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Digital Peacekeepers, Drone Surveillance And Information Fusion: A Philosophical Analysis Of New Peacekeeping, Lisa Portmess, Bassam Romaya Dec 2015

Digital Peacekeepers, Drone Surveillance And Information Fusion: A Philosophical Analysis Of New Peacekeeping, Lisa Portmess, Bassam Romaya

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In June 2014 an Expert Panel on Technology and Innovation in UN Peacekeeping was commissioned to examine how technology and innovation could strengthen peacekeeping missions. The panel's report argues for wider deployment of advanced technologies, including greater use of ground and airborne sensors and other technical sources of data, advanced data analytics and information fusion to assist in data integration. This article explores the emerging intelligence-led, informationist conception of UN peacekeeping against the backdrop of increasingly complex peacekeeping mandates and precarious security conditions. New peacekeeping with its heightened commitment to information as a political resource and the endorsement of offensive …


The Principle Of Fairness And States’ Duty To Obey International Law, David Lefkowitz Jul 2011

The Principle Of Fairness And States’ Duty To Obey International Law, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Philosophers and political theorists have developed a number of different justifications for the duty to obey domestic law. The possibility of using one (or more) of these justifications to demonstrate that states have a duty to obey international law seems a natural starting point for an analysis of international political obligation. Amongst the accounts of the duty to obey domestic law, one that appears to have a great deal of intuitive appeal, and that has attracted a significant number of philosophical defenders, is the principle of fairness (or fair play). In this paper, I examine the possibility of using the …


The Sources Of International Law: Some Philosophical Reflections, David Lefkowitz Jan 2010

The Sources Of International Law: Some Philosophical Reflections, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

It seems only natural to begin the study of international law with a description of its sources. After all, whether as practitioner or scholar a person cannot begin to ask or answer questions about international law until he or she has some sense of what the law is. This requires in turn a basic grasp of the processes whereby international legal norms and regimes come to exist. Thus students of international law must engage immediately with some of the most basic questions in the philosophy of law: what is law, and what is a legal order or system.

These questions …


(Dis)Solving The Chronological Paradox In Customary International Law: A Hartian Approach, David Lefkowitz Jan 2008

(Dis)Solving The Chronological Paradox In Customary International Law: A Hartian Approach, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As traditionally conceived, the creation of a new rule of customary international law requires that states believe the law to already require the conduct specified in the rule. Distinguishing the process whereby a customary rule comes to exist from the process whereby that customary rule becomes law dissolves this chronological paradox. Creation of a customary rule requires only that states come to believe that there exists a normative standard to which they ought to adhere, not that this standard is law. What makes the customary rule law is adherence by officials in the international legal system to a rule of …


On Moral Arguments Against A Legal Right To Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention, David Lefkowitz Apr 2006

On Moral Arguments Against A Legal Right To Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As the international response to recent events in Darfur demonstrates, the restriction of authority to intervene to the United Nations poses the greater legal barrier to intervention. From a practical perspective, then, the more pressing question may be whether international law ought to be modified to permit states, or multi-state organizations, to carry out unilateral humanitarian interventions; that is, interventions that are not authorized by the United Nations. The issue here is essentially a moral one: would the incorporation of a right to unilateral humanitarian intervention entail a moral improvement to international law – for example, a decrease in the …