For millennia, Iranian leaders have perceived strong naval forces as crucial to securing foreign trade and cementing the country’s predominance in the strategic Persian Gulf. Furthermore, given Iran’s huge size, long history, and strong national identity, its leaders have seen themselves and their maritime presence as the guarantor of regional security and the presence of foreign troops in the region as its impediment. Iranian strategists learned important lessons from the direct confrontation with the technologically superior US Navy at the end of the war with Iraq. Based on these lessons, since the 1980s, Iran has maintained two naval forces – the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) – which are examined in detail in this chapter.

The United Nation’s 1990s peacekeeping and peacemaking provoked introspection at the UN, but did not doom the UN’s peacekeeping or peacemaking enterprises. Why does UN peacekeeping remain a desirable part of peace processes despite its reputation as an ineffective measure of protection for civilian populations and warring parties alike?  This book investigates why peacekeeping survived its early catastrophes and how this survival should lead us to reconsider how peacekeeping works. I advance two key claims: first, I argue the UN’s central role in peacemaking and peacekeeping worldwide means peace operations have structural consequences: what the UN does in one place can shift strategies, outcomes, and options available to parties to conflict in other places. Second, drawing peace processes in Rwanda and Guatemala, I argue combatants turn to the UN because its presence enables unique tactical, symbolic, and post-conflict reconstruction outcomes that have little to do with the end of fighting. Combatants who negotiate with the UN’s assistance after peacekeeping failures may do so because negotiation affords them benefits even when they are neither invested in peace nor convinced the UN can help them achieve it. The introduction outlines the problem, situates the answer, and summarizes each chapter of the book.

The aim of this first part of the book was to question the first backbone of the indifference-narrative by testing the assumption according to which the nineteenth and early twentieth century authors who asserted the existence of rules regulating the use of force were foremost naturalists. Modern day literature, indeed, often argues that pre-Versailles international lawyers generally recognised that the use of force was beyond legal regulation and that the authors who did not were the ‘naturalist’ exception. Trying to have as broad a perspective and encompass as many nineteenth and early twentieth century textbooks as possible, it has not only shown that the idea that rules regulated resort to armed force was widespread among the scholarship, but also that this belief was not the prerogative of the ‘naturalists’. With few exceptions, in fact, authors of all theoretical inclinations asserted that the use of force, whether it took the form of ‘measures short of war’ or of war, was not an absolute right of States. The use of force was legitimate, but only in certain circumstances – that is to say as an exception, not as a rule.

This chapter is the first of three attempts to question the assertion according to which nineteenth century authors who claimed international law ring-fenced the use of force were 'naturalists'. It is divided into four sections: The first seeks to evidence how authors that can be labelled as 'naturalists' construed the international legal order. It shows that they did not dismiss positive law but believed natural law to be normatively superior. The second investigates how this translated in terms of method for the identification and determination of custom. ‘Naturalist’ authors adopted a two-step approach which consisted in analyzing State practice in order to identify potential customary rules and then test them against ‘necessary’ principles in order to confirm their normative value. The third and fourth sections respectively try to see how this method was applied to establish the existence of a rule of non-intervention and the exceptions to said principle. Non-intervention was deduced from the natural principles of independence and equality. Practice was more extensively taken into account to establish the cases in which States could resort to force.

This chapter turns to the analysis of the practice of justifying force in the ‘semi-peripheries’, i.e., in non-‘European’ States. The purpose is to see whether legal arguments were also developed and whether they differed from the ones brought forth to justify bellicose endeavours in the ‘centre’. It focuses on four case studies: the European intervention during the Greek War of Independence (1827); the French expedition in Lebanon and Syria (1860); the western intervention during the Boxer Revolt in China (1901); the Monroe doctrine and the Roosevelt corollary with special attention to their application in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century (1909–1912). It argues that, although these interventions rarely gave rise to full-blown wars, the justifications brought forward did not substantially differ from the ones used in the ‘centre’. States, in fact, carefully developed legal arguments and evidenced how their actions were meant to redress a previous offence.

This chapter is the third and last one dedicated to the analysis of 19th State practice. It turns to precedents of justifying force in the ‘peripheries’, i.e., non-‘European’ spaces. Four case studies are more particularly analysed: building from the work of Inge Van Hulle, it looks at British colonial expansion in Western Africa; at the Anglo-Zulu War (1879); at the French Tonkin expeditions in the 1870s and 1880s; and at the United States’ annexation of Hawaii (1893–1898). It shows that even though the status of ‘peripheral’ entities in the international legal system was debated, intervening States once more took care to develop legal arguments to justify their colonial and expansionist adventures. In so doing it completes the picture of the practice of justifying force in the nineteenth century.

It has been argued that every major crisis of international law has seen a return of the discipline to its history. There indeed appears to be an urge to go back to the foundations and to the fundamentals in periods of transition and uncertainty; a need to take stock of the past in order to know how to situate one’s self in the present and plan for the future. Returns to the past, are, in sum and in most instances, guided by present social, political or even psychological needs. In the course of this research, we have seen how the narrative of the indifference of international law to the use of force before the twentieth century emerged in the interwar scholarship as a means to rationalize the events of the World War I and enable the discipline to move past the failure which they represented.

A close examination of Iran’s defense policy and its carefully crafted and developed asymmetric warfare doctrine since the early 1980s points to a great deal of pragmatism and flexibility and a willingness to adjust to the changing strategic environment. The strategy has pursued four major goals: To ensure regime survival, to protect the homeland, to deter potential enemies, and to project power. In pursuing these broad objectives, the republic’s core priorities have been influenced by a combination of geopolitical forces, ideological orientation, and the revolutionary elite’s definition of security and threat perceptions.

The General Introduction presents the research question that underlies the book and the approach used to answer it. It starts by expounding the traditional historical narrative on the prohibition of the use of force and show how it appears to be at odds with 'reality' as it stems from primary historical sources. It explains that the purpose of the book is to investigate this discrepancy and understand of origins of the traditional narrative of indifference. It presents the theoretical framework inspired by mnemohistory that will be used to this end, as well as an argumentative roadmap to the book. Built as a step by step ‘deconstruction’ of the narrative of indifference it starts by analysing how nineteenth-century authors dealt with the use of force. It shows that the vast majority of authors, from all theoretical backgrounds, believed force be ring-fenced by law. The second part turns to practice for the purpose of demonstrating that law played a role to justify resort to force. The third part ambitions to explain where the narrative of indifference comes from: why it has emerged and why it still dominates contemporary scholarship.

What lessons can be drawn from the analysis of the arguments put forward by States when using force in the nineteenth century? First, it may confidently be asserted that law, beyond morals and politics, held an important role. In fact, whether in the ‘centre’, the ‘semi-peripheries’ or the ‘peripheries’, it seems that States systematically appealed to international law to justify or explain their actions. Sometimes references to international law were very clear and direct, sometimes less so. The Austrian intervention in Naples in 1821, the Spanish-American War of 1898, as well as, to a certain extent, the European intervention in Greece in 1827 and the annexation of Hawaii gave rise to rather ‘theoretical’ debates about the scope and limits of the right to resort to force. In other cases, international law might seem to have played a lesser role, but was always in the background; for instance, when a State claimed to be acting in reaction to a previous violation of law. In all the examined precedents, the intervening Power(s) followed the same procedure consisting in alleging that they were protecting or vindicating their rights, whether they issued from treaties or from customary international law. Fundamentally, all these actions were presented as sanctions of law – i.e. as the exercise of the right to self-preservation.

The chapter examines the recent changes in the nature of modern warfare. It argues that most recent military conflicts take the form of “low-intensity conflict,” “gray-zone competition,” “asymmetric warfare,” “fourth-generation warfare,” and “irregular warfare.” Given the huge military spending gap between Iran and its regional and global adversaries, Iranian leaders have articulated and adopted an asymmetric warfare doctrine since the 1979 revolution.