ABSTRACT
In 2009, as one of the most oxymoronic events of our time, President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize and concurrently ordered the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. He characterized the war as one of self-defence, thereby highlighting the military engagement’s legality and legitimacy in relation to international law. President Obama further alluded to the notion of a just war, and invoked transnational cosmopolitan values by referring to the importance of supporting the emergence of democratic institutions in other countries:
Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifi ce of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest – because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity . . . The one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that ‘we do unto others as we would have them do unto us’ and called upon all to reach for the world that ought to be-that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls. 1
We recall Adelman’s warning in Chapter 1 , that the ‘the continued monopoly of legitimate violence threatens to undermine the cosmopolitan vision’. Rather than concede defeat to realist views, this chapter invites recognition of the shifting
trends of local and national institutional processes by which to pursue the emancipatory vision of true cosmopolitan justice.
