War Tradition Research Articles

Force and the international community: Blair’s Chicago speech and the criteria for intervention

Tony Blair’s April 1999 Chicago speech is widely seen as foreshadowing his later decision to support the invasion of Iraq. Two sets of context for the speech are described: other criteria for the use of force, going back to the Just War tradition and more recent contributions from Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell, and the December 1998 strikes against Iraq and the Kosovo War, which began in March 1999. The origins of the five factors mentioned when considering force are explored and their implications assessed.

The Changing Nature of the Just War Tradition: How Our Changing Environment Ought to Change the Foundations of Just War Theory

It is becoming ever more apparent how quickly and dramatically our environment is changing. That changing environment must, in turn, change the way we think about just war theory. When examining jus ad bellum, jus in bello, jus post bellum, and a novel set of considerations referred to as jus para bellum, it becomes apparent that there exists an urgent need for changes not only to the content of just war principles, but also to the principles themselves.

The Markets for Force: Privatization of Security across World Regions. Edited by Molly Dunigan and Ulrich Petersohn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 224p. $55.00. - Outsourcing War: The Just War Tradition in the Age of Military Privatization. By Amy E. Eckert. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 200p. $39.95.

The Markets for Force: Privatization of Security across World Regions. Edited by Molly Dunigan and Ulrich Petersohn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 224p. $55.00. - Outsourcing War: The Just War Tradition in the Age of Military Privatization. By Amy E. Eckert. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 200p. $39.95.

Taking ‘justness’ seriously in just war: who are the ‘miserable comforters’ now?

The laws of war are under mounting pressure and yet recent developments in the ethics of war have encouraged a growing disjunction between ethics and the law. Is this a problem, and does just war have a responsibility to address it? How then should we think about the relationship between ethics and law in war? Focusing on the debates between orthodox and revisionist theorists about principles of liability and immunity in war, I argue that these are actually about competing conceptions of justness. Revisionists privilege a ‘best ethics’ approach to justness, whereas orthodox theorists tend to work within a more rounded conception that embraces the legal and political dimensions of the regulation of war. I argue that there is a danger that those revisionist theorists, despite their impressive ethical innovations, nonetheless operate in a reductive way that does little to assist with the contemporary plight of law, and may inadvertently offer but ‘miserable comfort’ to those caught up in the battlefield. In contrast, the just war tradition generally is rooted in a practice that makes greater allowance for a politically configured concept of war, and takes more seriously the requirement for effective law.

Guns, Gore and God: Bishop Gore and the First World War

AbstractMany have been deeply critical of the Church of England’s response to the First World War, which has been seen as insufficiently critical of Government policy and too influenced by the war spirit. Charles Gore (Bishop of Oxford, 1911–19) provides a fascinating case study of how one independently minded Anglican thinker arrived at swift and unwavering support for the war, while simultaneously trying to mount a ‘counterpoise’ to some elements of the war mentality. This article describes and evaluates Gore’s use of the just war tradition, and the efficacy of the counterpoise he attempted. Analysis of his thought reveals a curious mix of hard-headed strategic realism about what would secure a just and lasting peace, and striking naiveté about what war actually entailed.

Sovereignty, Pluralism, and Regular War: Wolff and Vattel’s Enlightenment Critique of Just War

Since its early origins, just war discourse has had two contrasting functions: it has sought to speak law and morals to power, and thus to restrain the use of force, but it has also served to authorize and legitimize the use of force. Critical voices have recently alerted to the increasing use of authorization and legitimization in a broader context of hegemonic and unilateral appropriations of just war discourse. In this article, I show that such critiques of just war have a long history, and reconstruct the powerful challenge that two of the foremost international jurists of the Enlightenment—Christian Wolff and Emer de Vattel—mounted against early modern accounts of just war. Their neglected theory of “regular war” helps us to recover a sense of what a truly pluralist and anti-hegemonic doctrine of ius ad bellum may look like, and reveals a deep tension in the just war tradition between the criteria of political authority and just cause.

Excuses, justifications, and the just war tradition: are there good reasons to kill the Naked Soldier?

ABSTRACTIn war there is a phenomenon known as the Naked Soldier problem (NS). A combatant discovers a vulnerable enemy combatant who is unable to defend himself and usually unaware of the combatant’s presence. This enemy combatant is not presently engaged in fighting and not threatening the lives of others. While killing the NS is legally permissible, the question I address in this essay is whether or not there can be a moral justification for doing so. I think such a moral justification is lacking, and there are only excuses for killing the NS. In this essay, I distinguish between a justification and an excuse and then I examine four traditional reasons given for the acceptability of killing in war to see if any of them are (a) justifications for killing in war in general and (b) justifications for killing the Naked Soldier, specifically.

A Practically Informed Morality of War: Just War, International Law, and a Changing World Order

AbstractJust war, international law, and world order are all historically conditioned realities that interrelate with one another in complex ways. This paper explores their historical development and current status while critically examining their interrelationship. It begins with exploring just war as a basic frame for analysis and interconnection with the other two realities. Just war is not an abstract body of moral thought but instead a practically informed morality of war rooted in Christian thought and law, Roman law, and the practice of statecraft. The essay notes the importance of the ideas of jus gentium and jus naturale in just war's fundamental formation, as well as the parallel between its three basic features—sovereign authority, just cause, and the end of peace—and the three goods or ends of politics as classically defined, namely, order, justice, and peace. The essay then moves out to explore the historical and thematic relations between just war tradition and international law, especially the law of war, arguing that these together define a moral and legal structure that is normative for world order. The final section of the paper considers the functioning of the institutions of world order in the context of challenges from rival cultural understandings of war, law, and world order and from the rise of nonstate actors in the international sphere, arguing for dialogical efforts aimed at strengthening both the moral and legal basis for world order against contemporary threats to that order.

Outsourcing war: the just war tradition in the age of military privatization

Outsourcing war: the just war tradition in the age of military privatization

Strategy & Entailments: The Enduring Role of Law in the U.S. Armed Forces

This essay aims to redescribe key moments in the history of American military engagements to account for a persistent role that law has played in these conflicts. The law of war tradition has persisted since the War of Independence, we argue, because of an internal dynamic that makes it both strategically useful and costly for the United States to commit itself to rule-bound warfare. Invoking the laws of war to advance the strategic interests of the United States, American soldiers and statesmen have found, entails consequences beyond their control, making reversals in position more costly and enabling critiques in the language of the law. These entailments, we argue, are built into the enduring strategic value of the laws of war. The law has remained useful not because it can claim perfect neutrality, but because it has force independent of the interests for which it is mobilized.

How We Fight: Ethics in War

As indicated by the editors, the ten essays in this volume “arose from a conference on just war theory held at the University of Sheffield [United Kingdom] in August 2010” (vii). The authors are all academics and all but two are philosophers; the outliers are professors of law and of politics. The emphasis is indeed on just war theory, not investigation of the development of the just war tradition over many centuries in theological, philosophical, or legal contexts, or of its application to historical cases from the remote or recent past. One should not look here for scholarly illumination, say, of the justification given for the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2003. This despite the fact that four of the essayists are employed at universities in the U.S. and two in the U.K., with the remainder representing Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Israel.

An ethical defense of treason by means of espionage

This essay argues that treason by means of espionage is ethically justified when six factors are present, two of which are: that the political community being betrayed fails to secure for its citizens basic human rights and other means of peaceful or otherwise lawful protest are unavailable. The paper begins by analyzing the application of several theories of ethics to treason, including: consequentialism, deontology, the Just War tradition, and Michael Walzer’s influential concept of ‘dirty hands.’ It then criticizes these points of view and offers an account of jus ad proditione per intelligentia (just treason by means of espionage) based upon Aristotelian thinking about ethics and politics.

Justifying Cyber-intelligence?

ABSTRACTThe surge in threats aided by or carried out through cyberspace has placed significant pressure on the intelligence community to adapt or leave itself open to attack. Indeed, many in both political and intelligence circles argue for access to ever greater amounts of cyber information in order to catch potential threats before they become real. By collecting all our digital information, the intelligence community argues that it is not only able to detail what people have done or are currently doing but also predict what their next move might be. However, the ethical implications are unclear and the backlash following Edward Snowden’s revelations have shown that such activities are not without controversy. This leaves the debate stuck between the important, ethical role that intelligence can play and the potential for its unrestrained use to cause undue harm. This paper will resolve this by giving greater detail to cyber-intelligence practices, highlighting the different levels of harm that the various intelligence operations can cause. The essence of this paper is not that cyber-intelligence should be banned outright, but that it can be justified given the necessary circumstances. Therefore, the paper will develop a specialised set of Just Cyber-Intelligence Principles, built on the just war tradition, to outline if and when such activities are justified.

Just War Tradition and the Popes: From Pius X to Francis

Which are the ways of knowing, understanding and justifying war by the Popes since the twentieth century? The Catholic Church has a long tradition to determine the need of wars, called the Christian just war founded by St. Augustine. Since the twentieth century, however, the popes have showed hesitation, contradiction and negligence towards just war approach.

The Tanzanian-Ugandan War: Were the Just War Principles, Islamic Just War Tradition or the Catholic Social Ethics followed?

The Tanzanian-Ugandan War: Were the Just War Principles, Islamic Just War Tradition or the Catholic Social Ethics followed?

Revisiting John Howard Yoder for Modern Contextual Political Theology

The goal of this article is to examine the political theology of John Howard Yoder, who was one of the prominent theologians in the twentieth century, and also to discover what his political theology can provide for modern contextual political theology in the twenty-first century. In order to examine his political theology, firstly, this article finds that he adopts the biblical approach,,which focuses on the works of Jesus on earth, as his methodology, that his political stances are nonviolent pacifism with anti-Constantinianism and radical pacifism for the minority, and that the main themes of his political theology are the idea that “God will fight for us” and the notion of the cross as alternative. Based on this examination, secondly, this article seeks to discover the current meaning of Yoder’s political theology and make a challenge to modern political theology. Three points are discovered in this process: an awakening of his biblical approach, his pacifistic reinterpretation of violent history, and his pursuit of the cross as alternative. What this article ultimately anticipates is that these three points would become three contributions of Yoder’s nonviolent political theology to modern contextual political theology in the early twenty-first century during a time in which pacifism has been relatively weakened and the just war tradition has been pervasive via the Iraq War.

Were Those Decisions Righteously Made? The Chinese Tradition of Righteous War and China’s Decisions for War, 1950–1979

This research provides the first empirical study examining the actual role that the Chinese Righteous War Tradition (CRWT) played in Chinese decisions for external war between 1950 and 1979. It aims to answer particularly whether the consideration of righteous war was treated as the decisive influence or simply as an instrument for legitimating such a decision. This research traces the role that the CRWT played in successive Chinese leaders' decision in three cases—the Korean War, the Sino-Indian War, and the Sino-Vietnamese War. The findings indicate that the ideas of the CRWT were largely used to assess and legitimate the decision for external war. However, the assessment of righteous causes generally occupied a lower priority and did not play the decisive role in determining the decision for external war. The actual role of the CRWT may largely be an instrument to help the Chinese to find legitimacy, and the legitimacy may have the potential to assist the Chinese to choose what should be done from among the options based on different pragmatic calculations.

What is war good for? Background ideas and assumptions about the legitimacy, utility, and costs of offensive war

Explores the concept of ‘background’ taken-for-granted ideas in politics, linking this notion to Habermas’ ‘lifeworld’ and Focault’s ‘episteme’ Explicates decision-makers’ background ideas about the utility and effectiveness of war Suggests that offensive war is not as effective as decision-makers tend to assume and that decision-makers tend to discount the costs of war Shows that beliefs about the effectiveness of war—specifically the articulation of military necessity and proportionality—tend to weaken the just war and international law limitations on war ‘Background ideas’ are the essential foundation for decision-making, action, and institutionalized practices. These ideas are sometimes explicitly articulated—when defended or asserted in new contexts—but more often simply assumed and unstated. Decision-makers often believe that war works—that it is effective—and moreover that war can achieve objectives at comparatively low cost. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations in the just war tradition—including last resort, necessity, probability of success, and proportionality, and the idea of double effect—are also explicitly concerned with utility—whether and when war works. Utility is also an essential element in the discourse about military necessity. Does war work? What is it good for? Why does it tend to extremes of violence? What are its costs? How do decision-makers hold onto beliefs about the utility of war in the face of disconfirming evidence?

Witnessing the protection racket: Rethinking justice in/of wars through gender lenses

Using as a starting point both feminist critiques of just war theorizing and feminist reconstructions of traditional theoretical approaches to the concept, causes and consequences of war(s), this article looks to outline a feminist approach to re-theorizing war ethics that explicitly accounts for and rejects the current gender biases it creates and reifies. It begins by suggesting that the just war tradition is conceptually and empirically inseparable from gendered notions of warfare, which are gender security and to securitize gender. Therefore, it suggests, war ethics through gender lenses need to be rebuilt from the ground up, paying attention to the heretofore gendered nature not only of war ethics, but also of war justificatory narratives, war practices and war experiences.The article suggests a dialectical hermeneutic framework for feminist war ethics as a basis for theorizing forward from the longstanding feminist recognition that the very concept of warfare is gendered, relying on Robin Schott’s (2008) work on witness as a theoretical basis. After outlining this approach generally, the article concludes by sketching out an example of the potential for a feminist approach to war ethics in action, examining the use whole-body image scanners in airport security assemblages.

Persons, Personhood and Proportionality : Building on a Just War Approach to Intelligence Ethics

There are a number of different approaches that one can take to intelligence ethics. In recent years, Michael Quinlan, Ross Bellaby and David Omand have each argued that the principles of the Just War tradition can be usefully employed to assess the ethics of intelligence (Bellaby 2012; Omand 2012; Quinlan 2007) from a deontological perspective. I have elsewhere argued that Just War principles are helpful in assessing surveillance (Macnish 2014), which has obvious overlaps with intelligence work. In this chapter I defend the approach of employing the principles of the Just War tradition to intelligence and develop these principles further than Quinlan, Bellaby and Omand have done so far. First, I consider the benefits of this approach. I then look at the challenges it faces, and in so doing present a comprehensive list of those challenges, answering each in turn. Finally, I accept that one challenge in particular (that of a lack of real guidance) holds particular weight. I address this challenge through a consideration of the Just War principle of proportionality as it applies to coercive techniques of intelligence collection. When weighing proportionality, it is tempting to see the assault in coercive intelligence as solely against the individual. I argue that the assault is also against personhood and the wider community, and goes both deeper and wider than an assault ‘merely’ against a single person. I conclude that coercive practices in intelligence are not mala in se, but that they are justifiable only in rare cases.