Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
European Journal of International Relations
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Web of Science (3)
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Bjola, C.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Legitimating the Use of Force in International Politics: A Communicative Action Perspective

Corneliu Bjola

Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

The legal provisions of the United Nations Charter offer imprecise and insufficient criteria for discriminating properly between legitimate vs illegitimate uses of force. The conflation of the concept of the legitimacy of the use of force with what is lawful, as agreed upon by a small number of major international actors, overlooks those situations in which legal standards are rendered instruments of political deception and manipulation in the hands of the most powerful actors. The solution proposed to address this problem draws on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, and it is subsumed by the concept of deliberative legitimacy, understood as the non-coerced commitment of an actor to obey a norm adopted on the basis of the criteria and rules reached through a process of communicative action. The analytical value of the concept of deliberative legitimacy is examined empirically in two case studies — the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, and the 2003 US-led war against Iraq.

Key Words: communicative action • Jürgen Habermas • legitimacy • United Nations • use of force

European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 2, 266-303 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1354066105052968
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?