Introduction: Non-state Actors and the Just War Tradition

Abstract

This volume is about the ethics of war in an era in which non-state actors are playing an increasingly prominent role in armed conflict. While the notion that nation-states have a monopoly on the use of organized violence has proved analytically useful in the field of international relations, it is becoming clear that this is no longer an empirically airtight observation, if it ever was. From the July War of 2006, when Hizbollah launched some 150 rockets per day into the territory of Israel, to the ongoing war in Iraq, where the United States Department of Defense employs some 100,000 private military contractors (30,000 of them armed) that operate largely independent of the sovereign jurisdiction of a state, non-state actors are demonstrating a striking array of state-like military capabilities and judicative capacities.1 How can these twenty-first-century non-state entities be accommodated by prevailing normative frameworks that seek to place moral limitations and requirements upon those who seek to use armed force? Given that our moral vocabulary about war is primarily equipped to apply to the conduct of states, how are these state-centric normative frameworks impacted by the presence and practices of these non-states?