The Ethics of War and Peace Revisited: Moral Challenges in an Era of Contested and Fragmented Sovereignty

THE PRESENT MOMENT is one of contested and fragmented sovereignty. Contested because the norm of territorial integrity has shed some of its absolute nature. The evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm marks a shift toward sovereignty as shared responsibility, empowering humanitarian interventions with mixed outcomes. The notion of preventive force risks further undermining the traditional norm of sovereignty by imbuing states with the ability to use force against distant or emerging threats, thus bypassing diplomatic measures. US drone strikes—based in the view that a threatened state can exercise its right to self-defense against terrorist groups when other states, in whose territory these groups operate, are unable or unwilling to deal with the threat—challenge the notion of Westphalian sovereignty that any given state should be free from outside military interference in its domestic space. Fragmented because some states do not control all their territory and cannot necessarily deal with terrorist groups operating within their borders or sliding across them (such as along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border). Or fragmented because the borders have imploded due to civil wars—such as, in the case of Iraq, after the controversial 2003 preventive war; in the case of Libya, after the now-contentious 2011 humanitarian intervention; and in the case of Syria, in spite of no direct foreign intervention in the beginning. Finally, fragmented because of threats from quasi-territorial groups—such as Boko Haram, the Taliban, and the Islamic State group (also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS), along with the transnational jihadist activities they inspire. Even as states seek to reestablish territorial integrity by force, their existence itself contests traditional notions of sovereignty. All these uses of force challenge traditional notions of sovereignty, and in doing so, also challenge the ethical paradigms of war and peace to which we turn when…