Protecting Individual Rights Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars Quoting John Westlake: “The duties and rights of states are nothing more than the duties and rights of the men who compose them” (53). Sovereignty is “merely an expression” of the values of “individual life and communal liberty” (108). Autonomous political communities are the arenas in which rights and liberties are won, or not.

Protecting Individual Rights Altman & Wellman, A Liberal Theory of International Justice Human rights: “individual moral rights to the protections generally needed against the standard and direct threats to leading a minimally decent human life in modern society” (3). “…a state has earned legitimacy if it is willing and able (a) to protect its own members against ‘substantial and recurrent threats’ to a decent human life – threats such as the arbitrary deprivation of life or liberty, and the infliction of torture – and (b) to refrain from imposing such threats on outsiders” (4).

Protecting Individual Rights Walzer’s answers (1) No one is safe (from anything!) in a world with intervention: Within existing state boundaries “men and women (let us assume) are safe from attack; once the lines are crossed, safety is gone” (57). (2) Outsiders are just bad at effectively promoting the protection of human rights Intervention might not be effective, and interveners usually have mixed motives at best.

Protecting Individual Rights Responses to Walzer On (1): (a) A & W’s proposal is that military intervention might be justified when (and only when) people’s basic human rights (arts. 3-20, 25-6 of the UDHR, a subset of those already recognized in international law) are violated. (b) Military intervention isn’t always destructive (the no-fly zone and safe haven in Iraq after the Gulf War, Haiti)

Protecting Individual Rights Responses to Walzer On (2): (a) A & W say we should take effectiveness into account (Haiti). (b) Morally imperfect actors don’t necessitate inaction (domestic politics, Bangladesh). (c) States have a tendency to oppress their own citizens, too.

Collective Self-Determination Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars “The moral standing of any particular state depends upon the reality of the common life it protects and the extent to which the sacrifices required by that protection are willingly accepted and thought worthwhile” (54, emphasis added) “When states are attacked, it is is their members who are challenged, not only in their lives, but also in the sum of things they value most, including the political association they have made” (53, emphasis added).

Collective Self-Determination Altman & Wellman, A Liberal Theory of International Justice Walzer’s claim that it’s better to suffer at the hands of compatriots is misguided: “The suffocation of self‐determination by a local tyrant rather than by an external state is still an affront to a people's right of self‐determination. Their right to become free by their own efforts is a claim–right against anyone coercively interfering in their efforts to create a legitimate state.…if political self‐determination is as valuable as Walzer insists, then it is difficult to see the moral logic in his view” (A & W, 24).

Collective Self-Determination Walzer’s answers (1) Millian argument: self-determination can only be achieved through local political struggle with no outside help. (2) Again, outsiders will likely be ineffective due to complicating factors, like bad motives.

Collective Self-Determination Responding to Walzer On (1): Mill and Walzer oversimplify the determinants of political change. That one’s activism is rendered ineffective by a “bloody repression” is no signal that she is insufficiently committed to justice. On (2): Again, that they might be misused is no argument against the veracity of A & W’s principles.

Final Points • Non-military intervention (sanctions, aid and loan conditionality, prerequisites for membership in international organizations, diplomatic pressure, public criticism, supporting one or another political faction in another state, NGO work, transnational activism, etc.) • Non-intervention as position-taking