This chapter provides a brief introduction to the ethics and laws of war. The first part outlines what international law and the ‘just war’ tradition say about war; the second explores the conduct of war; and the third examines two recent dilemmas as examples of moral and legal debate: the legitimacy of pre-emptive self-defence and the use of cluster bombs.

This chapter introduces the concept and practice of security in international relations. It explores the dilemmas faced by states, individuals and the global community by first looking at contemporary crises and disagreements about security; second, examining how security has been differently defined and focused; and third, surveying how different theoretical approaches have understood and analysed security.

This chapter examines sub-systemic actor’s duties. It treats NATO as indicative of a collective defence organization and the European Union (before the Lisbon treaty that contains two collective defence clauses) as indicative of a collective security organization. This chapter argues that NATO has, if requested to help by a member country, a contractual (Article 5) – and thus overriding – duty to protect a member state, and when must cause is satisfied, with securitization. It is argued that Article 5 is now somewhat outdated and that – going forward – just reason (i.e., the existence of an objective existential threat) + macro-proportionality, and not armed attack, should be the threshold for collective political action. The obligation to use securitizing measures, however, rests with the satisfaction of must cause. This chapter also argues that in collective security organizations, the obligation to securitize insiders, rests with remedial responsibility triggered by ties of community/friendship, this means that unlike in collective defence organizations, the obligation to securitize insiders can be overridden.

In this chapter, Nigel White assesses the contribution of the UN’s collective security system to the settlement of international disputes. This chapter tests the assumption that impartial law-based dispute settlement by the Security Council is neither achievable because of its political nature nor required by the UN Charter. This chapter analyses the provisions of the Charter and practice of the Security Council in the field of peaceful settlement, looking for evidence of impartiality in both inter-State and intra-State disputes and assessing the influence of peacekeeping mandated by the Council upon impartiality. This analysis shows that the concept of impartiality in peaceful settlement has largely disappeared and asks, in the conclusion, whether it is possible and desirable to (re)turn to impartiality.

Without falling into the Keynesian trap of implying the entire settlement was created in President Wilson’s ‘hot, dry room’, this chapter acknowledges the central role of the Big Four at the Paris Peace Conference in providing a decision-making forum to which many of the most contentious issues were referred. Their ideas, conflicting ambitions and interactions helped to shape the peace. Wilson and Lloyd George, who largely shared a Gladstonian liberal philosophy, advocated self-determination, disarmament, trade and a new international order based on a League of Nations, though this did not prevent significant clashes between them over reparations and naval construction. Clemenceau pursued a more traditional, though potentially incompatible, policy of alliances and territorial adjustments to counter what he perceived to be a continuing threat from a neighbour with larger resources and a more dynamic demographic. Orlando’s vision was focused more closely on Italy and its European context, though not without imperial aspirations. Keynes dismissed him in a sentence and footnote but Italy had an important part in the negotiations and compromises, which moulded the settlement drafted by the Four and their colleagues. The extent, however, to which a ‘New Diplomacy’ had overtaken the old remained moot.

This chapter covers the international law governing the use of force between states – the jus ad bellum. This is in contrast to the jus in bello – the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law – which regulates the conduct of hostilities once under way (see Chapter 11). Since at least 1945 the use of force by states has been prohibited, except in self-defence or when authorised by the United Nations Security Council. This chapter analyses the prohibition, the two exceptions, and the controversial issue of humanitarian intervention and its close relative, the ‘responsibility to protect’.

How can force be used to pursue human security? Treatments of this issue are surprisingly rare.  This chapter addresses the potentially positive uses of force to address basic human needs under the new doctrine of human security in international law.   International laws, cases, and regimes addressing the constituent elements of human security are addressed in turn: personal and political security, economic, food, health, community and environmental security. The evolving structure and function of UN Peacekeeping Operations is demonstrated through cases of specific missions. Finally, the possibilities of 2001’s "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine are debated.

Any government that wants to be taken seriously needs teeth. This chapter sketches a global security system in which national governments will still play a key role, but in which they have also worked together to create stable mechanisms of collective security. Since it is impossible to coerce nuclear-armed Great Powers through direct military action, the new global security system will need an especially robust regime of economic sanctions. If a Great Power transgresses international laws in egregious ways, such sanctions would aim to persuade the leaders of that nation that the costs of continued violations greatly exceed the benefits. In extreme cases, such sanctions could also aim to destabilize a transgressor nation’s economy so severely that its citizens would be impelled to bring about regime change from within. If such a global security system were in place for many decades, successfully keeping the peace, then incremental steps toward reductions in standing armies could be gradually undertaken. The resulting “peace dividend” could be used to further reduce global economic disparities, and to help fund the technologies for mitigating climate change.

This chapter focuses specifically on the Council’s contribution to the international law on the use of force (the jus ad bellum), an area of international law that is central to the Security Council’s role in the maintenance of international peace and security and the collective security system of the United Nations. The chapter addresses, first, the general state of the rules of international law on the use of force (the jus ad bellum). It then outlines the rules themselves. This is followed by sections relating directly to the Security Council: the prohibition of the use of force; the use of force by or authorized by the Council; the Council and the right of self-defence; and the Council and ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘responsibility to protect’.

Chapter 11 reappraises the peace conceptions and reordering strategies of Lloyd George and the other architects of the British agenda for the Paris Peace Conference. It argues that what they envisaged centred, not on containing Germany and re-establishing a workable balance of power but rather on the novel aim to create, in cooperation with the United States, a new Atlantic concert that was to stabilise a modern international equilibrium within a recast global order. It illuminates the underlying assumptions and rationales of what became an ambitious British peace programme, which included the most elaborate and influential blueprints for a League of Nations as framework for a novel, and integrative, international concert. And it highlights that British approaches to peacemaking, which were also designed to bolster the British Empire and expand British imperial influence in the Middle East, evolved and changed significantly between the armistice and Versailles as well. Finally, it analyses the extent to which Lloyd George and other key actors like Robert Cecil and Jan Christiaan Smuts had embarked on constructive learning processes – and the extent to which their evolving concepts and strategies were conducive to the creation of a durable and legitimate Atlantic and global order.

Chapter 15 offers new perspectives on the formative struggle to establish the League of Nations as an effective international organisation at the heart of the postwar order. It argues that in spite of the global conceptions they advanced its key architects intended the League to become the superstructure of a new transatlantic international order and security architecture. It analyses how far it was possible to find common ground between the most influential American and British blueprints for an integrative League and the markedly different French plans for an institution of the victors whose main purpose was supposed to be to protect France and constrain Germany. And it illuminates why ultimately the League of Nations came to be founded as a truncated organisation dominated by the principal victors of the Great War and initially excluding the vanquished, which were required to undergo a period of probation to become eligible for membership. Finally, it explains the far-reaching consequences this had and examines how far the League nonetheless had the potential to become the essential framework of a modern Atlantic and global order over time.

Chapter 10 reappraises the evolving plans and visions for a League of Nations and a new, progressive international order that were advanced by Woodrow Wilson and those who came to advise the American president and contribute to the American peace agenda that was presented at the Paris Peace Conference. It reinterprets Wilson’s core aspiration as, essentially, the pursuit of a new Atlantic order – rather than a “new world order”. And it not only analyses the underlying assumptions and maxims of the peace programme that he and his core advisers elaborated after the end of the Great War – and the crucial changes they made to this programme and their approaches to peacemaking during the critical phase between the armistice and the peace negotiations at Versailles. It also evaluates how far Wilson and his advisers had drawn deeper lessons from the war – and how far the president’s reorientated ideas and strategies for a “peace to end all wars” actually met essential requirements that had to be fulfilled to create a durable and legitimate postwar order in and beyond the newly vital transatlantic sphere.

Chapter 16 focuses on a comprehensive analysis of how the principal negotiators of the victorious powers sought to come to terms with the two most vital and indeed intricately interconnected questions of the entire peacemaking process: the challenge of establishing a new security architecture to stabilise the Atlantic world and make it “safe for democracy”; and the challenge of agreeing on the fundamental terms of the German settlement and how to deal with the pivotal problem of what shape and what status was to have in the postwar order. It reappraises how the protagonists came to forge a hybrid system of collective security that combined the novel guarantees of the League of Nations, temporary territorial guarantees, far-reaching disarmament of the defeated power and, crucially, specific security agreements under which Britain and the United States pledged to come to France’s aid in the case of unprovoked German aggression. And it offers a new interpretation both of the challenges of fortifying these elements into a new international concert system that could effectively secure the fledgling Atlantic peace and of the challenges of negotiating terms of a German settlement that could gain legitimacy not only among the victors but also on the part of the vanquished.

Chapter five discusses the UN’s articulated security project in relation to the concept of legalization. Legalization, whether pinned to an idea of positive doctrinal law or constitutional law, makes law into a continuum that effaces the distinction between juridical and managerial modes. This chapter reinstalls the distinction using infra-law to explore the phenomena described in Part One in terms of interlegality. In a post-Millennium global context, Foucault’s concept of infra-law mutates and the simple situation of interlegality he described in nineteenth-century French prisons, whereby discipline gathers beneath juridical droit, no longer pertains. The chapter describes infra-law as an entangled form of interlegality, whereby juridical forms also collect beneath managerial frameworks, but says that international lawyers have persisted in seeing managerial forms as waystations or helpmeets to juridicism. Using Freud’s distinction between associations of resemblance and associations of contiguity, the chapter explains the alchemy that leads international lawyers to misrecognize managerial technologies as juridico-political instruments.

This chapter introduces the UN’s principal approach to dealing with ‘threats without boundaries’, a category that includes terrorism, pandemic disease, WMD proliferation, and organized crime. The UN harnesses managerial governance as a way of countering these threats without resorting to unilateral, militarized responses like the War on Terror. The UN conceptualizes the threats as interdependence problems which call for a joined-up response. The chapter reveals the symmetry of threat and response, showing how each is articulated in three dimensions. First, the transboundary flow of threats calls for multilateral cooperation in response; second, the interconnection of the threats, which aggravate and incubate one another, calls for a comprehensive response; and third, the attribution of a life-span to threats without boundaries, which are serried into emergent, manifest, and residual stages, calls for a continuous response. Managerial governance, the chapter concludes, is produced through the imperative to organize attendant on the complexity that accumulates in a project that is cooperative, comprehensive and continuous.

This chapter introduces the jus ad bellum: the rules of law determining when states may resort to war or, more broadly, the use of armed force. These rules must be distinguished from the jus in bello: these are the rules of law that apply in armed conflict (known as international humanitarian law). In order to put the current jus ad bellum rules into perspective, the chapter begins by introducing the concept of collective security and demonstrating how this was applied during the League of Nations era. The following sections set out the relevant rules of the UN Charter on the prevention and regulation of recourse to the use of force, with a particular focus on the prohibition on the threat or use of force. The chapter also discusses the collective use of force, meaning the use of force authorized by the Security Council, and the unilateral use of force in self-defense. Finally, the chapter examines whether new exceptions to the prohibition of the use of force are emerging -- in particular, humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect.