Ethical, Political, and Legal Concepts of War

Abstract

Apart from military-technical categorizations of war, there are three other main approaches to their categorizations: ethical, political, and legal conceptualizations. Ethical conceptualization of war includes war as evil or war as condonable as a lesser evil. But they include also the idea that war can be good, especially if commanded by God taking the form of jihad or crusade. Or it has been described as a tonic beneficial to society against decadence and as promoter of progress. Political conceptualizations of war begin from Plato’s division between polemos and stasis—public versus private or civil war. Greeks and Romans proscribed civil war, but private war was ubiquitous in later centuries. In the modern period: sub-State-level wars were criminalized, while in cases of extremely poor government, in case a State abuses and persecutes its own subjects, justifications have been articulated for tyrannicide insurgency and civil war. Philosophers and theologians have differentiated between wars of necessity and wars of choice. Legal conceptualizations of ‘war’ have involved to include also (intra-State, or asymmetric) ‘armed conflict’ including one or more non-State actors. Jurists have defined war as a legal condition or a state that would be triggered with a declaration of war. In the absence of an independent tribunal that could judge the quarrel between sovereign parties, war was seen as an ordeal to settle the quarrel. But with the introduction of such international courts of justice in the twentieth century, the recourse to war as an instrument of State policy has been outlawed.