I have recently decided to focus my post-graduate studies and research around the theme of  legitimate force and the force of legitimacy in the global arena, under the title “Warrant for War”.

The “Warrant for War” research project is an essentially interdisciplinary enterprise, crossing the boundaries of various fields of study, such as political theory, strategic studies, constitutional and international law, history, sociology, international relations, philosophy and even physics. It has developed out of my eclectic readings on these topics and my attempts to find linkages, similarities, and synergies between and across them.

I have set up a blog Warrant for War Blog and Warrant for War Wiki, which will hopefully assist me in my work by building up, over time, a community of interest around this topic. Anyone is more than welcome to visi, join, and contribute to these sites.

Lone Civilian and Tanks - Beijing, China 1989

“Warrant for War” hypothesizes that the emergence of a proactive, dynamic global civil society as an essentially democratic, participative grassroots network of movements, opinions and interests has become a critical factor both enabling and constraining developing legal rights of universal jurisdiction, use of emergency powers to apply military force in protecting communities at risk across national borders, and the manner in which such force is deployed and employed. This sui generis process of developing a global legitimacy requirement “from below” represents a key factor in the emergence of a global cosmopolitan citizenship heralding not the birth of a hierarchical, centralized “world state” based on the traditional European state-building model, but rather of a post-Westphalian multi-level world order where particular levels of governance will accommodate various state and non-state, territorial and non-territorial actors as well as various forms of grassroots, individual participation.

The “right of participation” of these various actors in the process of public opinion-formation and actual decision-making regarding the use of force across borders, the reasons why and the manner in which such force is deployed and wielded, and the specific actors who can legitimately exercise such powers in various circumstances will profoundly affect not only the shape and structure of a new international juridico-political order, but also the nature of the actors which will constitute this order. These trends and processes are by no means inevitable; rather, they are contingent upon the ability of today’s liberal democracies to create a “pole of attraction” possessing a critical mass sufficiently resilient in space and time to allow the progressive transformation of illiberal, totalitarian regimes and their integration in the emergent post-Westphalian international order by means of a variety of political, economic, military and ideological networks of governance expanding across their borders and their progressive transformation both from “inside” and “outside”.

Managing the transition between the current, state-centric international system structured around the key principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention tending towards a multi-polar, global balance of power system based on realist notions of interaction between territorially-defined, sovereign nation-states, and a post-Westphalian international order defined by a universal jurisdiction, cosmopolitan citizenship, and legitimate processes of multi-level governance providing effective rights of participation to various state and non-state actors will constitute the central strategic challenge of the Twenty-First Century.

This presupposes the conceptualization of more sophisticated and dynamic strategic theories than either those of a multi-polar balance of power combining both liberal democratic and illiberal totalitarian states, each pursuing their national interest in an essentially anarchic international environment, and those of a “League of Democracies” counter-posed to a set of illiberal totalitarian states in a new ideological “Cold War”. Such a transition will exhibit three simultaneous, interactive, and dynamic processes of “global social capital building” : a “bonding” process deepening the integration of liberal democracies and accelerating their transition from a Westphalian to a post-Westphalian system of governance; a “bridging” process providing illiberal totalitarian states with a voice (but not a vote) in the development of the new international order, thus endowing them with increasingly high stakes in its success and attracting them to gradually move towards this new order; and a set of “evolutionary”, national processes at work within each totalitarian state generating internal legitimacy and direction to the progressive integration of illiberal totalitarian states in the emerging system of global governance.

An evolving NATO, a revitalized G-8 and a possible NAFTA-EU Free Trade Area could provide the initial institutional military, political and economic frameworks allowing the development of such “bonding” processes of global social capital formation between liberal democracies, whilst the UN and its specialized agencies, the WTO, IMF and the World Bank could provide settings for the creation of the “bridging” processes mentioned above. Together, these three processes would lead to the progressive consolidation of today’s emergent global civil society and cosmopolitan citizenship as part of an expanding, increasingly global post-Westphalian system of governance where emergency powers of intervention and use of force for protection purposes in a universal jurisdiction will be democratically legitimated, enabled and constrained.