Justifying War in Post–Cold War Conflicts

Justifications for war-making are a useful site to examine perceptions of legitimate political authority in particular historical contexts. Post–Cold War era political scholarship has extensively focused on the growing involvement of non-state actors in warfare, leading to assertions that a just-war revival is occurring through which the humanitarian justifications which were characteristic of pre-modern warfare are replacing modern era justifications that are rooted in the political authority of the sovereign state. The implication is that the concept of state sovereignty as the basis of international political authority is waning in the face of non-state challengers. I analyze justification frameworks used by political and military leaders in the weeks surrounding the initiation of nine conflicts from 1990 to 2008. The data do not support the claim that states are eschewing conventional state-interest arguments in favor of the greater flexibility of humanitarian arguments, or that non-state actors are more likely to use humanitarian justifications because the established state sovereignty frames are not open to them. Rather, the data indicate that state-interest frames are the predominant frame employed by both state and non-state actors, and that state actors are more likely than non-state actors to intertwine sovereign- and humanitarian-based justifications. These findings suggest that the just-war revival asserted by some scholars has been overstated and that further empirical analysis is needed.