ABSTRACT
Thousands of children die each day of mostly resolvable poverty-related causes. Millions of displaced persons live on contested borders and in refugee camps – for many of these people, such camps are the only ‘home’ they have known. In other parts of the world, the ‘camps’ resemble another form of lost freedom, where multinational corporations (MNCs) provide employment at rock-bottom wage rates, complete with mandatory and highly restrictive accommodation systems and private militias for security. Within the Global South, the so-called ‘failing states’ have lost all but notional sovereignty over their populations and territory. In addition, the twenty-first century has witnessed the return to prominence of religion on the international stage (Carlson and Owens 2003; Norris and Inglehart 2004; Petito and Hatzopolous 2003). Religion was, of course, a significant factor in the creation of the modern international system (Philpott 2001). The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was in large part a response to wars that were caused by religious difference, and the Westphalian resolution subsequently subordinated religion to reason of state as a legitimate justification for war. The 9/11 and subsequent events have signaled a need to again engage with the question of religious violence in the international system. The religious fundamentalism that motivates and supports contemporary terrorism has complex roots. It has been argued that this particular clash, often billed as a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the West and Islam, will form the ideological structures that will shape International Relations (IR) for the foreseeable future (Huntington 1997). Religious terrorism is condemned as a violation of the human rights of those who are
terrorized. But, in one of the ironies of political life, some of the measures that have been put in place in and between states since the 11 September 2001 attacks have also demonstrated a lack of regard for human rights – the human rights of regular law-abiding citizens, along with those of people either suspected of or shown to have been involved with terrorism. In the name of security, civil liberties have been forgone, fundamental political principles have been overturned, and egregious breaches of protocol have been sustained. Both in the pursuit of terror suspects and in the provision of new regulative and legislative frameworks for security within and between states, governments have undermined many of the principles that – by virtue of being nonarbitrary and accountable regulators of the exercise of power in the pursuit of justice – set orderly government apart from the behavior of terrorists. The ‘war on terror’ falls into incoherence and internal contradiction if it is initiated and waged on any other basis than respect for human rights. This observation takes us back to one of the most influential traditions of thought-about war within the field of IR, the just war tradition (Walzer 2000, 2004). For a war to be just, two sets of criteria
must be met: those that deal with the justice of the initiation of a war; and those which deal with the justice of the prosecution of the war. On this basis, the war against terror will not be a just war if it is waged in a manner that undermines the rights of those whom it seeks to protect or, of those whom it seeks to protect us against (Bellamy 2005).
