The use of private military companies (PMCs) has become increasingly prevalent, with such firms as Blackwater, MPRI, and DynCorp taking over a growing number of roles traditionally performed by the regular military. This article uses the framework of just war theory (JWT) to consider the central normative issues raised by this privatization of military force. In particular, I first examine the claim that private contractors are inappropriate actors to wage war because they contravene the JWT principle of right intention. The next section asserts that the use of PMCs is largely consistent with the application of the principle of legitimate authority but undermines two of its central rationales. In the third section, I apply the jus in bello principle of discrimination to PMC personnel. Overall, I argue that JWT needs to be updated and extended to respond to the issues raised by the privatization of military force.

Legal debates about humanitarian intervention—military intervention by one or more states to curb gross human rights violations occurring in another state—tend to assume that its legitimacy is irrelevant to its legality. Debates among philosophers and political theorists often assume the inverse, that the legality of humanitarian intervention is irrelevant to its legitimacy. This paper defends an alternative account, one that sees the legality and legitimacy of humanitarian intervention as intertwined. This account emerges from a conception of international law as a legal domain that structures global politics by treating sovereignty as a legal entitlement that it distributes among the multitude of legal actors that it recognizes as states. Drawing on a long standing debate among domestic legal theorists about the rule of law, it first identifies formal constraints on the UN Security Council‘s discretion to authorize the use of force to end human rights violations. Developing a distributive conception of international human rights, it then identifies substantive considerations that shed further light on the legality of intervention. It suggests that members of the Security Council must give reasons when exercising their discretion to authorize the use of force and that some reasons might divest a member's vote of legal validity.

This article considers the question of what legal rights should be possessed by those who reside and work in a democratic state without the legal authorization of the state, given the background assumption that the state is morally entitled to exclude such migrants. I argue that irregular migrants are morally entitled to a wide range of legal rights, including basic human and civil rights, but also rights to wages, workplace protections, and even rights to public education for their children. In order for these rights to be realized in practice, I argue, states ought to create a firewall between those charged with protecting and enforcing these rights and those charged with enforcing immigration laws.

Human rights and global democracy are widely assumed to be compatible, but the conceptual and practical connection between them has received little attention. As a result, the relationship is under-theorized, and important potential conflicts between them have been neglected or overlooked. This essay attempts to fill this gap by addressing directly the conceptual relationship between human rights and global democracy. It argues that human rights are a necessary condition for global democracy. Human rights constrain power, enable meaningful political agency, and support and promote democratic regimes within states, all of which are fundamental elements in any scheme for global democracy. The essay explores the normative and conceptual bases of these functions and works out some of their institutional implications.

This article examines three arguments according to which the Iraq war has been justified: preemptive or preventive self-defense, law enforcement, and humanitarian rescue. It concludes that for empirical and moral reasons, the Iraq war lacks a just cause. In the course of making that judgment, the article explores moral and practical implications of a preventive war policy. It also examines efforts to invoke one justification—rescue—retrospectively to justify the war. The article claims that such ex post justifications confuse the meaning of intention and, wittingly or unwittingly, allow leaders to authorize a resort to force in bad faith. Retrospective justifications also fail to understand that different burdens are attached to ad bellum rationales. That claim is premised on the idea that self-defensive wars join duty and interest in ways that wars of rescue do not. To assume that arguments can shift from self-defense to rescue, without recognizing that these entail different kinds of sacrifice, is to discount the respect due to those whose sacrifice is required. If altruistic policies are expected to be carried out by soldiers, stronger reasons than self-defensive purposes are necessary to justify the risks, reasons that avoid the allegation of leading in bad faith.