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As depicted in the previous part of this entry, most NSAGs have moral obligations not so different from the governments they often want to replace. This final part offers a discussion of particular elements of the ethical dimension of NSAGs that usually play a role within the activity of these groups, i.e. in violent conflict as well as in its aftermath.
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| The Bosnian village of Ljuta burns after heavy fighting between Bosnian Serbs and Muslims on July 22, 1992. Image from: Reuters/Stringer |
For Milton Friedman, business organizations act socially responsible simply by meeting their objectives, with the limitation to stay “within the rules of the game”, which means to comply with the law. Governments, which are more comparable to NSAGs in terms of their moral dimension, usually follow their national law, too. This is, however, rather simple for them because governments usually posses the power to make and unmake law - particularly in less democratic countries. It must nevertheless be mentioned that it is especially but not only the governments of such countries that tend to disrespect certain international laws, which oftentimes causes grievance among the affected people, particularly when it comes to human rights law. NSAGs on the other hand often break both national and international law when they wrench the monopoly to the use of force from the state - with some notable exceptions. These include the right of rebellion as it is guaranteed in many national constitutions as well as in international law. It is, however, difficult to determine how often these regulations actually apply in the case of armed violence by NSAGs. Oftentimes quite the contrary is the case, with NSAGs breaking regulations of human rights law and international humanitarian law. Many consider human rights, to which all human beings are inherently entitled, as moral intuitions and the disrespecting of them, therefore, immoral and worthy of condemnation.
Political and Military Leadership
Another ethical conflict is the lack of differentiation between two types of moral justification that apply in regards to armed violence. The “Just War Theory” distinguishes between jus ad bellum, meaning the moral justification for war and jus in bello, the moral justification of actions being taken during war. Traditionally it is the government or the parliament of a country that is concerned with the former, i.e. the decision to wage a war, while the latter, the decisions in the field are the business of the military commanders. This matters when we look at the issue from an ethical perspective. It means that, “[g]enerally speaking, a government is not to blame for the behavior of soldiers, and soldiers should not be blamed for the decisions made by the political class.“
With regards to our concern, NSAGs, we note a significant difference to the situation of nation states. The political head of NSAGs is more often than not identical with its military command. Therefore, there is only little or no division between the moral justification for engaging in armed violence and for actions take during this conflict. One implication is that, in the case of NSAGs, the leadership and its supporters, i.e. the insurgents are equally responsible for the decision to engage in armed violence and for the consequences of it. On the one hand, supporters of insurgencies would argue that the unity of jus ad bellum and jus in bello exposes the leadership of NSAGs to a wider range criticism because they have the nerve to shoulder their burden of responsibility. On the other hand, critics might hold that successful NSAGs that manage to overthrow and replace a government or gain control over a certain area in which they wield authority will be the equivalent of an unelected military dictatorship with fundamental lacks in the rule of law as well as checks and balances. Of course, if the government an NSAG fights looks like this already, the arguments would be undermined.
NSAG-Administration and Civil Society
When an NSAG is gaining new territory, they usually oust and often replace the official government of this area. The consequences of this transition depend on many factors and vary strongly. For example, are there any issues that might lead to violence towards the civilian population? There might be a variety of reasons, from ethnical over ideological or religious to tactical. Moreover, how is the NSAG structured? The levels of organization, hierarchy and discipline matter as well as the size of the group in respect to the extend and nature of its territory. These are only some examples of factors that determine the fate of a population under an NSAG’s administration, but there are also conditions that are common in almost all situations in which NSAGs control a territory.
With an NSAG as de facto government, the political administration as well as social services rest on military men. Legislative, judicature and executive power are often united in one hand. As history shows, it is not always easy to resist the temptation to abuse this power, even in the case of nationalist/separatist groups and rebels motivated by experiences of injustice and other grievances.
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| Child Soldier. Image by Steve McCurry |
[C]hildren who had played an active part in the [Liberian civil] war had experience [sic] additional horrors and display symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome including nightmares, insomnia, bed-wetting, aggression and hyperactivity. Many observers comment on the inability of child soldiers to make informed moral choices about their actions, because of their youth and the atrocities they have witnessed and taken part in.
Having traumatized men in charge of the administration of a given population certainly poses a threat to peace-building and the resolution of the conflict, but it also complicates social coexistence. As mentioned in the first part of this entry, the collapse of social norms and practices is one of the attendant evils of civil wars. The effects of this breakdown become apparent with the increase in domestic violence, which occur not only during but also in the aftermath of violent conflicts: “One enduring impact of the militarization of daily life and the forging of militarized masculinities is an increase in domestic violence, a phenomenon noted in many post-conflict settings” (p. 21). (More on this here).
It takes much time and effort for a society to recover from the corrosive consequences of armed violence and to restore the social fabric that allows for peaceful coexistence. With regards to this, Soliman M. Santos, Jr. of the South-South Network for Non-State Armed Group Engagement states that “[v]alues must be transformed as much as society must be restructured since cultural values underlie and support societal structures.” With armed violence being responsible for these detriments, the effects of NSAG-activities on the moral principles of societies is certainly a topic that deserves more attention from the public as well as from scholars in the field of descriptive as well as normative ethics.
War within a Society
Unlike conventional interstate wars, fighters of NSAGs as participants of civil wars and other forms of insurgency often point their guns at members of their own society. Even if the waring parties have different economic, religious, ideological or ethnical backgrounds, in most cases they will have to find a way to coexist once the guns fall silent - an option that is very difficult but still preferable to the alternative: the forced displacement or even genocide of the defeated group. One can only imagine how difficult it is to gain or restore lost trust and establish social cooperation after a period of armed violence within a society. Since mutual trust is a basic prerequisite of shared moral convictions and the compliance with them, this issue is of high importance with respect to the ethical dimension of NSAGs.
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| Albert Einstein on the individual responsibility of soldiers |
Another relevant ethical dimension of NSAGs is the individual responsibility of its fighters. As human beings they have to be considered moral agents. In this context, it is important to note that many people agree that the moral rules for soldiers during war fundamentally differ from their peacetime equivalent (A matter that is profoundly examined by McMahan). This sentiment is a precondition for warfare and can, therefore, be observed in almost all cultures and throughout many centuries or even millennia. Today this notion is reflected in international humanitarian law, which does not prohibit war and killing in general but merely regulates which targets and ways of killing are allowed and prohibited, respectively. For soldiers, actions that are usually worthy of condemnation like for example the intentional killing of a complete stranger become morally acceptable or even worthy of praise during the time of war. The question we are faced with is if this notion equally holds for the fighter of NSAGs. Are they individually responsible for their actions during armed struggle, e.g. do they have to be considered murderers when they kill in battle? Indeed many governments that are confronted with political violence on their territory resort to the political maneuver of labeling the fighters of NSAGs as terrorists to suggest their moral inferiority (the Syrian government does not only call all Syrian opposition fighters without distinguishing terrorists, last month they even added the opposition delegates at the Geneva peace talks to a national terrorist list), but this should not distract us from the real question: In what respect do rebels or insurgents differ from regular soldiers in moral terms?
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| Bosnian Croat soldiers pass by the corpse of a Bosnian Serb soldier. Image by Tom Dubravec/AFP/Getty Images |
Individually responsible or not, there are two exceptions regarding fighters of NSAGs. First, abducted adults do not give their consent to the actions the NSAG they belong to (in the truest sense of the word) forces them. This applies also to abducted child soldiers, which, moreover, do not necessarily have to be considered as persons and therefore moral agents, because they might - to a certain degree - lack the ability to make rational decisions.
Disruption of Development and Growth
In his famous paper Famine, Affluence, and Morality, philosopher Peter Singer argues that everyone who is able to relieve people from life-threatening poverty without sacrificing something of similar moral importance is obliged to do so, or, more generally: “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, do so.” In reverse, this moral principle would prohibit any person to do any actions that cause poverty among a given population unless these actions also have consequences that are morally more significant. This utilitarian notion of a “moral cost-benefit analysis” of course holds for all negative effects of NSAG-activities, but in the case of the economic impact it is much easier to compare the outcome of both sides of the calculation - forming an NSAG and engaging in armed violence or accepting the status quo.
Civil wars and other forms of political violence often cause the destruction of physical capital, the reduction of investment in physical capital, the decrease in private investment and an interruption of production and market transaction. These consequences have to be taken into consideration in any discussion of the ethical dimension of NSAGs, especially in societies that are already struggling with poverty. Unfortunately, it is particularly those that are frequently plagued by armed violence, as the following graph indicates:
The unspeakable suffering of the victims of political violence in countries like Syria or the Democratic Republic of Congo and many other parts of the world make it impossible to ignore the ethical aspects that are associated with the activities of NSAGs. This does not mean that NSAGs are necessarily (solely) responsible for these ethical conflicts, but they are inextricably linked to their existence.
As I tried to show, NSAGs do not have any social responsibility that they are bound to besides their primary actions because they are predominately concerned with social matters, anyway. Similar to governments, they are also not bound by moral responsibility but rather (attempt to) serve an analogous function as morality: the regulation of social coexistence. In this role, their objectives and - to a certain degree - their actions can of course not be in contradiction to the moral convictions of their peer group. In this sense NSAGs are bound to moral convictions without actually being moral agents themselves.
The depicted ethical conflicts that arise from violent NSAG activities are only a sample, the range is almost indefinitely extendable and also covers issues like the lethal effects of battles as well as famine, disease and the destruction of health services as a result of armed violence, increased child mortality in poor conflict regions, the destruction and reduced investment in human capital, the diversion of public funds from education, wartime rapes, the increased production and trafficking of illicit drugs in many areas controlled by NSAGs, the weakening of state capability and the destruction of government services and, of course, the high probability of renewed armed conflicts after a civil war. Unfortunately, this list is far from complete. In the light of this it is all the more surprising that there is an exceptional lack of research in the field of ethical dimensions of NSAGs. I hope that this important but yet understudied research topic soon gains more attention from the public and also from scholars in the field of practical philosophy.
