The Changing Nature of Legitimate Authority in the Just War Tradition

ABSTRACT

The legitimate authority principle has become reduced to the issue of state authority. In its current formulation, the state has the sole authority to wage war, and because non-state actors, by their very definition, cannot satisfy this principle, their use of force is inherently unethical. This does not reflect the reality that non-state actors are increasingly engaging in the use of force, sometimes legitimately. As a result, the legitimate authority principle can and should look beyond the state. This article navigates a terrain in which non-state actors engage in the use of force, and in which revisionist just war thinking proposes that the concept of legitimate authority is irrelevant to thinking about the ethics of war. It proposes a principled approach to the inclusion of some non-state actors under the rubric of legitimate authority. This approach draws upon the historical development of the legitimate authority principle and incorporates the factors important to early writers on the subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Legitimate authority
• states
• non-state actors
• just war
• just war tradition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Amy E. Eckert is Professor of Political Science at Metropolitan State University of Denver in Denver, CO. She is the former section leader of the International Ethics section of the International Studies Association. She is co-editor, with Laura Sjoberg, of Rethinking the 21st Century: “Old” Solutions to “New” Problems (2009), and co-editor, with Caron Gentry, of The Future of Just War: New Critical Essays (2014). Her most recent book is Outsourcing War: The Just War Tradition in the Age of Military Privatization (2016), published by Cornell University Press.

We were truly saddened to be informed that Professor Eckert passed away just after this article was finalized and published online. She will be remembered for her valuable contributions to the scholarly community, and this article is indeed a testament to that contribution.

Notes

1 It has also recently been held, within the pages of this journal, that the criterion is essentially superfluous (Steinhoff 2019).

2 There is variation in the terminology used to describe this principle. I utilize the term “legitimate authority,” but the principle mandating that just wars be initiated by actors with the authority to do so has also been called right authority, competent authority, and proper authority.

3 But, Davis Brown (2011) disagrees that the statist formulation of legitimate authority gives the state limitless discretion.

4 On the other hand, Walzer (2006, 303) suggests that even in a perfect democratic system, the responsibility of the people for decisions about warfare is limited and in an imperfect democracy (as in the US prior to intervention in Vietnam), moral accounting is “difficult and imprecise”.

5 Rawls (1999) developed the hypothetical example of Kazanistan, which was based on aspects of the Ottoman Empire. Despite being non-democratic, Kazanistan had a structure for consultation with and accountability to groups within its borders.