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Volume 6, Issue 3 July 2013 ISSN: 2151-0806 Vol. 6, Issue 3 July, 2013 Editor: Dr. David Gabbard, Boise State University Table of Contents ARTICLES Why Security Needs Liberty Amien Kacou….………………………………………………………………………………… 3 Drone Warfare: A Worldwide Terrorist Threat Timothy Rodriguez………………………………………………………... …………………... 12 Democratization and Armed Conflict in Africa: Critical Perspectives Abosede Omowumi Babatunde …...……..…………………………………………………….. 20 Revelation on Johan Galtung’s Approach to Peace: Implications for the African Peace Oluwaseun Bamidele …...……………..……………………………………………………….. 37 Feminist Peacebuilding: Merging Theory and Practice in Pisco, Peru Anna Erwin ………………………………………………………………………………...…... 46 Power, Peace and the Political: Arendt’s Alternative to Perpetual Peace Anya Topolski ……………………………………………………………………………...….. 57 What Does a Reciprocal Peace Process Look Like? Katerina Standish ……………………………...…………………………………………...…... 69 Towards Peaceful Adaptation? Reflections on the Purpose, Scope, and Practice of Peace Studies in the 21st Century Rhys Kelly & Ute Kelly ……..………………...…………………………………………...…... 85 Playing to Kill: Video Games and Violence Urko Del Campo Arnaudas ……..…………...………………………………………….…...... 107 Peace Studies Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 3, July 2013 Page 1 ISSN: 2151-0806 Socio-Economic Status as a Predictor of Perceptions, Behaviors, and Administrative Responses Related to Bullying Marvin J. Berlowitz and Kelli Jette…………………..…………………………………..…… 120 Interview with Michael Wayne Ustaszewski Melissa Sheridan Embser-Herbert …………………..…………………………………..……. 142 Lessons Learned From the Field: The Blurring of Research and Advocacy with East African Muslim Youth Letitia E. Basford .………………..………………………………………………………..….. 150 Living Beyond Solitary: An update on Mumia Abu Jamal Kevin Price……... ………………..………………………………………………………..….. 159 Intergenerational Crime Prevention: Attempts to Save Children from Following in Their Incarcerated Parents’ Footsteps Steven Dobransky ………………..……………………………………………..…………….. 164 BOOK REVIEWS Book Review: Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco-Ability Movement. 2012. Edited by Anthony J. Nocella II, Judy K. C. Bentley, and Janet M. Duncan. NY: Peter Lang. Reviewed by Dylan James Hallingstad O'Brien………………………………….………….. 179 Book Review: Adventures With a Texas Naturalist. 1947. Roy Bedichek. TX: University of Texas Press. Reviewed by Roberto Bahruth ………………………………………………………………. 181 Peace Studies Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 3, July 2013 Page 2 ISSN: 2151-0806 Vol. 6, Issue 3 July, 2013 Why Security Needs Liberty Author: Amien Kacou, Ph.D. Attorney at Law, GPI LAW LLC Baltimore, Maryland E-mail: [email protected] WHY SECURITY NEEDS LIBERTY (Essay) Abstract A tentative non-legal essay on the broad reasons why the United States ought to give apparent “terrorists” the same basic rights it extends to its most “upstanding” citizens. The “hyperreality” of what was until recently officially referred to as the “War on Terror” should be obvious, by now. For one thing, there is its quasi-metaphysical dimension as a conflict that could evade definite physical boundaries of both place and time (Wittes, 2008, p. 50; Yoo, 2003, p. 429)—a notion from which the Obama administration’s rhetoric is only now beginning to shy away. And, then, there is its exaggerated simulation of the very notion of “war,” with dramatic new norms of brutality—between “enemy combatants” (another verbum non gratum of President Obama’s mere rhetoric) on one side making a spectacle of murdering civilians, and on the other side making a mystery of their own “harsh” techniques. (For an examination of the irregular status of CIA operatives under the international laws of war in particular, see, e.g., Burt & Wagner, 2012.) But some “philosophical” implications of these notions have seldom been examined. For example, while it may be inherently more difficult to distinguish between “enemy combatants” and civilians (and thus easier to “invent” new enemy combatants—by designation or by inspiration), what should we make of the fact that the disappearance of traditional conflict boundaries may also have entailed the blurring of identities between the conflicting parties? After all, homegrown jihadists—however rare—have been a source of some concern in the United States, Great Britain and other Western nations. Peace Studies Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 3, July 2013 Page 3 ISSN: 2151-0806 Identifying in any way with a declared enemy is bound to make people feel uncomfortable, to say the least. And, beyond that, some might argue that doing so (“empathizing with evil,” as they might describe it) would be dangerous and fundamentally immoral. On the one hand, it might seem too short a step to delegitimizing one’s own self-interest: it might be seen as a projection of weakness and experienced as an abdication of self-respect (see Gelven, 1994, pp. 122-123). (And perhaps for a subset of people the same should be said of “appeasing” the enemy’s less violent supporters.) On the other hand, for all the U.S. forces’ “harsh” techniques in the War on Terror, arguably, the fact that organizations such as Al Qaeda acknowledge that they specifically and systematically intend to target civilians is sufficient to dissolve all moral equivalence between the parties. U.S. drone attacks, for instance, may well kill civilians; however, that is not what the United States acknowledges to be its specific intent in carrying them out. (For another example: specific intent seems essential to the difference between a suicide attack and a suicide mission.) And then perhaps some could argue even further that making a mystery of one’s own brutality is somehow inherently less immoral (or at least less “indecent”) than making a spectacle of it. That said, arguably also, the methods of Al Qaeda or any other group still do not “therefore” necessarily provide an acceptable (retaliatory or other) basis for the United States’ extrajudicial drone attacks or other “harsh” practices. Some might insist that, given their methods, the organizations’ members and sympathizers deserve to be stigmatized as enemies in the most radical or primitive sense; enemies in a war that one might describe as “the ultimate acknowledgement of not living in a shared community and having shared values” (Luban, 2005, p. 225). In other words, some might be morally tempted to treat the members and sympathizers of Al Qaeda and similar organizations as the ultimate “other;” just the kind of “monsters” who could plan and celebrate the horrors of 9/11. However, in response, it might be appropriate to recall for a moment Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1989) warning that: “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster” (p. 89). And here the meaning of this warning would not merely be to question the moral justification for retaliating against brutality with brutality, or to compare the terrorists’ techniques with those of U.S. forces in degree of brutality; rather, a more fundamental question would ask independently whether U.S. counterterrorism—i.e., going to the “dark side,” as former Vice-President Cheney famously put it, or letting the “gloves come off,” as one former CIA Counterterrorism Director less-famously put it (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the U.S., 2004)—has put the American identity at risk. The American identity is at risk, as suggested earlier, first and foremost because of the dimensions of the War on Terror as a conflict without definite boundaries of place—which may confront the United States with a dilemma: either to risk importing some of the alienating practices of its foreign wars into its domestic policy (i.e., into its relationship with U.S. persons), or, instead, to risk exporting some of the enfranchising characteristics of its domestic policy into its foreign wars. Advocates of the former option may seem to include at least to some extent President Obama, who, in recently justifying the extrajudicial targeted killing of U.S. citizens such as Anwar Al Awlaqi (Department of Justice, n.d.), seems to have reaffirmed the strongest interpretation of former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo’s argument that “the government may reduce the individual liberties of even citizens in order to more effectively fight” wars— because it should place “the interest in effectively waging war first” (Ku & Yoo, 2006, p. 218). Peace Studies Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 3, July 2013 Page 4 ISSN: 2151-0806 Perhaps some might see this last argument for the primacy of military effectiveness (or of “national security”, more generally) as simple “common sense,” especially if the concept of “liberties” evokes in their minds some general value equivalent of an interest in physical freedom from imprisonment (forgetting that when it comes to targeted killings at least, what is at stake is also the security of the few). Surely, most people naturally consider death worse than imprisonment. This “common sense” is reflected as much in the American legal system, where sentences of life imprisonment are ordinarily considered less severe than the death penalty, as in international humanitarian law, which “allows intentional lethal force only when necessary to protect against a threat to life, and where there are ‘no other means, such as capture or non-lethal incapacitation, of preventing that threat to life’” (Cavallaro & Sonnenberg, 2012, p. 131). The basis for this can be seen simply as a brute fact of ordinary subjective preferences, or more “objectively” (and more interestingly for our purposes)