How to Look Good in a War: Justifying and Challenging State Violence by Brian Rappert

Author:Brian Rappert [Rappert, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, Political Freedom, General, Human Rights
ISBN: 9780745331799
Google: t_olLgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 15792822
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2012-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

The onus of proof will be critical to the meaning and relevance of these and other criteria. At the time of writing, the Arms Trade Treaty does not provide guidance about how assessment of risk should be conducted, merely that states should undertake them against the criteria specified. But it matters enormously in relation to transfers of concern, for example, whether a positive case has to be made by governments that a certain export is likely to be used inappropriately in the future or whether past experience demonstrated by others can justify an initial presumption of risk unless reasons can be given otherwise.

The burden of proof is not just a factor within formal international treaties. Instead it is a pervasive feature of debates about what is right or wrong, legitimate and illegitimate, permissible and impermissible. So in the disputes about Iraqi civilians killed, the UK government did not regard itself as having to make a case for how many people died, or even a case for why it was not possible to make estimates. Instead, it responded to others’ figures by (on certain occasions) pointing to the disparity between calculations based on different methodologies gauging different types of deaths (though not acknowledging this) in order to contend that ‘reliable’ estimates could not be produced.

Finding ways of reversing the onus of proof can be a powerful move in reducing the harms of state violence and the opacity of statecraft. Within environmental movements, this has been one of the elements often associated with ‘precautionary approaches’ to risk.30 But reversing the onus is in itself only an initial orientation to arguments. It does not settle what counts as credible evidence, what needs to be proven in the first place, or what to do in the absence of necessary information. Perhaps more profoundly is the matter of the harm needed to justify a rethink. The CCM may have operated with the starting assumption that the retention of any cluster munitions needed to be argued for, but this was only done after decades of death and injury.

Other possible dangers can be identified. Many of the ‘pre-emptive’ national security policies adopted in the US after 9/11 were justified through much of the same logic used by those advocating precautionary approaches to environmental policies.31 Among other things, the Bush Administration contended that Iraq had to prove it no longer posed a WMD threat in order to avoid intervention.

Still another danger is that the heightened scrutiny given by reversing the onus for one set of issues may cast disproportionate attention on a narrow set of humanitarian concerns. For instance, to start with a presumption that certain weapons are ‘indiscriminate’ until proven otherwise could result in other options being used that are just as worrisome. To acknowledge this is not to endorse the hypothetical and empty hand-waving of officials detailed in Chapter 3. Rather, it is to recognize the need for careful consideration that attempts to ‘humanize’ certain aspects of conflict might unintentionally legitimate other forms of violence.32 They may also undermine efforts to work towards the elimination of war.

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