Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T23:06:33.198Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Best Defense?: Legitimacy & Preventive Force. By Abraham D. Sofaer. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2010. Pp. xiii, 214. Index. $29.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2017

Elizabeth Wilmshurst
Elizabeth Wilmshurst*
Affiliation:
Chatham House
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Recent Books on International Law
Information
American Journal of International Law , Volume 105 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 390 - 394
Copyright
Copyright ©by the American Society of International Law,2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 In giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry in London in November 2009, Greenstock noted: “I regarded our invasion of Iraq—our participation in the military action against Iraq in March 2003—as legal but of questionable legitimacy, in that it didn’t have the democratically observable backing of a great majority of member states, or even perhaps of a majority of people inside the UK. So there was a failure to establish legitimacy, although I think we successfully established legality in the Security Council in the United Nations . . . .” His view of the law was not, of course, widely shared in the United Kingdom.

2 A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, UN Doc. A/59/565 (2004), available at http://www.un.org/secureworld.

3 Id., para. 204 (emphasis added).

4 Id., para. 190.

5 Id., paras. 204, 205.

6 Reference must of course be made here to Thomas Franck’s The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations with its essentially procedural criteria of determinacy, symbolic validation, coherence, and adherence to a system of validating rules. For a discussion of European constitutionalist views, see, for example, Manias Kumm, The Legitimacy of International Law: A Constitutionalist Framework of Analysis, 15 Eur. J. Int’l L. 907 (2004).

7 The draft report was discussed at meetings in the United States, Italy, and Japan, with further consultations with some Latin American and African practitioners and scholars.

8 In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, Report of the Secretary- General, UN Doc. A/59/2005 (2005), available at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/ N05/270/78/PDF/N0527078.pdf.

9 Richard, Falk, Legality and Legitimacy: The Quest for Principled Flexibility and Restraint, 31 Rev. Int’l Stud. 33, 50 (Supp. 2005). That volume, as a whole, is devoted to a useful discussion of force and legitimacy.Google Scholar