Through most of the history of the just war tradition, writers on just war, when listing the requirements for just resort to armed force, followed the example of the summary provided by Thomas Aquinas: first the authority of a sovereign ruler; then just cause, defined as retaking that which has been wrongly taken and punishing evildoing; and then right intention, defined negatively as avoiding intentions grounded in personal vice and positively in terms of aiming to secure peace.¹ Here the primary necessity for a just war is sovereign authority; the other necessities named not only follow in precedence but also...

The aim of this chapter is to defend the position that while the categories associated with just war thinking may help us to exercise judgment in particular cases, we should avoid just war theorizing altogether. The intended distinction here is best, if somewhat crudely, summarized by saying that whereas those who look to just war theory expect to be given answers, those who prefer to talk of just war thinking hope to discover good questions. In the first case, the expectation is that just war theory properly applied will tell us whether a particular war, or a particular action in...

We might achieve a universal language about the ethics of war. It might be that warrior cultures will vanish from the world, and that no one will ever again suppose that the ecstasy of violence is its own justification, or that domination is war’s obvious and intrinsic end. It might be that the terms in which the just war tradition speaks will become the global lingua franca. I doubt it, but it might be. If it were so, we would have achieved a measure of consensus about how to view war morally—but still only a measure. Common terms are...

This chapter aims to explore one aspect of the massive controversy generated by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The war, occupation, and postwar political fate of Iraq and Iraqis have occasioned enormous debate on a whole range of important political questions and still cast a lengthy shadow over the political reputation of the two leaders most closely associated with the invasion, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and their administrations. The failure of the war to achieve its stated goals, the inaccuracy of the intelligence on which the case for war rested, the incompetence of postwar reconstruction efforts, the deaths...

When us president george w. bush justified the US military invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq in part by proclaiming that “brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong” and mixing that proclamation with the language of just cause in the just war tradition,¹ the gendered nature of his justifications was neither coincidental nor aberrant to the tradition itself.² Instead, the just war tradition has been built on, and I argue is inseparable from, a gendered idea of the dichotomy between civilians and combatants that stereotypes men as “just warriors” (righteous defenders of the innocent) and women as “beautiful souls”...

Since the early twentieth century, irregular and nonstate actors have demonstrated not only their political relevance but also increased levels of military capability and sophistication.¹ Such developments have spurred a reexamination of the legitimate authority criterion, leading certain theorists to argue that this criterion—as it serves to determine the justice of wars—ought to be reconsidered or dropped altogether.²

Cecile Fabre is especially helpful in understanding these arguments. Grounding herself in cosmopolitan theory, she claims that it is untenable to argue that individuals have rights that merit and require protection, while at the same time denying individuals the authority...

“Justice removed, then, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?”¹ Augustine’s question does not go away. It calls forth the problem of the “just war”—when can a human kill without sin, what separates a legitimate act of killing from murder, what separates the violence of maintaining public “order” and “security” from mere banditry? The just war tradition, first as a theological tradition, and then in many secular variants, makes the distinction between “just” and “unjust” wars through the use of moral principles or criteria. In relation to the jus ad bellum, these criteria sometimes include the requirement that...

How can citizens of democratic states engage in moral deliberation about war? Public discourses about war in democratic states tend toward the nationalistic or even jingoistic. This tendency is exacerbated in such states by the assumption that democracies only use force for good purposes and never resort to war for self-interested reasons. That is, any judgments about war tend to be ones that reinforce the right and good of war-making by democracies rather than critical moral debate about just or unjust wars.

This chapter proposes one way to make possible a more critical moral debate. I begin with the assumption...

“Just wars are usually defined as those which have for their end the avenging of injuries [ulciscuntur iniurias].” This phrase from Augustine, cited in Gratian’s Decretum, was repeated approvingly by successive generations of canon lawyers and theologians.¹ For these early authors in the just war tradition, punishment was intimately connected with the issue of legitimate authority. Most assumed that waging war to punish wrongdoers fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the supreme authority in each country. By the same token, legitimate authority was posited as a strict requirement of just war only when such force was exercised in view of...

The mainstream western christian teaching about just war, as it had developed up to the 1270s, was succinctly summarized by Thomas Aquinas. His summary included three conditions for justifiably waging war.¹ In referring to waging war or war-making (“bellare” in Latin), Aquinas appears to be discussing the complex social act of a group of people. His initial moral concern was about whether and under what conditions that action is morally permissible. His attention was on the grounds for rightly undertaking war in the first place and for rightly carrying it on. Thus, Aquinas was not primarily concerned with the particular...

In the late hours of May 1, 2011, city streets around the United States filled with people celebrating the announcement by the US media, and the president of the United States, that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been killed in a targeted operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by a team of Navy SEALS. The quotations given above capture some of the confusion over these celebrations. One more quotation in particular, by the US News & World Report foreign affairs writer Susan Milligan, shows the real discomfort felt by some in the United States over these celebrations: “So while all of...

Although it is crucial to ask how state armies should fight nonstate guerrilla organizations justly, it is equally important to ask whether guerrillas can wage just war. It is often thought that they cannot—that guerrilla armies violate the principles of just war in the most egregious way and leave state armies to wring their hands in frustration and debate the price of violating the same principles that their adversaries mockingly ignore.

Although this dismal perspective dominates the thinking of state actors, it is decidedly narrow and, ultimately, unconvincing. Some, though not all, nonstate actors that dominate armed conflict today...

The jus in bello guidelines of the just war tradition—discrimination and proportionality—infuse international humanitarian law and the contemporary US understanding of ethical conduct in war. There is nothing new in that: The rhetoric of the US military since the middle of the nineteenth century has reflected both the just war tradition’s articulation of the justice of going to war and its articulation of limits on conduct in war. The US operational and legal rhetoric—as articulated in US rules of engagement and military law—also reflect and amplify the long-standing tensions within the just war tradition between the...

Combating terrorism and counterinsurgency warfare pose novel challenges to the system of professional military education and training. Indeed, the many dimensions of the changing nature of war is a theme that unites many of the chapters in this volume. Further, because, as the editors point out in their introduction to this volume, so much of just war theory in recent centuries has been formed in the context of state-centric ideas of authority, necessarily existing legal regimes fit the nature of some of these challenges poorly, if at all. Such changes will require the evolution and development of agreed-upon legal principles...

I begin with some comments on this chapter’s title. As many will recognize, the first words are borrowed from Michael Walzer’s 2004 essay, The Triumph of Just War (and the Dangers of Success).¹ Walzer’s concern is shared by all those engaged in interpreting the just war idea. If we do our work well, the vocabulary of jus ad bellum and jus in bello becomes better known. More people refer to the idea, and many of them do so in ways that are—well, unreflective, or at least not very well informed. So Walzer mentions the way President George H. W....

The period since the end of World War II, and most especially from the 1970s to the present, has seen a revival of normative theorizing about war unparalleled since the seventeenth century. And in the main, such theorizing has tended to fellow relatively well-worn paths. Both explicitly religious and, especially, secular theorizing have focused to a very large extent on working broadly within the parameters of the just war tradition, the most influential European tradition of thought connected with the ethical evaluation of war. This is even true where (as in some recent cosmopolitan work) the tradition is also greatly...