Avery Plaw

Since June 2004 the Central Intelligence Agency is widely reported to have carried out around 300 covert drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan which have killed more than 2000 people including some civilians. Critics have charged that the strikes have resulted in elevated and even disproportionate numbers of civilian deaths. Senior US officials, by contrast, have claimed that civilian casualties have been low. This chapter explores the proportionality of the civilian casualties of drone strikes, drawing on the four most rigorous and transparent databases tracking their impact. It shows that the best available empirical evidence suggests that drones strikes have resulted in a comparatively moderate to low rate of civilian casualties and that their accuracy has significantly improved over the last two years. While this does not entail that all US operations have complied with the requirement of proportionality, it does suggest that violations have not been very widespread or systematic.

Should states be permitted to use drones to kill terrorists hiding in foreign territory even when these pose a heightened danger to civilians relative to other types of operations? This chapter presents an exchange of views on this question. It focuses on the principle of distinction, a central pillar of both the law of armed conflict and just war theory, and how it should apply to drone strikes. This chapter stresses that drones are new weapons which demand revised rules, and argues that the principle of distinction should permit their use even in some cases where they pose a higher threat to local civilians than alternatives. It then argues that this would involve a dangerous weakening of the principle of distinction, and that it is preferable that it apply to drones in traditional fashion, requiring states to employ other types of operations when they are less threatening to local civilians.

This dissertation argues that Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls can be seen as seminal contributors to two quite distinct revivals of political theory in the latter half of the twentieth century. It suggests that coming to grips with the different underlying character of these revivals and writers is important to understanding political theory and liberalism today. However, while the importance Berlin's of Berlin's work is increasingly recognized, there remain puzzling controversies concerning its overall character and import and in particular concerning its relationship to the dominant forms of American political thought, and Rawls' work in particular. This dissertation offers a novel interpretation of Berlin's political thought and liberalism, and a preliminary exploration of its relationship with Rawls' political thought. ;The reading of Berlin develops the following principal themes: Berlin was a moderate but consistent historicist primarily concerned with the interpretive self-understanding of his own form of life; Berlin was a strong but distinctive pluralist who argued for a limited but open-ended range of recognizable and rivalrous ultimate values and for an agitated equilibrium of these values in public life; Berlin focused the bulk of his critical energy on defending an internally pluralistic range of traditionally liberal values within this agitated equilibrium, with an emphasis on liberty and pluralism. He nonetheless recognized that there were other equally ultimate values, not distinctively liberal, which were legitimate and deserving of consideration and even defense. Berlin's essential insight is into the contemporary rivalry of equally ultimate values revealed by the historicist exercise of the sympathetic imagination. ;This interpretation of Berlin's thought suggests some deep points of dispute with Rawls' Political Liberalism, in particular over the regulative role of Rawls' political conception of justice in public reason. This dissertation argues that, when explored, these points of disagreement reveal two very different approaches to contemporary political thought, Berlin's grounded in an embrace of strong moral and political pluralism as the basis of political theory, and Rawls' grounded in an effort to tame such "simple" pluralism through the elaboration of a consensual normative framework of public life.

Frontiers of Diversity critically examines the explanatory and normative power of pluralism in contemporary philosophy, politics, economics and culture. Based on the papers presented at the "First Global Conference on Critical Issues in Pluralism" at Mansfield College, Oxford, it brings together for the first time essays examining pluralism's impact, both positive and negative, in each of these critical domains. These essays exhibit something of the fertility of the concept of pluralism, not only across the spectrum of fields, but at all levels of analysis, from individual to social to national and international, touching on specific cases from around the world. Through their diversity, the essays are intended to both promote cross-pollination between these domains of study and experience, and to encourage reflection on pluralism as a powerful cross-disciplinary approach for understanding the contemporary world.

ABSTRACTAmong the most forceful and provocative criticisms that have been leveled at US drone strikes against alleged terrorists far from conventional battlefields has been Jeremy Waldron's charge that they cannot be justified in terms of a neutral principle that most reasonable people would accept. In essence, Waldron asks ‘whether we are comfortable with [such a norm] in the hands of our enemies’. He thinks most people will say ‘no’ and that this is a reason not to embrace a permissive norm in the first place. We will argue that a key assumption in Waldron's argument is highly contestable, and that if it is challenged, the whole argument can be turned inside out to provide support for a limited drone program aimed at terrorist leaders. In essence, if the suspected terrorists who are the targets of drone strikes are understood to be combatants rather than civilians, as the US government has forcefully argued that they should be, then the norm permitting strikes against them is the humanitarian principle..

In the ongoing war on terror both the American and Israeli governments have resorted to a policy of ‘targeting terrorists’. In essence, both governments authorize their military or intelligence services to kill specific ‘terrorists’ who they believe mortally threaten citizens and cannot otherwise be neutralized. President Bush calls this ‘sudden justice’ and the Israeli government ‘targeted killing’ but their critics speak of ‘assassination’, ‘liquidation’ or ‘extra-judicial killing’. Since 11 September 2001, America is reported to have killed at least 44 people without warning or trial under the guidance of this policy, at least 18 of whom were civilians; the Israelis have killed at least 348, including 120 unintended targets.