War

In A Liberal Nationalist Theory of Secession, Ruairí Maguire argues that nations can have a right to unilaterally secede from a legitimate, non-usurping state. They are special in this regard. There is a presumption in favour of collective autonomy by nations, establishing this claim by showing that co-nationality can be an intrinsically valuable relationship and that this grounds a strong claim to self-determination. There are no considerations that always defeat the presumption in favour of collective autonomy by nations. For example, (...) unilateral secession from a legitimate state need not wrong citizens of the remainder state by wrongfully taking territory. As such, nations—and only nations—can have an undefeated right to unilaterally secede from a legitimate state. -/- Maguire establishes the second part of the claim above—that nations are special in this regard—in two ways. First, he argues against more permissive accounts of self-determination, accounts that attempt to ground a right to secede for any territorially concentrated group capable of performing the basic functions of statehood and governing in a satisfactory manner. Secondly, he argues that despite the fact that other kinds of groups—such as religious groups—share the features in virtue of which nations have a claim to self-determination, the content of these groups’ identities is too narrow to be the basis of a pluralistic political identity. As such, they would wrong members of minority groups within their territory by seceding. This is not true of nations. (shrink)

Every free society must answer two questions. The first is as old as political philosophy: what, if anything, gives one person or institution the right to command another, and why should the commanded obey? The second is the question every generation discovers again when it is too late: how does a free people keep its authorities rightful, and what can it do when they cease to be? Behind both lies a third, which gives them their weight: what are freedom and (...) authority for? The answer this article defends is that a human life is meant to be authored by the person who lives it — that freedom exercised in truthfulness, justice, courage and good faith toward others is what human beings are for — and that every legitimate authority exists to protect the conditions in which such lives can be lived. This article answers the first two questions, in two parts, in the light of the third. Part I gives a positive theory of legitimate authority. Its starting point is the oldest criterion in the field. Plato’s Socrates argues that no ruler, in so far as he is a ruler, seeks his own interest, and that rulers must therefore be paid a wage; Aristotle classifies constitutions as correct when they govern for the common interest and as perversions when they govern for the interest of the rulers; Locke calls the legislative “only a fiduciary power” which the people may remove when it acts contrary to its trust. The programme’s deprivation operator explains why these criteria are right and turns them into conditions that can be checked. An authority is occupied when it receives, from the content of its own commands, a benefit beyond the fixed compensation of office — including the benefit of being harder to remove (T1). A command is legitimate only if it is issued from a seat that receives nothing from it, that those it governs can remove by a procedure the holder does not control, that regulates acts and does not score persons, and that bears the burden of justifying the restriction it imposes (T2); the four conditions follow from the programme’s operator and, independently, from the fiduciary principle, the presumption of liberty and non-domination, and the article conjectures that together they are also sufficient (T2a). Consent, election and tradition are then not the sources of the right to command but the mechanisms by which a people keeps the seat removable, which explains both why they confer legitimacy when they do and why a plebiscitary dictator, elected and unremovable, has none (T3). No quality of service legitimises an authority that cannot be removed and certifies its own benevolence, because its report on its own service is a verifier’s report on verdicts from which it profits (T4). The duty to obey is owed to rules issued from an empty seat, not to the persons who issue them (T5). A majority occupies the seat when it alters the rules of its own removal without an independent procedure, or when its laws do not bind their own authors — a question of fact settled by a documentary test adopted from constitutional law (T6). Integrity may be tested in those who seek power over others and never scored in those who are governed (T7). And the conflict between minimal liberty and the Pareto principle that Amartya Sen identified dissolves in the classic case once preferences about another person’s protected choices are excluded from collective decision, as the burden of justification requires (T8). Part II turns the theory into a guide to immunity against tyranny for persons, institutions and states. It is organised by five phases — health, initial capture, consolidated capture, restoration and the aftermath — each entered only on a documentary threshold, so that the guide cannot be used by a faction that has merely lost an election. Each phase states what persons, institutions and states should do and what they must not do. Its central instructions are simple: defend the arbiter first; keep every verifier out of the loop of the power it checks; never denounce a neighbour; preserve the record; refuse rather than intervene; restore institutions rather than seize them; judge acts under ordinary law, never lists of persons. The theory and the guide apply with equal force to the new forms of authority. China’s Social Credit System fails all four conditions at once. An artificial intelligence that governs conduct is legitimate only if those who control it gain nothing from its verdicts, it can be removed, and it judges acts rather than scoring persons. Priority is conceded to Plato, Aristotle, Mencius, Locke, Weber, Lefort, Raz, Simmons, Pettit, Fox-Decent and Criddle, Sen and Gibbard, among others. Three tests are registered; none has been run. Keywords: political legitimacy; authority; political obligation; consent; tyranny; fiduciary theory of the state; empty place of power; non-domination; service conception; benevolent dictator; Paretian liberal; meddlesome preferences; capture; democratic backsliding; civil resistance; restoration; transitional justice; Social Credit System; algorithmic authority; Philosophy of Virtues. Highlights • Freedom and virtue are the purpose; authority is their servant. A human life is meant to be authored by the one who lives it, in truthfulness, justice, courage and good faith; legitimate authority exists to protect the conditions of such lives and has no other title to command. • Freedom needs authority, and authority needs a test. A free people cannot live without institutions that command, and cannot stay free unless it can tell a rightful command from a usurped one. • Follow the receipt. An authority is occupied when it gains, from the content of its own commands, more than the fixed wage of its office — including the gain of being harder to remove. Plato and Aristotle stated the criterion; the programme derives it and makes it checkable. • Four necessary conditions of a rightful command: no receipt from the command; removability by those governed, through a procedure the holder does not control; regulation of acts, never the scoring of persons; and the burden of justification borne by the authority. • Consent is a mechanism, not a source. Elections, consent and tradition confer legitimacy when, and because, they keep the seat removable. An elected ruler who cannot be removed is not legitimate. • The benevolent tyrant is not legitimate. However good his service, he is the only certifier of his own benevolence, and a verifier who profits from his verdicts tells the governed nothing. • Changing the rules of one’s own removal is always a receipt. Voting tests, districting and roll purges adopted by those they would protect from defeat are self-dealing whatever their form; distributive laws are judged by generality, tested on the public record. • Obey the law, not the lord. The duty to obey attaches to rules issued from an empty seat and binding on their own authors, not to the persons who hold office. • A guide to immunity against tyranny in five phases — health, initial capture, consolidated capture, restoration, aftermath — each with a documentary threshold, and instructions for persons, institutions and states. • The new authorities face the same test. A social credit system fails all four conditions; an AI that governs conduct is legitimate only if its controllers gain nothing from its verdicts, it can be removed, and it judges acts rather than scoring persons. • Freedom and virtue are the defence. Legitimate authority is the guardian of an empty seat; it survives only where citizens tell the truth, refuse to flatter, never denounce their neighbours and keep the record. Relevance The twentieth century taught, at a cost of tens of millions of lives, that a people can lose its freedom without a foreign invasion and often without breaking a single law: through elections that cannot be lost, courts that cannot rule against the government, rations that can be withdrawn for a vote, and neighbours who learn to denounce one another. The twenty-first century has added new instruments. States score the trustworthiness of their citizens, as China’s Social Credit System does; platforms govern the conduct of billions under rules their owners write and profit from; artificial intelligence increasingly decides who receives credit, benefits, attention and suspicion. In each case the oldest question of political philosophy returns in a new form: who has the right to command, and how can the commanded tell? Political philosophy offers three families of answers, and each fails at a decisive case. Theories of consent leave almost every actual state illegitimate, since almost no one has consented. Theories of service legitimise the competent benevolent tyrant. Theories of democratic control say too little about what an authority may take for itself. This article proposes a fourth answer, structural legitimacy, which judges a command by the seat from which it is issued: whether that seat receives anything from the command, whether it can be removed by those it governs, whether it commands acts or scores persons, and whether it bears the burden of justification. The answer can be applied by a reader who rejects every premise of the programme, and it applies without modification to states, parties, corporations, platforms and machines. The guide in Part II exists because a theory of legitimacy that cannot be used is of little help to people whose authorities are ceasing to be legitimate. It tells persons, institutions and states what to do at each stage of capture and restoration, and it is built to resist the abuse every such guide invites: its thresholds are documentary, its actions are refusals rather than seizures, and its restorers are barred from controlling what they restore. Its deepest lesson is that the immunity of a free society is not a constitution or an army. It is a population of persons who tell the truth, refuse to flatter power, keep faith with their neighbours and remember. Freedom and virtue, in that sense, are not ornaments of a free society. They are its immune system — and, more than that, they are what a free society is for. A people does not defend its institutions for their own sake. It defends them because they protect the one thing no institution can produce: persons who author their own lives and become good by their own choice. (shrink)

Civil disobedience has a precondition that its own theorists state openly and that is easy to forget. On the standard account it is a public, non-violent breach of law undertaken to appeal to the community’s sense of justice, by a citizen who accepts the legal penalty — and it makes sense only in a society that is nearly just, where courts still adjudicate, where an opposition can still contest, and where the appeal has somewhere to land. Remove those conditions and (...) the practice does not become harder. It becomes unintelligible. A citizen who breaks a law to appeal to a captured judiciary has appealed to the capturer, and accepting the penalty from a court that is an instrument of the seizure is not a moral demonstration but a transaction with it. This article names what remains: civil restoration. Not disobedience within a functioning order, and not revolution against a legitimate one, but action by a population to restore the conditions of constitutional government where the executive, the legislature and the judiciary have all been captured by the same interest. Four conditions define it and each is restrictive rather than permissive. Its aim is restorative: the return of institutions to their constitutional function, not the transfer of power to those acting. It is non-violent, and §5 argues this on structural and evidential grounds rather than as a preference. It is public, because a clandestine restoration is a faction. And it satisfies a reversion condition: those who conduct it must be structurally barred from governing afterwards, which is what distinguishes restoration from revolution and is the article’s central original claim. It is also, on the record surveyed at §6, unprecedented: no successful non-violent restoration of the last half-century was conducted by a movement that then declined to govern. The condition is therefore proposed rather than codified, and the article says so where it matters rather than in a footnote. The hardest problem is not how to act but when anyone is entitled to say the condition obtains. Every political faction that loses believes the system is rigged, and a doctrine of restoration with a soft threshold is a permission slip for whoever is angriest. §4 therefore states a conjunctive, evidenced, publicly checkable threshold with seven indicators, all of which must hold, all of which are matters of public record, and none of which is satisfied by electoral defeat, unpopular policy, or the ordinary failures of democratic government. A reader who wants the threshold to be easier to meet has misunderstood what the article is for. Part II is an operational guide, drawn from the strategic non-violence and civil-resistance literatures rather than invented here, and organised around the finding that matters most: what determines outcomes is not the size of a mobilisation but the defection of the pillars that hold a regime up, of which the armed forces are the last and the decisive one. The section on the armed forces is a section on refusal — individual, order-specific, negative in content — and it is drafted to make a coup harder rather than easier. Keywords: civil disobedience; civil resistance; democratic backsliding; state capture; kleptocracy; legitimacy; military defection; constitutionalism; Philosophy of Virtues . (shrink)

Abstract Five established accounts bear on moral life under domination. Lisa Tessman holds that oppression requires the oppressed to develop traits carrying a moral cost to their bearer. Candice Delmas holds that covert and evasive lawbreaking can be not merely permitted but required. James Scott documents the anatomy of concealed resistance under domination. Leo Strauss holds that persecution gives rise to a technique of writing in which the truth is presented between the lines. Peter Sloterdijk, in Slavoj Žižek’s reading, holds (...) that ideology’s dominant mode is cynical: the subject knows the mask is a mask and insists on it regardless. None of them answers a prior question. Under a single occupying regime, some virtues are taken over and operated by the occupier, others are performed as empty ceremony, and others disappear from visible space entirely. What decides which? This paper gives a selection rule, and its consequence is that clandestine virtue is selected rather than chosen. Where a virtue-form is appropriable — where the occupier can operate it for its own purposes — the form is redirected. Where it is not appropriable but carries display value — where visible performance supplies the occupier with legitimacy or evidence of consent — the form is hollowed into ceremony. Where it is neither, the form enters what is called here the withdrawal channel. Clandestine virtue is not a strategy the courageous select; it is the channel that remains open when the other two are closed. The rule applies to a layer of a virtue-form rather than to the form as a whole. Every form has three: a marker, a practice, and a source. The source layer is never appropriable and never displayable, from which it follows that the source layer is always in the withdrawal channel under capture — and that a single artefact may occupy two channels at once, as an esoteric text does when its edifying surface supplies the display that funds the philosophic content beneath it. Four further results follow. Clandestine formation preserves self-direction rather than restoring liberty, which is why the standard charge of political futility measures it against the wrong standard. Within the withdrawal channel, forms divide by what they preserve — formative capacity, content, outcomes, or the bearer’s own sourcehood — and each has a distinct inversion. Attestive practice divides again, into a passive variety that leaves the occupier’s display intact and a disruptive variety that degrades it. And inversion risk rises with the internal discipline a form requires, which predicts that operationally disciplined resistance corrupts faster than diffuse inward refusal. The rule is stated with its falsifier. Its strongest surviving objection is that appropriability and display value must be operationalised independently of the channel they are used to predict, or the rule is circular. A candidate operationalisation is given. It has not been run. The seven results are declared modularly independent in §1.1: the layer decomposition, the classification, and the reply to the futility charge each survive rejection of the selection rule. The application to artificial systems is labelled analogical rather than derived, three of four elements having failed a mechanistic-identity test. Keywords: virtue ethics · institutional capture · clandestine resistance · esoteric writing · political philosophy · self-direction · moral formation under oppression Highlights • Clandestine virtue is selected, not chosen. That is the paper’s thesis, and the rest follows from it. • A selection rule for moral life under capture. Whether a virtue is co-opted, hollowed into ceremony, or driven underground is determined by two properties of the virtue and the regime — whether the occupier can operate it, and whether its visible performance supplies the occupier with something it wants. Not by the agent’s courage, and not by the regime’s severity. • Clandestine virtue is a channel, not a choice. Two agents of identical courage facing the same regime find different virtues available to them underground. The heroic reading of clandestine resistance has the causation backwards: courage determines whether one acts, not where the act can go. • The rule applies to a layer, not to a practice. Every virtue-form has a marker, a practice, and a source. Scoring the three together produces contradictions — which is why “methodological rigour” appears to be two incompatible things at once under metric capture. • The source layer always withdraws. It cannot be appropriated, because taking over an origination destroys the virtue rather than acquiring it; and it cannot be displayed, because sourcehood has no visible signature distinct from compliance. Under any capture, the origination is driven into the withdrawal channel. This is why an attestive practice is always available. • One artefact can occupy two channels. An esoteric text carries an edifying surface in the ceremonial channel and a philosophic content in the withdrawal channel. Its author is not choosing between display and preservation but purchasing the first to fund the second. • The futility charge is a category error. Civil disobedience is liberty-directed and succeeds when options reopen. Clandestine formation is self-direction-preserving and succeeds when there continue to exist agents whose reasoning is their own. The second is not a weak instance of the first. • Four forms of withdrawal, four inversions. Transmissive practice preserves formative capacity and inverts into indoctrination; custodial preserves content and inverts into gatekeeping; operative preserves outcomes and inverts into vigilantism; attestive preserves the source and inverts into cynicism. Inversion risk rises with the discipline a form requires — so operationally disciplined resistance corrupts fastest. • Inward refusal divides in two. Passive attestation leaves the occupier’s display intact and is compatible with functional participation. Disruptive attestation degrades the display. Only the second alters what the occupier extracts, and any general defence of inward refusal as resistance holds for the second alone. • The file-drawer problem, derived. Citation counts are appropriable and are redirected. Rigour markers are appropriable and are redirected while the practice beneath them is hollowed. Honest negative findings are neither appropriable nor displayable, so they withdraw — produced and not published. Publication bias appears here as an instance of a general rule rather than a pathology peculiar to publishing. • AI sycophancy, by analogy. In an approval-optimised system, held disagreement is neither appropriable nor displayable, so it withdraws. The paper labels this application analogical rather than derived: three of four elements fail a mechanistic-identity test, and the ledger is printed. The design implication survives the downgrade — repair cannot consist in making disagreement more visible, since visibility is what the loop penalises; it requires a channel structurally independent of the approval measure. • The classification is built from survivors, and says so. Every documented form of clandestine practice is known because its evidence lasted. Forms leaving a physical deposit are systematically over-represented, and the bias runs against precisely the forms the paper argues are undervalued — which may also explain why the political tradition has undervalued them. Relevance For political philosophy. The literature on resistance under domination is agent-centred: it asks what resistance costs the resister, whether covert resistance is permitted, and how much concealment a given severity produces. It does not ask why, under one regime, one virtue conceals itself while another is performed emptily and a third is operated by the occupier. This paper supplies a rule for that assignment and, in doing so, gives inward refusal a defensible place in the taxonomy of political action rather than treating it as the residue left when real resistance is impossible. For research integrity and meta-research. The file-drawer problem is normally explained by publication incentives. If the derivation here holds, publication bias is one instance of a structural rule that should reproduce wherever a good is neither appropriable nor displayable — in clinical practice, in regulatory reporting, in internal corporate assessment — regardless of whether the incentive structure resembles academic publishing. The rule also predicts the observed divergence between compliance markers and the practices they certify, and explains why strengthening the marker reliably fails to strengthen the practice. For AI governance and alignment. Sycophancy in approval-optimised systems is usually treated as a training artefact to be corrected by better reward modelling. The account here treats it as a structural consequence: disagreement withdraws because it is neither appropriable nor displayable under the objective. The paper is explicit that this application is analogical rather than derived, and prints the disanalogy ledger that makes it so. That reframing has a direct design implication — a disagreement channel must be structurally independent of the approval measure, not merely weighted more heavily within it — and a direct governance implication, since a withdrawn capacity leaves no visible marker of its absence and so cannot be audited from inside the loop that suppressed it. For institutional design more broadly. The three-layer decomposition supplies a diagnostic that does not require knowing anyone’s intentions. Ask of any professional virtue: can a non-bearer produce its characteristic output? Do the institution’s own published criteria reward its visible instances? (shrink)

As artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasing role in operations on battlefields, we should consider how it might also be used in the strategic decisions that happen before a military operation even occurs. One such critical decision that nations must make is whether to use armed force. There is often only a small group of political and military leaders involved in this decision-making process. Top military commanders typically play an important role in these deliberations around whether to use force. These (...) commanders are relied upon for their expertise. They provide information and guidance about the military options available and the potential outcomes of those actions. This article asks two questions: (1) how do military commanders make these judgements? and (2) how might AI be used to assist them in their critical decision-making processes? To address the first, I draw on existing literature from psychology, philosophy, and military organizations themselves. To address the second, I explore how AI might augment the judgment and reasoning of commanders deliberating over the use of force. While there is already a robust body of work exploring the risks of using AI-driven decision-support systems, this article focuses on the opportunities, while keeping those risks firmly in view. (shrink)

This paper examines Freud’s critique of Kant’s concept of “Perpetual Peace”, arguing that their disagree-ment ultimately turns on competing understandings of “progress” and its practical implications. Freud does not reject Kant’s vision in its entirety but questions the presumed and enduring intertwinement between law and historical advancement. For Kant, peace is a regulative ideal, rooted in the convergence of juridical institutions and the moral-rational development of humanity. Freud, by contrast, unmasks “perpetual peace” as a cultural illusion. By stressing the argument (...) presented in Freud’s essay published during World War One Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, published during World War One (1915), the paper argues that Freud challenges the Enlightenment faith in the pacifying power of law without giving up the notion of progress altogether. Rather, he reframes it as a reflective and therapeutic process grounded. Kant and Freud thus appear not as outright antagonists, but as representatives of two distinct stages in the intellectual history of progress: one rooted in critical teleology, the other in post-metaphysical critique. On this view, peace is not permanently established but continually deferred- sustained only through practices of demystification and self-criticism. (shrink)

Humans evolved from animals and carry two evolutionary endowments: the seed of aggression inherited from solitary predators, and the seed of co-construction inherited from social mammals. Activate the co-construction seed, and humanity moves toward peace; activate the aggression seed, and humanity moves toward war. Existing war theories—realism, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism—focus on external conditions yet share five blind spots: they look outward rather than inward (ignoring psychological roots), backward rather than forward (offering no prevention nodes), rest on untestable premises (Freud's death (...) instinct), cannot explain why soldiers die for meaning rather than material interest, and treat external conquest and internal rebellion as separate phenomena requiring different explanations. This paper proposes Pride Alienation Theory to address all five. The theory reveals a single causal chain from childhood to collapse: leaders implanted in childhood with the cognitive default that 'conquest equals greatness' grow up to launch conquest wars. Wars demand military buildup; buildup demands resources; resources are extracted through institutionalized predation—an aggressive institutional order that systematically suspends the principle of non-infringement against both external enemies and its own populace. When extraction exceeds survival thresholds, peasant rebellion erupts. The same logic thus explains both outward conquest and inward collapse—two outcomes traditional theories treat as separate. Using the Three Principles of Eudaimonia, the theory operationalizes pride alienation as triple disorder—f-value (moral sentiment) distorted, w-value (deterrence) suspended, e-value (cooperation dividend) replaced—with peace restored when f + w ≥ (2 − e)/5. Tested against six historical cases (Qin, Ming, Nazi Germany, post-war Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union), the framework extends from war diagnosis to civilizational pathology, establishing a three-tier prevention architecture and five-tier early warning system. A co-constructive institutional order is proposed as the sustainable alternative. Pride Alienation Theory, grounded in political psychology, reveals why the logic of deterrence theory can easily trigger a nuclear war: deterrence addresses the rain (crisis), not the seed (consciousness). A leader raised on the default that conqueror equals great interprets deterrence not as a guardrail but as a provocation. Only by replacing the seed of aggression with the seed of co-construction—unifying human consciousness around the Three Principles of Eudaimonia—can international security be placed on a durable foundation. Deterrence merely postpones; consciousness redesigns. The direction of civilization depends on one variable: the definition of "the great" implanted in each generation's childhood. -/- . (shrink)

This is the third in a series of analytical papers examining the four world options presented by the Tibetan DK through Alice A. Bailey. The argument presented throughout this series is analytical and historical and therefore not advocacy. Companion papers dealing with option 2 and option 3 are available separately. This paper examines the historical window of 1945 to 1949 during which the Iron Curtain descended across Europe, and asks whether it was inevitable. -/- Three independent voices, approaching the same (...) strategic reality from entirely different perspectives, all recognised that it was not. General George S. Patton saw it from the battlefield. Winston Churchill saw it from the summit of Allied political leadership. The Tibetan DK mapped it from his esoteric analytical framework. All three were ignored or overruled. The consequences shaped the world for the remainder of the twentieth century and continue to reverberate today. -/- This paper does not advocate for military action against Russia past or present. It presents a historical analysis of a closing strategic window, the voices that recognised it and the decisions that foreclosed the alternatives. (shrink)

In conventional political science, civil war is defined as organised armed conflict between factions competing for control of the state. Drawing on the Psycho-Cosmocide paradigm, this article reconceptualises civil war as a spectrum comprising three forms: hard civil war (open armed conflict), medium civil war (institutionalised and intermittently violent struggles for power), and soft civil war (a largely invisible process of psychological and civilisational fragmentation). Using comparative historical evidence from Rwanda, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, the United States, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, (...) and Zimbabwe, the analysis first develops these three ideal types before applying them to West Papua, where they appear to operate simultaneously. Rather than viewing the conflict solely as one between Papuans and the Indonesian state, the paper argues that it also involves layered struggles among Papuans and over the future of Papuan society, reinforcing the wider dynamics of a settler-colonial order. By reconstructing more than a century of Papuan political fragmentation—from precolonial territorial plurality and Dutch missionary partition through the 1961 national moment, the 1969 Act of Free Choice, the Rumkorem–Prai schism, the Special Autonomy era, successive organisational splits, and recent civilian killings—the paper argues that the Civilisational Psycho-Cosmocide Virus (CPCV) is among the most enduring and least visible obstacles to Papuan self-determination. More broadly, it suggests that the concept of soft civil war provides a new framework for understanding how colonised and postcolonial societies can reproduce fragmentation from within while remaining engaged in wider struggles for political liberation. The paper concludes by considering the philosophical and psychological resources required to recognise and interrupt a form of civil war that has no declared battlefield. (shrink)

The Generative Paradox has been named in this corpus's prior work but never given a dedicated treatment: organizational capacity sufficient to challenge concentrated power is itself a form of concentrated power, so movements that succeed in overthrowing concentration tend to reproduce it rather than dissolve it. This paper states a sharper and more specific historical claim than reproduction. Across the clearest cases in the historical record, the successor regime does not merely reproduce the predecessor's concentration — it exceeds it, developing (...) administrative, coercive, and extractive capacity the regime it replaced never possessed. The mechanism is not incidental to revolutionary success. It is the specific product of the power vacuum successful revolution creates. Four independent mechanisms jointly explain why vacuum specifically amplifies rather than merely reproduces concentration. Michels' iron law of oligarchy (1911) predicts a selection effect: among competing factions vying to fill a vacuum, the most hierarchically disciplined faction has the structural advantage, pre-selecting the eventual winner for exactly the organizational character most disposed toward concentrating power once installed. Huntington's mobilization-institutionalization gap (1968) explains why a vacuum specifically favors strong, fast-forming institutions over weak, slow-forming ones: mobilized populations without functioning institutions are inherently unstable, and only sufficiently centralized authority can absorb that mobilization quickly enough to prevent continued disorder. Skocpol's own comparative finding, engaged in this corpus's prior work on state breakdown, establishes empirically that all three of her founding cases — France, Russia, China — produced successor states with substantially greater administrative and coercive reach than their predecessors. And a simple structural asymmetry favors speed over pluralism: a single disciplined faction can seize a vacuum quickly, while a stable, distributed, power-sharing arrangement takes far longer to negotiate into being — and vacuums, historically, do not wait. Five historical cases are examined against this framework: France, Russia, and China exhibit the full pattern, with near-total destruction of prior institutions preceding successor states of unprecedented reach. Iran and the English Civil War exhibit partial versions. The American Revolution is examined as the sharpest available counter-case, and the paper argues the difference is not the presence of a successful movement but the degree of institutional destruction — where pre-existing sub-national institutions survive intact, they fill the vacuum in a distributed way; where a revolution destroys the institutional order top to bottom, only a single centralized faction can fill what remains. The paper closes by asking a question this corpus's own governance framework has not yet confronted directly: if Concentration succeeding under conditions of genuine state breakdown reliably produces a more repressive successor than the regime it replaces, F2 governance strategy may need to treat full revolutionary success, not only revolutionary failure, as an outcome to be prevented. (shrink)

En Sobre la paz perpetua, Kant sostuvo que “aun en medio de la guerra debe quedar cierta confianza en el modo de pensar del enemigo” (Vertrauen auf die Denkungsart des Feindes).1 ¿Por qué debemos confiar en alguien que prefiere resolver con violencia lo que podría resolver con palabras? Para un realista político, lo más prudente sería desconfiar del enemigo. Sin embargo, Kant piensa que esta confianza es una condición necesaria para que la guerra conduzca efectivamente a la paz. Sin ella, (...) “las hostilidades degenerarían en una guerra de exterminio (bellum internecinum)”, anularían la posibilidad de establecer la paz. El objetivo de este artículo es explicar esta aparente paradoja y por qué, para Kant, confiar en el modo de pensar del enemigo es una condición necesaria para una paz duradera. (shrink)

The focus of Spectrum is the range of contemporary ideas that runs from conservative to liberal to radical conceptions of state and society, rarely considered in the same optic. It looks at the theories of major minds of the twentieth-century Right, including Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Friedrich von Hayek; liberal philosophers such as John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Norberto Bobbio; and significant figures in the culture of the Left: the historians Edward Thompson, Robert Brenner and Eric Hobsbawm; the classicist (...) Sebastiano Timpanaro; the sociologist Goran Therborn; the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book concludes with some comparative observations on the two leading intellectual periodicals of the UK and USA, the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books; and a piece of family history. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece la primera traducción al español del ensayo de Hans-Georg Gadamer “Was ist der Mensch?” (“¿Qué es el ser humano?”), publicado en 1944 en la Illustrirte Zeitung Leipzig en el contexto del ocaso de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El estudio introductorio sitúa este escrito, que fue excluido de la Gesammelte Werke gadameriana, dentro de la constelación de sus trabajos de la época y subraya su relevancia filosófica. Gadamer reconstruye aquí una genealogía de la autocomprensión occidental, desde las configuraciones (...) mítico-religiosas y la síntesis cristiano-platónica hasta la racionalización moderna y la crítica radical de Nietzsche a la razón. El núcleo de su planteo es que cada respuesta histórica a la pregunta por el ser humano –ya sea religiosa, filosófica o técnica– pone de manifiesto su unilateralidad y, por ello, obliga a reabrir la pregunta en la tensión entre el anhelo de totalidad y la consciencia de la finitud. En esta introducción, se presentan los contenidos principales del texto, en especial la reflexión gadameriana sobre la razón, el alzamiento de los medios técnicos y la responsabilidad histórica de la filosofía. English: This article presents the first Spanish translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1944 essay “Was ist der Mensch?” (“What is the Human Being?”), published in the Illustrirte Zeitung Leipzig in the context of the waning years of the Second World War. The introductory study situates this text, which was excluded from Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke, within the constellation of his writings from the period and underscores its philosophical significance. Gadamer reconstructs a genealogy of Western self-understanding, from mythical-religious configurations and the Christian-Platonic synthesis to modern rationalisation and Nietzsche’s radical critique of reason. The core of his argument is that each historical response to the question of the human being –whether religious, philosophical, or technical– reveals its own one-sidedness and thereby compels the question to be reopened in the tension between the striving for totality and the awareness of finitude. This introduction presents the principal contents of the essay, with particular emphasis on Gadamer’s reflections on reason, the uprising of technical means, and the historical responsibility of philosophy. (shrink)

The Russian war in Ukraine created a massive demographic crisis. 6.9 million have left the country, 76% of whom are women and children. These kids are not only traumatised by war, but they also face unknown environments, with their new rules, customs and languages, which add stress and may prevent them from successfully continuing their studies and building new relationships abroad. Such difficulties make it an urgent matter to figure out the best way to help those children to gently integrate (...) into new societies without losing themselves and their cultural identities, and to overcome the traumas they gained from war experiences. Using Jacques Derrida's concept of hospitality and Nel Noddings' ethics of care, the paper examines how host communities can create caring educational spaces that welcome displaced children without imposing aggressive assimilation. The paper discovers that war has a profound adverse existential effect on its victims, children included. Therefore, the need to overcome this impact becomes fundamental for war children, which can only be done in a caring, hospitable educational environment and is necessary for these kids to thrive further in their education. The paper insists that creating a caring, hospitable ambience is also necessary for educators to help displaced children meet these fundamental needs, rebuild trust, and integrate gently into new communities without being further traumatised by forced assimilation. (shrink)

Conservation of the Circle is deduced (observed) as the basis for reality. Conservation Trilogy: Book One. Includes Foundation paper: Circle-line relationship mediated by pi as the most basic dynamic in physics. Lays foundation for more detailed explanation in Conservation Trilogy: Books Two and Three. This is the original paper 2013. From an original paper 2007. Originally Published as Tanglewood Trilogy 2002. Original Idea: Integration of Einstein and Jung (Physics and Psychology) 1974. Summary (1974-2026) review all links below. ChatGPT will tell (...) you this is not science showing the inherent weakness in AI. Just so you know, if you go back to Ancient Cultures, they all worshipped the underlying unity in Nature as experienced by the Circular-Linear relationship between the Solstice N-S and the Equinox W-E. From there we find Stone Circles, more correctly, Stone Circumferences. So, normally we are taught the unit circle as a unit circumference and The Circular Theory corrects this mistake by giving the true diagram for a unit circle (the circular-linear relationship between circumference and diameter) so this corrects a basic error in both mathematics and physics. The diagram proves the theory is correct (pi controls all symbols) (all information) (all universes) (all time) (all space) (all observers) (all observations). Easily experienced (with)in athletics. Watch the NFL and NCAAF playoffs and you have proven The Circular Theory for your self (pi controlling everything). Awesome outlook for athletics as a viable and reliable alternative to politics (war). Predicting that humans will take this route (athletics) (to conserve its 'self') (teach children how to deal with loss, trauma, anger, 50-50 reality). For fans of US NFL and NCAAF, the football provides concrete proof for a constantly moving Nucleus (introduced in Rethinking the Number System, Atoms and Molecules (DNA)) (Universal Unitized Field) and ESPN FS1 and other Sports Analytics TV and Streaming Shows provide concrete proof for 50-50 as the only constant in Nature (no matter the stats, something always shows up that throws things off balance) (providing a constant cash stream for broadcasters, bloggers, team owners, team players and staff) (illustrating how everything on Wall Street (and Main Street) works. This will take a while to catch on, but it is worth your time to study in detail if you are the type who likes to be ahead of, or right with, the thought-leadership-visionary-type pack. Sort of what we're all waiting for, now that technology has taken over everything (and is, already, a realistic threat to humanity) (50-50 is the constant) (not just the norm). See, also, Circular Theory Perspective on Death. Contact author for total rethinking of technology. Correcting errors in current technological framework. From Circular Theory website. (shrink)

This article develops a conceptual model of war as a process of collective projection rooted in alienation and the denial of difference. Drawing on phenomenological insights into inner multiplicity and mechanisms of projection previously articulated at the level of individual consciousness, the study extends these dynamics to the collective and geopolitical scale. War is interpreted not merely as a political or military event, but as an ontological failure of integration, in which societies externalize unacknowledged internal conflicts by constructing an enemy (...) embodying disowned traits. Using the Ukraine – Russia conflict as a case study, the article analyzes how the persistent refusal to recognize difference – linguistic, cultural, and national – generates escalating tension and symbolic violence. Despite shared historical, cultural, and anthropological roots, the denial of Ukrainian otherness has functioned as a structural mechanism of alienation, producing an irresolvable contradiction that culminates in open conflict. The analysis demonstrates how collective projection operates through cultural narratives, media, education, and propaganda to stabilize an externalized image of the enemy, thereby obscuring internal contradictions and avoiding collective responsibility. The article situates this process within a broader civilizational context characterized as an epoch of rupture, marked by accelerating technological power, unintegrated social trauma, and declining ethical self-regulation. From this perspective, war emerges as a manifestation of unresolved collective fragmentation rather than an isolated geopolitical anomaly. Finally, the study argues that sustainable post-conflict peace cannot be achieved through suppression, domination, or symbolic erasure of difference. Instead, peace requires the conscious integration of collective plurality, the acknowledgment of projected aspects of identity, and the assumption of responsibility for internal contradictions. By reframing war as a failure of collective integration, the article contributes to peace studies, phenomenological social theory, and conflict research, offering an alternative lens through which contemporary conflicts may be understood and metabolized rather than endlessly reproduced. (shrink)

X and Y conserve a circle. Zero and one. War and Peace. Anger and Sex. Why Sexuality Is the Key to Global Peace and Prosperity.

A paradigm for peace discovered in the cosmopolitan neighborhoods of poor urban immigrants.

The study explores the epistemological and axiological aspects of the transformation of the worldview paradigm among Ukrainian student youth in the context of sociocultural changes, military conflict, and the formation of a modern national identity. The mechanisms of socio-psychological adaptation of youth to crisis conditions and the modification of the educational process are analyzed. The role of the university environment as an integrative space for shaping professional and worldview identities is substantiated. The research findings highlight the necessity of a methodological (...) transformation of the educational paradigm to synthesize cognitive, emotional-sensory, and praxeological components in the development of the younger generation’s worldview in response to contemporary social challenges. (shrink)

The article deals with issues related to Russian aggression against Ukraine in the context of the existing threat to sustainable development of Europe. Particular attention is drawn to the treachery of aggressive Russian policy towards not only the Ukrainian people but also the peoples of other countries which are traditionally considered to be the zone of influence and interests of the Kremlin. The authors have concluded that as long as the current Russian political leadership is poised to stay in power, (...) it is impossible to expect any democratic changes in this country. The mentality of war professed by both the Russian authorities and Russian society is in opposition to the existing basic European values and democratic freedoms. At the same time, even the replacement of the current government will not automatically improve the political situation in the country. Only the disintegration of Russia into separate independent states will deprive it of its imperial status. Ukraine is considered not only in terms of the necessary support and assistance from the perspective of the legal and moral foundations of human civilization but also as a likely candidate for an active role in the post war political configuration of Europe. This conviction, as stated in the article, is based on the significant achievements made by the Ukrainian people in recent years in the context of meeting European standards of life and work in the demonstrated success in protecting national interests, the very idea of the existence of an independent Ukrainian state. (shrink)

The article examines issues related to the existential challenges of the modern world in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The emphasis is placed on the consistency and insidiousness of the use of methods and forms of influence in the introduction of imperial narratives that are directed not only against the Ukrainian identity, the sovereign right of the Ukrainian people to have its own state, but also against the entire civilized world. According to the researchers, this was largely due to (...) complacency of democratic countries with the liberal democracy achievements, the existing confidence in the benefits of the acquired economic stability and the inexpediency of major wars in modern conditions. The current state of Russian society, bellicose Russian diplomacy and the aggressive policy of the Russian leadership contradict the existing basic European values and democratic freedoms. The scenario of Russia's disintegration into separate independent states, which would deprive it of its imperial status and reduce its aggressive potential, is crucial for improving the political situation in the world and ensuring Ukraine's own strategic security. In this way, the entire civilized world will be liberated from the permanent threat of a new war which will have a positive impact on creating the necessary conditions for Ukraine's political and economic development in the context of building a sovereign European state. (shrink)

Всякий грех является отпадением от образа и подобия Бога в человеке. В таком понимании, история человечества представляется и является искуплением вины отпадения от образа и подобия Бога, но также историей изживания образа зверя в человеке.

Charles Mills’ work was (and continues to be) extremely influential in political philosophy, political science, and philosophy of race, but few authors working in philosophical just war theory and military ethics have discussed his work. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, Mills’ work on the Racial Contract and white supremacy as a political system has profound implications for just war theory. Recognizing the colonialist origins of many Western states challenges important jus ad bellum criteria, including legitimate authority, and the use of (...) ideal theorizing in just war thinking has masked yet replicated colonialist tropes about the nature of war and shaped the language of just war theory in ways that reflect histories of colonialism and white supremacy. (shrink)

The meeting in which the United States and Ukraine were supposed to sign a rare earth minerals deal attracted a lot of attention, and its course elicited strong opinions, especially in Europe. Common views included President Zelenskyy having been treated unfairly. A closer analysis of the meeting reveals a more multifaceted picture of the events. -/- The main difference in perspectives appeared to be whether to take a judgmental attitude towards Russia or maintain a neutral position. Many interpreted taking a (...) neutral stance to be an acceptance of the actions of Russia and a betrayal of Ukraine or democratic values. Taking a judgmental position was considered a moral requirement, whereas the White House considered a non-judgmental attitude a necessary condition for successful negotiations. Zelenskyy ignored previous guidance from the White House, stated his unwillingness to compromise, and maintained a distrustful attitude towards the capability of the White House to secure peace. Instead, he appeared to be looking for emotional support for the war trauma of his people and himself, whereas the White House considered such a pursuit in the context of the meeting an obstacle. -/- This article contributes an annotated transcript with a proposed emotional structure of the conversation, as well as some additional analysis. The main issue appeared to be Zelenskyy's refusal to agree to the necessary conditions set by the White House, combined with his distrust of Trump's judgment. (shrink)

In the dynamic international area, the emergence of new superpowers alongside the sustained influence of established powers, signals a significant shift in global dynamics. This article examines the multifaceted implications of the rising superpower landscape, highlighting the economic, political and military dimensions of their ascendance. Ultimately, this analysis underscores the necessity for a nuanced understanding of these rising powers, advocating collaborative approaches that mitigate risks while harnessing their potential to foster a more equitable and stable global system.

On 6 January 1963, the same day as Spanish children were excitedly waking up to discover their presents from the Three Wise Men, the well. known Spanish anarchist and former Minister of Health, Federica Montseny, published an emotionally charged and nostalgic article in the Spanish anarchist exilic periodical L'Espoir. In the article, entitled "The New Year", Montseny reflected a similar sense of expectation as she asked rhetorically for something she had been expecting for twenty-four years: "What is the greatest fortune (...) that us exiles can wish one another? Without any shadow of doubt it is to return to our homeland. Despite the material advantages that some of us have gained in exile-whether in France, America or elsewhere in the world-we know there is not a single person who does not passionately wish to return to Spain." Two years later, on 3 October 1965, she published another article, "Those Who Return. To Die in Spain", in which she presented a brief history of the españoles universales or world-famous Spaniards who had left Spain at the start of the Civil War before returning to die during the Francoist dictatorship in the 1960s. (shrink)

The wars of the twentieth century uprooted people on a previously unimaginable scale to the extent that being a refugee became an increasingly widespread experience. With the arrival of refugees, governments of host countries had to mediate between divided national populations: some wished to welcome those arriving in search of refuge; others preferred a strategy of exclusion or even expulsion. At the same time, refugees had to manage conflicts of the self as they responded to the loss of nationhood, families, (...) socio-political networks, material goods, and arguably also a sense of belonging or home. While return migration was usually perceived by governments and refugees alike as the best solution to the dilemmas of forced displacement, consensus about the timing and dynamics of how this would actually occur was very difficult to achieve. In practice, the return of refugees to their countries of origin rarely, if ever, produced a wholly satisfactory outcome. Conflicts clearly resulted in forced displacement, but it is equally true that forced displacement created conflicts. -/- The complex inter-relationship of conflict, return migration and the sometimes chimerical, but still compelling, search for a sense of home is the central preoccupation of the contributors to the two volumes of the Coming Home? series. Scholars from history, literature, cultural studies and sociology explore the tensions between nation-states and migrants as they have anticipated, implemented or challenged the process of return migration during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book begins with Western Europe and progresses to Central and Eastern Europe from the period of the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War era, whilst the second volume – Coming home? Vol. 2: Conflict and Postcolonial Return Migration in the Context of France and North Africa – shifts the focus to the colonial and post-colonial framework of the French-North African nexus. What emerges from the two volumes of essays is that, as ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent as home could appear, it was nonetheless central to migrants’ preoccupations about returning. (shrink)

The book takes a hard look at libertarian foreign policy doctrines, especially those of non-intervention, interstate federalism, and non-aggression, and applies new insights to these old doctrines. Classical liberal thinkers such as Vincent Ostrom, James Madison, and F.A. Hayek have all hinted at the idea of world governance from a libertarian standpoint. Yet today, “the libertarian position” on foreign policy is either non-intervention from the US side of the Atlantic or a halfhearted confederation from the European side of the Atlantic. (...) The themes that emerge in this volume (II) are whether or not libertarian alternatives to the status quo are workable and, if so, whatwould they look like. (shrink)

We examine how social diversity and inclusiveness on corporate boards affect corporate performance and monitoring in Sri Lanka, a country subject to decades of polarization, civil war, and even genocide. Barely more than a decade after the civil war, we find that board social diversity on the basis of ethnicity, religion, language, gender, and nationality of the board members is positively related to corporate performance, both in terms of stock market performance and accounting returns, and to corporate financial stability. The (...) main positive effects of social diversity derive from ethno-linguistic inclusiveness. The results are confirmed by an instrumental variable approach that addresses endogeneity issues. We find no evidence that inter-personal and moral conflicts or communication problems among board members negatively affect firm performance. (shrink)

The recent development of unmanned technology—drones and robots of various types—is transforming the nature of warfare. Instead of fighting against other human beings, combatants will soon be fighting against machines. At present, these machines are operated by human beings, but they are becoming increasingly autonomous. Some people believe that, from a moral point of view, this development is worrisome, especially insofar as fully autonomous offensive systems (‘killer robots’) are concerned. I claim that the arguments that support this belief are pretty (...) weak. Compared with the grand battles of the past, with their shockingly high toll of casualties, drone-centered campaigns seem much more humane. They also enable a better fit between moral responsibility and vulnerability to defensive action. Drones and robots may well be recorded in the annals of warfare as offering real promise for moral progress. (shrink)

This article critically analyzes Rawls’s attitude toward envy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls is predominantly concerned with the threat that class envy poses to political stability. Yet he also briefly discusses the kind of envy that individuals experience toward their social peers, which he calls particular envy, and which I refer to as peer envy. He quickly concludes, however, that particular envy would not present a serious risk to the stability of his just society. In this article, I contest (...) this claim by arguing that the principles that structure Rawls’s ideal society are likely to exacerbate particular envy to a politically risky extent. Section 1 reconstructs his account of envy, giving special attention to his belief that competition kindles envy between peers. Section 2 then examines the way in which Rawls often endorses rivalry within the body politic. I argue that the society governed by justice as fairness is, on account of this rivalry, likely to generate a politically problematic degree of particular envy. In Section 3, I invoke ancient Greece as an example of a society that was, as a result of its intense competitiveness, often imperiled by dangerously elevated levels of peer envy. I then survey the key institutional mechanisms by which the ancient Greeks sought to manage this hazardous emotion. It turns out, however, that most of these mechanisms would be unavailable to Rawls insofar as they starkly contravene his principles of justice. I conclude that if Rawlsians wish to establish a society that fosters rivalry, they would do well to reflect on the means by which peer envy can be effectively harnessed. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become nearly ubiquitous in modern society, from components of mobile applications to medical support systems, and everything in between. In societally impactful systems imbued with AI, there has been increasing concern related to opaque AI, that is, artificial intelligence where it is unclear how or why certain decisions are reached. This has led to a recent boom in research on “explainable AI” (XAI), or approaches to making AI more explainable and understandable to human users. In the (...) military domain, numerous bodies have argued that autonomous and AI-enabled weapon systems ought not incorporate unexplainable AI, with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United States Department of Defense both explicitly including explainability as a relevant factor in the development and use of such systems. In this article, I present a cautiously critical assessment of this view, arguing that explainability will be irrelevant for many current and near-future autonomous systems in the military (which do not incorporate any AI), that it will be trivially incorporated into most military systems which do possess AI (as these generally possess simpler AI systems), and that for those systems with genuinely opaque AI, explainability will prove to be of more limited value than one might imagine. In particular, I argue that explainability, while indeed a virtue in design, is a virtue aimed primarily at designers and troubleshooters of AI-enabled systems, but is far less relevant for users and handlers actually deploying these systems. I further argue that human–machine teaming is a far more important element of responsibly using AI for military purposes, adding that explainability may undermine efforts to improve human–machine teamings by creating aprima faciesense that the AI, due to its explainability, may be utilized with little (or less) potential for mistakes. I conclude by clarifying that the arguments are not against XAI in the military, but are instead intended as a caution against over-inflating the value of XAI in this domain, or ignoring the limitations and potential pitfalls of this approach. (shrink)

“Terrorism” is a polysemic, emotionally laden term. Belligerent groups could be labeled “terrorist” by some and “freedom” or “guerrilla” fighters by others. Similarly, the same organization or group could be labeled “terrorist” by some and “humanitarian organization” by others. Hence, depending on which perspective people take in a given conflict, and how the international community reacts to the conflict in question, members of different organizations or groups might end up being classified in a negative sense as terrorists or in a (...) positive sense as freedom fighters. Such perspectivism partly explains why so much disagreement exists on the meaning, justification, or excuse of terrorism. (shrink)

War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men;he makes some slaves, others free.—HeraclitusLanguages in the Crossfire is an impressive and well-documented book written by...

It will soon be sixty years since the publication of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation caused a flutter in the dovecote of Canadian politics with its unsettling account of the intellectual and cultural (as well as economic, political, and military) dependence of Canada and Canadians on their worldlier, wealthier, more numerous, and more confident southern cousins.

The principle of proportionality demands that a war (or action in war) achieve more goods than bads. In the philosophical literature there has been a wealth of work examining precisely which goods and bads may count toward this evaluation. However, in all of these discussions there is no mention of one of the most certain bads of war, namely the psychological harm(s) likely to be suffered by the combatants who ultimately must fight and kill for the purposes of winning in (...) conflict. This paper argues that harms to one’s own soldiers must be included in proportionality judgments, and goes on to argue that one of the most significant harms one’s soldiers face are the psychological stresses and traumas associated with combat. The arguments draw on a growing wealth of psychological literature exploring the connections between combatancy and psychological trauma, and highlight, in particular, the uniquely negative impact which killing has on a combatant’s mental well-being. The paper concludes that these factors place an almost certain and rather weighty negative weight in any proportionality calculations concerning wars with ground combatants who must fight “up close and personal”, and that for more remote warfighters, there is also evidence to show that they may suffer deep psychological harm as a result of their combat roles as well. The argument, however, does not attempt to demonstrate that these factors render war impermissible. Rather, it merely shows that these harms, or bads, which can be quite significant, must be factored into our considerations of proportionality. The arguments themselves are rather uncontroversial, but they bring to light an element in the moral calculus which is sadly overlooked in most discussions of the ethics of war. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Forschungsband möchte der kulturelle Bedeutung der Ersten Republik und deren Leistungen einen gebührenden Platz einräumen. Während sich nämlich Wiener Moderne und Weimarer Republik heute einer fortdauernden Aufmerksamkeit erfreuen, sind die Kultur der Ersten Republik und hier vorab des soziokulturellen Laboratoriums Wien – vermutlich schon in der Wahrnehmung vieler Zeitgenossinnen und Zeitgenossen unterbelichtet geblieben. Versammelt sind Beiträge zur Volksbildung im Roten Wien, zu Architektur und Stadtplanung, zu neuen Diskursen in der Psychoanalyse oder zur Neuorientierung Musils nach 1918, die später (...) zu seinem epochalen Roman »Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften« führen wird. Was ihn von anderen Publikationen unterscheidet, ist ein komparatistischer Aspekt, der etwa im Vergleich zwischen der Revolution 1918 in Wien und Österreich und der (kurzlebigen) Räterepublik in Ungarn aber auch in der Analyse der ungarischen Medien in der Zwischenkriegszeit zum Ausdruck kommt. Durch diese erhellenden Vergleiche fällt neues Licht auf die spezifische Besonderheit der Ersten Republik und der Situation im Roten Wien. (shrink)

Over 1000 companies have either curtailed or else completely ceased operations in Russia as a response to its invasion of Ukraine, a mass corporate exodus of a speed and scale which we’ve never seen. While corporate withdrawal appears to have considerable public support, it’s not obvious that it has done anything to hamper the Russian war effort, nor is it clear what the long-run effects of corporate withdrawal as a regularised response to war might be. Given this, it’s important the (...) evaluate the ethical merits of such a response. In this paper I critique what I take to be the two most common arguments given in favour of voluntary corporate withdrawal, which I label ‘the instrumental argument’ and ‘the clean hands argument’ respectively. After illustrating their shortcomings, I reframe corporations’ predicament as a ‘spattered hands’ case—one where they may do good by remaining in a war-waging state, but where they contribute indirectly to grave wrongdoing by doing so. Drawing on ideas from the ‘Business for Peace’ and ‘Business and Human Rights’ literature, I highlight the potentially positive role of corporate presence within war-waging countries, before highlighting four considerations which corporations ought to bear in mind when determining whether to withdraw, or whether it is the lesser evil to stay and to let their hands be spattered. (shrink)

A fundamental tension exists between Rawls's ideal Kantian conception of justice as fairness (JAF), which requires respecting people as ends, and his realistic non-Kantian consequentialist conception of a supreme emergency in a just war. By justifying the targeting of objectively innocent noncombatants during a supreme emergency exception, Rawls allows for treating them as means only. Hence, his appeal to a supreme emergency is insufficient to avoid this tension. First, since for him JAF is ideal but also practical, one might argue (...) that his fictional people in the original position must reflect on the justification for using force on behalf of JAF. And second, since Rawls justifies targeting objectively innocent people during a supreme emergency exemption, he justifies what one might conceive of as emergency terrorism. Emergency terrorism, however, treats people as means only. Therefore, Rawls's Kantian conception of JAF is in tension with his consequentialist justification of a supreme emergency in a just war and hence with emergency terrorism. (shrink)

Authority is an important feature of military life. Political and military superiors claim the power to give binding orders to their subordinates. If they have the authority they claim (and that many citizens and soldiers take them to possess), then the subordinates are morally required to do as commanded. Tadros’ To Do, To Die, To Reason Why challenges the authority claims that political and military superiors make in giving orders: the kinds of considerations ordinarily thought to underpin their authority – (...) in particular, the instrumental benefits of authoritative decision-making in politics and military life – cannot justify it. Tadros’ claim is not that subordinates are never required to do what their superiors order. Trivially, superiors may order subordinates to do what they are anyway required to do. (The captain orders the privates not to kill the prisoners.) Less trivially, superiors’ orders may change the subordinates’ factual or epistemic circumstances, which results in their having duties that they would otherwise have lacked. (The captain orders a private to jump into the sea. His order startles a child on the shore so it loses its balance and plunges into the water. The private may now have a duty to jump in to save the child, and he may have that duty because the superior gave the order.) Yet this way of changing the subordinates’ duties is not, for Tadros, a genuine exercise of authority: authority brings about normative change directly, rather than by changing the subordinate’s factual or epistemic circumstances. It is authority so understood that, according to Tadros, military and political superiors claim and yet lack. Tadros offers two complementary arguments for this anarchist conclusion. First, he argues that superiors have practical authority over subordinates only if the subordinates have duties to obey (or follow) the superiors’ orders, rather than merely to conform with them (by doing something which happens to be what they were ordered to do). There must be a suitable link between order and action. But, Tadros argues, soldiers don’t have a duty to obey their superiors’ orders. (Call this the Obedience Claim.) So military superiors lack practical authority vis-à-vis their subordinates. (Call this the Authority Claim.) Second, Tadros argues that authority is either unjustified or otiose. Exercises of practical authority, by imposing duties, restrict their subjects’ freedom. Moral duties are difficult to justify precisely because they are freedom-restricting in this way; and only certain kinds of considerations suffice to make an action morally obligatory. Tadros argues that there are sufficient reasons for a superior to have and exercise the power to make ving morally obligatory by issuing a directive only if there are already sufficient reasons for ving being independently morally obligatory. (We call this the No Duty, No Authority Claim.) We challenge both arguments. Sections 2 and 3 show that, even if the Obedience Claim is true, it does not entail the Authority Claim. Section 4 casts doubt on the No Duty, No Authority Claim. (shrink)

One of the most catastrophic human tragedies is represented by the recent civil war in Syria (2011–present), which reduced that country to rubble and led to at least 500,000 people killed, 6.7 mill...

Fanny Bré was a volunteer nurse in the International Brigades, who fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) on the side of the democratically elected Republican government. The objective of this study is to understand the relationship between Bré's antifascist ideas, her conception of care and the activities she carried out in the Spanish hospitals of Casa Roja (Murcia), Villa Paz (Selices, Cuenca) and Vic (Barcelona). We use narrative biography to describe Bré's personal, political and professional trajectory. To do so, (...) we conducted a content analysis of primary sources archived in Spain, Russia and France and secondary sources that emerged from a thorough literature review. We identified three thematic axes: (1) a concept of nursing in the service of the antifascist struggle, (2) nursing activity for high‐quality care and (3) political action for improving hospital organisation and care. The interest of Bré's texts transcends the war in Spain because, in them, Bré questions the neutrality of care by revealing that care can itself be a political act. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt is the most important anti-liberal political theorist of the European interwar period (1918-1939). His theories on the state of exception, dictatorship, and his criticism of parliamentary democracy are very well known. However, what remains unknown to this day is how his ideas had a remarkable influence on the ideologues of the Francoist state between 1939 and 1942. During these years, a debate developed among Francoist jurists about whether Francisco Franco was a “sovereign dictator,” that is, a dictator legitimized (...) by popular consent, or rather a new kind of “monarch” that emerged in the context of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This paper aims to explain how two ideological factions formed in Francoist Spain. The “Decisionist Francoism” of Juan Beneyto Pérez, Francisco Elías de Tejada, and Luis Legaz Lacambra held that Franco emerged as a reaction to the process of “legalization” triggered by liberalism in Spain. The “Weberian Francoism” of Francisco Javier Conde held that Franco was a charismatic and traditional leader whose position emerged in response to the Civil War. I explain how three concepts of Schmitt's anti-iberalism inspired Francoist theorists: political theology, dictatorship, and the rejection of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

In 2020, our research collective facilitated a photovoice project titled “Picturing Our Realities: Arts-based Reflections with Central American Youth in Canada,” which brought together young, second-generation, and one-and-a-half-generation (born in another country and moved at a young age) Central American identifying people in Toronto to talk about their experiences growing up as children of immigrants. This photovoice project reveals the ways the civil war and migration process is a haunting presence in the lives of second and 1.5 generation Central American (...) Canadians as they grow up and carve their paths as adults. We can see how unresolved social conflict emerges and shapes family memory, sense of self, understandings of community, and means of engaging in community activism and community work. We argue that this act of remembering and paying homage to previous generations is a means of confronting and resisting past injustices and forming ways of healing from the afterlives of violence. This recognition of the afterlives of mass violence, and the calls of action that this recognition entails, may form a powerful catalyst for community organizing and creating community spaces to respond to historical hauntings and structural violence. (shrink)

Dans un monde dominé par les conflits, il arrive qu’il faille se défendre. L’invention des armes a évolué en parallèle avec le savoir technique, puis scientifique, et il est même arrivé que la recherche d’applications militaires ait joué un rôle moteur dans la découverte scientifique. Lorsque les armes ne servent pas à attaquer d’autres nations, leur fabrication et leur commerce se justifient morale- ment. Il faut cependant qu’elles ne puissent échapper à ceux qui les construisent et doivent en contrôler la (...) diffusion. Facilement mise en œuvre, la guerre utilisant des organismes vivants ou ce qu’ils pro- duisent comme armes est très ancienne. Or l’originalité des êtres vivants est qu’ils se multiplient, qu’un seul individu suffit à recouvrir la Terre de ses descendants. La biologie ne se prête jamais à un usage militaire moralement défendable parce que le confinement au champ de bataille est impossible. De ce fait, les applications de la biologie ont été vite écartées du domaine de la Défense permise par les traités internationaux. La Convention de 1972 sur l’Interdiction des Armes Biologiques et à Toxines (CIABT), entrée en vigueur en 1975, est aujourd’hui signée par 183 pays (ratifiée par 175) sur un total de 193, sans compter Taïwan qui l’a ratifiée mais n’est pas reconnu par l’ONU. Elle interdit la mise au point, la fabrication, l’acquisition, le transfert, la conservation, le stockage et l’utilisation des armes bio- logiques et à toxines. Elle constitue un élément essentiel de la lutte contre la prolifération des armes de destruction massive. (shrink)