Authority/Practice in the Just War Tradition

Abstract

Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice. Edited by Anthony F. Lang, Cian O'Driscoll, John Williams. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. 328 pp., $39.95 paperback (ISBN: 978-1-589-01996-6). This is a well-crafted edited volume working to re-center Just War as an evolving, intentional tradition though an exploration of legitimate authority, a long neglected principle. Bringing together well-respected scholars, the editors, Anthony Lang, Cian O'Driscoll, and John Williams establish the foundation for the volume's structure upon the interplay between the “practice of authority” and “authority in practice.” The editors choose to focus their volume on questions of legitimate authority because it has “been largely overlooked” in “most contemporary literature” (p. 2). This is a timely argument, particularly because legitimate authority has become “construed almost exclusively in terms” of Weber's “definition of the state as the agency that exercises the monopoly of legitimate violence within a given territory” (p. 3). For many of the contributors, including Nahed Artoul Zehr and Michael Gross, questions of legitimate authority's “institutional, discursive, and performative elements” allow for the questioning of the assumed legitimacy …