The Just War Tradition: Restraint on the Use of Force or Partner in Crime?

Abstract

Nicholas Rengger's Just War and International Order: The Uncivil Condition in World Politics is a masterful work of scholarship in which the author develops a counterintuitive argument that the just war tradition (JWT) has become complicit in the expanding use of violence that characterizes the international system. The JWT is widely viewed as a constraint on the use of force because it treats the use of force as just only under particular conditions and only if utilized in particular ways. Rengger's broad and sophisticated intellectual history calls this widely held belief into question with his contention that the JWT has developed in a way that authorizes an expanding scope of violence. Rengger is not the first to claim that the world is gripped by increasing violence. Many others have made similar claims and some have argued that this increasing use of force is just in response to humanitarian crisis or, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as part of a crusade against terrorism.