Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and The Modern Age

Abstract

This book is not only about Just War Theory. Rather, it is a collection of essays by leading international historians who have analyzed how wars in the modern age have been justified in different political, economic and cultural contexts.1 It starts from the premise that wars have always been with us. Each essay is placed in historical context with the intention to question whether the Just War Tradition remains a valid theoretical framework for governing principles of how and why wars are fought. If Just War Theory (albeit with important redefinitions) has survived the test of different types of war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will it remain robust in the face of the challenges of the twenty-first century? In the modern age, once wars have begun, belligerent states, in order rapidly to mobilize opinion, invariably begin publishing accounts of how the war has been caused. They do so because the issue of responsibility is one of the key elements in the propaganda battle for ‘hearts and minds’. The relationship between the need to justify war and the means of communications is the other central feature of this volume. Propaganda came of age in the twentieth century. The development of mass- and multi-media offered a fertile ground for propaganda and total war — and, later, global conflict and asymmetric warfare — provided the impetus needed for its growth. Over the past 100 years, ‘opinion management’ has become a major preoccupation of states, in times of both war and peace.KeywordsLegitimate AuthoritySupreme EmergencyBelligerent StateAsymmetric WarfareDaily ExpressThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.