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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Barack Obama As Just War Theorist: The Libyan Intervention, Harry Van Der Linden
Barack Obama As Just War Theorist: The Libyan Intervention, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
President Barack Obama has clearly placed himself in the just war tradition, and so we may ask how successful has President Obama in fact been as just war theorist? His justification of the recent NATO intervention in Libya shows that the record is at best mixed. More broadly, Obama’s failure as just war theorist is at least partly a failure of the theory itself: as long as this theory does not address issues of “just military preparedness,” it will fail to place real constraints on American resort to military force.
On The Violence Of Systemic Violence: A Critique Of Slavoj Žižek, Harry Van Der Linden
On The Violence Of Systemic Violence: A Critique Of Slavoj Žižek, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This paper questions the extension of the common notion of violence, i.e., “subjective violence,” involving the intentional use of force to inflict injury or damage, towards social injustice as “systemic violence.” Systemic violence is altogether unlike subjective violence and the work of Slavoj Žižek illustrates that conceptual obfuscation in this regard may lead to an overly broad and facile justification of revolutionary violence as counter-violence to systemic violence, appealing to the ethics of self-defense. I argue that revolutionary violence is only justified to counter subjective violence inflicted or organized by the state. Thus I reject in conclusion Žižek’s further defense …