Max Weber Guest Lecture: Democratic Interventionism: Syria and the “Refugee Crisis”

Reinhard Merkel, professor criminal law and philosophy of law at the University of Hamburg, delivers the annual Max Weber Guest Lecture. Via Deutsches Haus NYU:

In its first part, Reinhard Merkel’s talk will deal with the question of whether there were legitimate normative grounds for the more or less clandestine interferences of external powers, including the U.S., in the Syrian civil war. In order to sufficiently address this, the more basic problem of a normative justification of the armed Syrian insurgence itself needs to be clarified. Coming to negative conclusions with regard to both these questions, the talk will then expound certain normative consequences following from this analysis for the formerly intervening powers with regard to the current “refugee crisis” in Europe.