Conceptions of Justice in War: From Grotius to Modern Times

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the conflicting views of justice in war, traced through the seventeenth century to the last century, and is an introduction to the modern debate on justice in war in historical context. Grotius, unsurprisingly, took a position in between these two, and suggested an entirely new legal approach. It allowed Grotius to put forward a theory which claimed that states had tacitly agreed that, irrespective of the objective justice of their claims, their representatives in battle (commanders and soldiers) could be recognized as having mutual and legitimate rights against each other in war. The final section of this chapter outlines the three traditional conceptions of justice, and demonstrates how the debate set out between the positions of Rousseau, Hobbes and Grotius continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The three traditional conceptions of justice includes the martial conception of justice, the grotian conception of justice and the Republican Conception of Political Justice.