To begin the reappraisal of just war theory, it is helpful to gain a sense, albeit brief and partial, of how it has evolved to date. I shall thus say something about the history of the just war tradition in the West. To orient the subsequent discussions I then formulate one particular version of the theory, which I believe represents its most sympathetic contemporary exposition. As stressed in the preface, it must not be thought that the contributors to this book all accept my formulation or even the tradition in general. But the stated version will function to highlight both...

The Bush administration reacted to the horrific September 11th attacks by proclaiming a right to preemptive self-defence, making preemption official US military doctrine. A preemptive war doctrine is, so it argued, the only way to make the United States safe. The Bush administration rightly points to the changed nature of military threats and poses a dilemma for scholars of just war theory: how long, in an era of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, can states afford to wait to use their military force in self-defence? But the administration’s doctrine is actually also a preventive war doctrine. And although the...

Humanitarian intervention, while controversial, has become more acceptable as a reason for using military force in the last twenty years. But humanitarian intervention may be giving way to a related, yet distinct, form of intervention. This new form of intervention is characterised by a desire to punish wrongdoers, whether they are individual leaders or whole states, a phenomenon I call punitive intervention. Punitive intervention can be defined as the use of military force across national boundaries to alter the internal affairs of a state that has violated international law or other widely recognised international norms. A punitive intervention aims to...

The American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation has been the most controversial event in world politics of recent times. As is abundantly clear from the frequency with which it is invoked in this book, it raises a whole battery of issues for just war theory to address. Indeed, one might think of it as a laboratory in which the theory may be put to the most exacting tests. In this chapter, we consider some questions arising from the controversy as to whether the invading coalition possessed the authority to launch the war: did it have the...

In November 2001, in the first few months of the war on terrorism, US and UK forces in Afghanistan, together with the Northern Alliance, rounded up more than 400 Taliban and suspected al-Qaeda fighters and brought them to the Qala-i-Jangi fortress outside of Mazar-i-Sharif. They neglected to disarm the prisoners completely, and in the midst of some initial interrogation procedures, some of the detainees detonated some grenades, seized weaponry and rioted. In response, airstrikes were called in, and over the next twelve hours they proceeded to bomb the prison relentlessly, eventually killing all 400 prisoners. A few days later, US...

Despite the enormous shifts that have taken place in the conduct of warfare over the past centuries, theories of just war have had a remarkably continuous currency: largely the same nomenclature and considerations run through the tradition’s history. Indeed, few concepts have had such enduring resonance as the very idea of a just war, shaping even the otherwise guileless rhetoric of contemporary US presidents, for example. This volume, a critical reappraisal of just war tenets, itself illustrates and explores that appeal in the context of a new and particularly challenging security environment. However, in terms of just war theorising’s application...

The supreme emergency exemption is a doctrine which pushes to the very limits the relationship between jus ad bellum (the justice of resorting to war)² and jus in bello (the justice of conduct in war).³ It has high profile support, including such luminaries as Winston Churchill, John Rawls and Michael Walzer. But it is Walzer who is fundamentally responsible for the structure of this exemption: Churchill merely inspires it, and Rawls merely apes it.

As Walzer defines it, the supreme emergency exemption allows a country victimised by aggression⁴ to set aside the rules of jus in bello and fight however...

The lessons learnt from international politics in the post-Cold War era and the nature of global conflict today compel us to accept an important fact: it is impossible to protect and enhance human freedom and well-being exclusively through the traditional paradigm of state security. The security of the individual human being must also be taken into consideration. Political theory and practice must come to accept this global reality, since all too often the best laid plans for achieving state security have come at the cost of an increase in human suffering, fear and deprivation. What is required is a new...

In this chapter I want to argue that:

[i] A necessary feature of any just peace, particularly in post-civil war situations, is that it is a durable one.

[ii] A particularly significant factor contributing to the durability of a peace settlement is that key publics, communities and opinion leaders believe that the peace is sufficiently ‘just’ as to merit their commitment.

[iii] A necessary element in facilitating the belief that a peace is ‘just enough’ is that the socio-cultural scars left by the war are addressed in a manner such that the pains of the past cease to dominate the...

With varying degrees of sympathy and criticism, the chapters in this book have scrutinised some of the key elements of just war theory and have thereby demonstrated how central they have been in arguments about the justification of war and its conduct. Even where they have found serious flaws, one might see from them how the elements in question could still continue to set the terms of such controversies – and the presence of conceptual and practical problems with them may suggest, not that they should be abandoned, but that further work needs to be done to refine them, to...