Suchergebnisse

Should the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991 be characterized as an "international enforcement action" of the United Nations Security Council or as a campaign of collective self-defense approved, encouraged, and blessed by the Security Council?This is not simply a nice and rather metaphysical legal issue, but an extremely practical one. The question it presents is whether the control and direction of hostilities in the gulf, their termination, and the substance of the settlement they produce were handled by the Council as the Korean War was handled, that is, as a campaign of collective self-defense, or as the United Nations' first "international enforcement action." According to some international lawyers, characterizing the gulf war as a Security Council "enforcement action" under the untried procedures of Articles 42-50 of the Charter would in effect eviscerate Article 51, make the exercise of each state's "inherent" right of self-defense subject to the permission of the Security Council, threaten the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council, and thus lead to extremely grave and perhaps insoluble political difficulty. It could even destroy the United Nations.

To mitigate the costs associated with suppressing rebellion, states may rely on civilian self-defense militias to protect their territory from rebel groups. However, this decision is also costly, given that these self-defense groups may undermine control of its territory. This raises the question: why do governments cultivate self-defense militias when doing so risks that these militias will undermine their territorial control? Using a game theoretic model, we argue that states take this risk in order to prevent rebels from co-opting local populations, which in turn may shift power away from the government and toward the rebels. Governments strategically use civilian militias to raise the price rebels must pay for civilian cooperation, prevent rebels from harnessing a territory's resources, and/or to deter rebels from challenging government control in key areas. Empirically, the model suggests states are likely to support the formation of self-defense militias in territory that may moderately improve the power of rebel groups, but not in areas that are either less valuable or areas that are critical to the government's survival. These hypotheses are tested using data from the Colombian civil war from 1996 to 2008.

I am pleased to provide a brief response to the comments in the pages of this Journal on my note on self-defense principles and to welcome those comments, as well as others, as contributing to the kind of debate that publication of the principles hoped to achieve. I do not agree with much that has been said but am pleased that the public debate has been joined.