Description
War has become illegitimate as a way to resolve disputes between states. Victory in battle is no longer a triumph that is respected by the international community and accepted as a way to decide ownership of territory or the distribution of rights. Instead, states deny they are ‘at war’ and try to manipulate the legitimacy of their use of force in various ways. But exactly what difference does this rhetorical shift make to how states make war? In this paper, I demonstrate the various effects of the illegitimacy of war on the diplomacy and conduct of war and peacemaking through a comparison between two uses of force; the Japanese invasions of Manchuria in 1894 and 1931, known as the Sino-Japanese War and the Manchurian Crisis. This paper uses in-depth primary source evidence to show that the two cases differ radically in the justifications for the war and the framing of the use of force, the attitudes of third-parties to the nature and outcome of the use of force and how belligerents tried to make use and manipulate those attitudes.
