ABSTRACT
In the late 1960s and the first few years of the 1970s, it was widely held in the Western world that the role of force in international relations had gone into decline. The power which the Arab oil producers had demonstrated in the 1973 crisis was, after all, not military power, and the impotence of the Western countries when confronted with it was taken to be one more sign of the ineffectiveness of military force in enabling them to obtain their objectives. The doctrine of a right to conduct ‘Just wars of national liberation’ is sometimes presented as a special case of the right of self-defence - the extension of this right from states to nations that are not yet states - and sometimes as a right distinct in itself. During the 1970s, there have been many instances of resort to force that have resulted in a change of territorial boundaries that seems likely to be permanent. .
