Domestic Legitimacy, Competent Authority, and the Right of National Defense.

This paper explores the different understandings of competent authority in the just war tradition, and advances a view that only states with domestically legitimate political regimes can satisfy the just war requirement of "competent authority." Part one of the paper sets out a puzzle about what is a "domestically legitimate political regime." The view taken by this paper on the relationship between human rights protections and state legitimacy is less minimalist than Michael Walzer?s conception or John Rawls's in (Law of Peoples), but it is more minimalist than some Kantian liberal conceptions, and it is contextualized and distinguished between these competing views by means of three short arguments. Part Two: Do states without domestic legitimacy have a right of national defense? This section began as an engagement with David Rodin's book on the subject and also with David R. Mapel's 2006 ISA paper on the subject of national self-defense. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]