What the political community owes participants of other arrangements whose constitutive vulnerabilities are governed by the same [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) logic that grounds mutual recognition within an arrangement is the open question on defense and cross-boundary recognition. The framework's recognition tradition reads defense as constitutive infrastructure (protection of the political community against external coercion is one channel through which the rights-protection obligation [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) derives is discharged), with the load-bearing constraint running on proportionality between deterrence investment and recognition-building investment, with defense-industry capture as the structural-extraction failure mode the framework derives against, and with the just-war tradition's discrimination / proportionality / last-resort constraints as the recognition-failure logic located across arrangement boundaries rather than as a separate moral system grafted on. Three contemporary traditions in international-relations theory deny this framing at its premise from different directions.

The pacifist tradition (Tolstoy 1894; the historic peace churches' Mennonite and Quaker witness; Gandhi's *satyagraha* (truth-force) writings; Hauerwas 1983) presses the legitimacy claim from one direction: the use of organized lethal force is itself the recognition-failure the framework derives against, and any architecture that licenses defense reproduces at the political-community level the recognition-failure it precludes at the within-community level. The framework's licensing of defense as constitutive infrastructure, on this reading, fails the structural derivation it claims to follow.

The realist tradition (Thucydides, *History of the Peloponnesian War* book V on the Melian Dialogue; Hobbes, *Leviathan* ch. XIII; Morgenthau 1948; Mearsheimer 2001; the broader neorealist and offensive-realist literature) presses the recognition claim from the opposite direction: cross-boundary mutual recognition is not available under anarchy, and the framework's derivation of recognition-building investment as load-bearing imports a moralism that the empirical record of state behavior has never sustained. Deterrence proportions are set by capabilities and interests, not by recognition-building obligations.

The cosmopolitan tradition (Kant 1795; Held 1995; the modern transnational-institutionalist literature through Held and Slaughter; the world-government strand through Archibugi and beyond) presses the boundary claim from a third direction: the framework's arrangement-bounded recognition is itself the structural failure mode; the political community whose obligations stop at its own boundary cannot meet the recognition obligation the framework derives at full scope, and the answer is to dissolve the boundary by building transnational institutions, not to optimize the within-boundary recognition proportions.

A fourth dispute runs inside the just-war frame rather than against its premise, on the conduct of force rather than its licensing, and the three traditions above leave it untouched. Walzer (*Just and Unjust Wars* (1977)) presses it from the conventionalist side: combatants on both sides fight with equal right and bear equal liability to attack regardless of whether their side's cause is just, and the war convention (the accreted body of shared practice governing conduct in war) binds both sides symmetrically and on its own interpretive authority, *jus in bello* standing independent of *jus ad bellum*. McMahan (*Killing in War* (2009)) presses it from the revisionist side: liability to defensive force tracks moral responsibility for an unjust threat, so combatants prosecuting an unjust cause are liable in a way those resisting them are not, and the moral equality Walzer defends survives at most as a convention of positive law rather than as deep morality. Beneath the first question sits a second: whether the binding force of the war convention is interpretive (reconstructed from within an accreted shared practice, as Walzer's method takes it) or derivational (generated by something prior to and independent of the practice, as the recognition tradition takes it). The framework cannot stay neutral here: because its in-bello constraints run on the same recognition-failure logic that grounds liability within an arrangement, it owes Walzer a parting on both questions rather than the assimilation of treating the just-war constraints as simply its own logic restated.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the constitutive-defense-with-extraction-precluded destination on multiple independent grounds. The just-war tradition (Augustine, *De civitate Dei* book XIX; Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae* II-II, q. 40; Vitoria's lectures on the Indies; Suárez's reworking; Grotius, *De Jure Belli ac Pacis* (1625); Walzer 1977) located the binding force of legitimate use of force in just cause, discrimination, proportionality, last resort, and legitimate authority: constraints the framework recovers structurally as the recognition-failure logic located across boundaries. Dwight D. Eisenhower's January 17, 1961 farewell address articulated the structural prediction sixty-five years before this section was written, warning that the same defense apparatus could be turned against the arrangement it was built to protect. The security-dilemma branch of realist theory (Jervis 1976; Glaser; the broader defensive-realist literature) supplies the analytic apparatus that traces how deterrence investment without recognition-building investment systematically over-produces conflict. The security-community institutionalist literature (Deutsch on pluralistic security communities; Adler and Barnett 1998) supplies the empirical and theoretical case for how mutual recognition can scale across arrangement boundaries under conditions the realist tradition takes as foreclosed. The peace-studies and structural-violence tradition (Galtung on structural violence; the broader peace-research literature) supplies the analytic vocabulary for naming defense political-economy capture as structural extraction. The defense-political-economy literature (Bacevich 2008, 2010; the SIPRI Yearbooks documenting global defense spending; the empirical literature on revolving-door Pentagon-to-contractor career flows) supplies the operational evidence on which the structural-extraction prediction rests. The arms-control tradition (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; the broader nuclear-arms-control empirical literature through Wezeman and Wezeman at SIPRI) supplies the empirical case for cross-boundary recognition-building that the realist tradition treats as structurally unavailable.

The dispute the section frames is whether defense reduces to a licensing question (rejected outright by pacifism), a power-political adjustment in capabilities and interests under anarchy (realism), or an architectural-dissolution question routing through transnational institutions (cosmopolitanism) — theses pressed by Tolstoy-through-Hauerwas, by Morgenthau-through-Mearsheimer, and by Kant-through-Held — or whether defense is legitimate constitutive infrastructure for protection of the political community against external coercion, load-bearing on the proportionality between deterrence and recognition-building investment, with defense-industry capture structurally precluded as extraction at the protective-floor and with the just-war discrimination / proportionality / last-resort constraints binding as cross-boundary recognition obligations on the same [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) logic that grounds within-arrangement recognition, a thesis pressed by the just-war lineage, the Eisenhower structural-extraction account, the security-dilemma analytics, the security-community institutionalist record, and the peace-studies structural-violence vocabulary. Cutting across all three is the *in bello* axis: whether, once force is licensed at all, the moral equality of combatants and the independent authority of the war convention hold (Walzer) or give way to liability tracking responsibility for an unjust threat (McMahan). On both registers the dispute is answered at [§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>), where the structural-necessity derivation reads off the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) and [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) grounding what defense must deliver to count as defense, and on what ground its conduct-constraints bind, under a political community whose protective obligation runs alongside its cross-boundary recognition obligation. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.11 Defense](<9.11 Defense.md>) | [9.11.2 What is Required](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>) →
