I’ve been writing lately about war. Bas van der Vossen and I have a volume upcoming at Oxford University Press entitled Debating Humanitarian Intervention. Today I published a post over at the Stockholm Center for the Ethics of War and Peace summarizing my views on the relationship between intervention and revolution, presented in Chapter 3 of the book. Here’s the link. An excerpt:

It is widely held that violent revolution can be justified to end tyranny. It is equally widely held that foreign intervention is not justified to end tyranny. Intervention is justified, if at all, in a much narrower range of cases – perhaps to halt massacre or genocide, but not to end ‘ordinary’ oppression. On this view, state oppression may be sufficient to furnish internal revolutionaries with a just cause for violence, but simultaneously insufficient to generate a just cause for outside parties to do the same. Can this difference be justified? … I answer in the negative: the just cause for humanitarian intervention is exactly the same as the just cause for revolution, and both are subject to the same principles of proportionality (call this the equivalence thesis.) On my view, there may be cases in which intervention is impermissible while revolution is permissible, but this is simply because, for contingent reasons, the intervention will be disproportionate while the revolution will not. Their differential moral status does not depend on a difference between their respective just causes.