Preventive wars of aggression: The new definition of preventive “self-defense” and the normalization of perpetual military violence

• In Event: Atrocity Crimes: Types of Offending (ECACTJ)

Abstract

This paper explores the redefinition of preventive war in the 21st Century. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part explores how successive US administrations – from the Bush to the Trump administration – embraced a new definition of the concept of imminent threat and, consequently, introduced a new doctrine of preventive national self-defense. In this part, I show how the US redefined imminent threat by excluding two of its key traditional components – that is, the immediacy and certainty of the threat. The second part examines which states, both US allies (e.g., the U.K., Israel, Australia, Canada, India, Turkey) and non-allies (e.g., Russia), adopted a similar doctrine of preventive self-defense. This part provides an overview of the political discourse (e.g., statements made by political leaders, policy papers) and state practice to determine which states adopted the new preventive war doctrine. The final part examines how the redefinition of preventive self-defense relaxed the rules for the use of armed force (e.g., lower threshold for launching military operations, broader temporal and geographical scope of war) and thus contributed to creating the conditions for perpetual war.

Author

• Vasja Badalič, Institute of Criminology