in Iraq show,
other states might have strong stakes in the resolution of such a
conflict. Thus, the discussion in this book is limited neither to
international nor to internal wars.
How can we judge what is a morally acceptable outcome to a
war’s issue? Especially considering that the belligerents themselves
often fight about what justice requires, how are we to go about
answering this question? An evaluation of a war’s outcome has to
consist of three main elements. First, in order to directly take up
the arguments that the belligerents make, we must ask what gives
rise to valid claims to statehood, territory, and political rights.
Here we must look to contemporary political theories for help.
The reason is this: say that a substate group wishes to secede, and
fights a war to that end. In order to judge whether the war in fact
should end with a new state for the secessionists, we have to ask
under what conditions a substate group has any right to statehood.
Political theories of secession try to spell out the circumstances
under which a secessionist struggle should succeed. Similarly, when
two belligerents argue over a piece of territory, they will each offer
reasons why they have the better claim. In order to assess these
claims, we will have to engage with those reasons and explore what
gives rise to a valid territorial claim. Moral theories of territorial