Terminating Wars and Establishing Global Governance

Abstract

When we think of recent armed conflicts, such as those in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia or Rwanda, we realize that one profound difficulty shared by them was how they ended. The process of war termination—of resolving successfully serious outbreaks of armed conflict between national groups—is fraught with fragility and complexity, featuring often competing claims of security and justice.Only recently have we begun to understand how crucial the issue of war termination is, with regard not only to bringing particular conflicts to an end but also to mitigating further devastations in the future. Whereas past attention focused obsessively on the beginning of war, and/or on proper conduct during wartime, it is becoming clear that the ending of war deserves equal time with regard to critical analysis, historical application and the creative construction of proposals for amelioration. There are only a handful of works on this important and topical, yet neglected, issue.This article proposes to contribute to the sparse literature by constructing a theory of war termination. The article will offer reasonable responses to questions of what constitutes justice, security and legality in the aftermath of war. The inquiry will proceed first by examining the status quo with regard to war termination, undertaking an examination of its few strengths and many weaknesses. Then, the account will fashion a more satisfactory set of laws to regulate state conduct during the immediate aftermath of a particular war. These universal and abstract norms, once constructed, will be applied to a recent and concrete case, namely, that of the lengthy termination process of the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The theory will next shift its attention away from short-term principles, regulating the endings of particular wars, towards those longer-term rules and institutional reforms required to transform the international system itself into one in which the incidence and destructiveness of war will be diminished. Before concluding, attention will be paid to defeating doubts about the laws forwarded as a plausible theory about securing justice and peace when wars end.