The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture, and the Law of War
Cambridge University Press, 3/9/2009
EAN 9780521730143, ISBN10: 0521730147
Paperback, 676 pages, 22.6 x 15 x 3.3 cm
Language: English
Why should America restrain itself in detaining, interrogating, and targeting terrorists when they show it no similar forbearance? Is it fair to expect one side to fight by more stringent rules than the other, placing itself at disadvantage? Is the disadvantaged side then permitted to use the tactics and strategies of its opponent? If so, then America's most controversial counterterrorism practices are justified as commensurate responses to indiscriminate terror. Yet different ethical standards prove entirely fitting, the author finds, in a conflict between a network of suicidal terrorists seeking mass atrocity at any cost and a constitutional democracy committed to respecting human dignity and the rule of law. The most important reciprocity involves neither uniform application of fair rules nor their enforcement by a simple-minded tit-for-tat. Real reciprocity instead entails contributing to an emergent global contract that encompasses the law of war and from which all peoples may mutually benefit.
Introduction
Part I. Reciprocity in Humanitarian Law
1. Reciprocity in the law of war
ambient sightings, ambivalent soundings
2. Reciprocity in humanitarian law
acceptance and repudiation
3. Humanitarian vs. human rights law
the coming clash
Part II. The Ethics of Torture as Reciprocity
4. Is torture uniquely degrading? The unpersuasive answer of liberal jurisprudence
5. Fairness in terrorist war (1)
Rawlsian reciprocity
6. Fairness in terrorist war (2)
Kantian reciprocity
7. Humanitarian law as corrective justice
do targeted killing and torture 'correct' for terror?
Part III. Reciprocity in the Social Science of War
8. Reciprocity as civilization
the terrorist as savage
9. The inflationary rhetoric of terrorist threat
humanitarian law as deflationary check
10. Reciprocity as tit-for-tat
rational retaliation in modern war
11. The 'gift' of humanitarianism
soft power and benevolent signaling
Part IV. The End of Reciprocity
12. Sources of national restraint in martial honor
the JAGs' intercession
13. Sources of anti-reciprocity in national self-respect and transnational identity
Conclusion.