The Rights of War and Peace is the first fully historical account of the formative period of modern theories of international law. Professor Tuck examines the arguments over the moral basis for war and international aggression, and links the debates to the writings of the great political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. The book illuminates the presuppositions behind much current political theory, and puts into a new perspective the connection between liberalism and imperialism.

ABSTRACTThe juridical force of time forms a critical, but hitherto unexplored part of Hugo Grotius’s discourse on the justice of war and peace. Grotius defines war as a span of time in which disputed rights and armed conflicts between states are examined in reference to temporal coordinates. This method allows him to adjust otherwise static laws to meet the demands of times and spaces in an increasingly expanded world. In doing so, Grotius is also able to reconcile multiple (...) layers of laws in a temporal framework, which suspends one layer of law, to be revived at later times. Finally, cautious in the use of the language of time, Grotius admits both that right demands immediacy, and that justice suffers delays. By this nexus of delay and emergency, Grotius warns against the abuse of ‘time’ as a legal concept to justify unlawful claims, which still rings with alarm today. (shrink)

This article is part of a Symposium that examines the legal and policy issues raised by the Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll litigation, in which a Hollywood star-turned-governor sued under California's right of publicity laws and under federal copyright law to stop a small Ohio company from selling a bobblehead doll depicting Schwarzenegger in a business suit, with a bandolier of bullets, and brandishing an assault rifle. The article contends that defendants' unauthorized use of the Schwarzenegger image on dolls and their accompanying (...) packaging was permissible as First Amendment-protected free speech under California's right of publicity laws and also constituted fair use under federal copyright law. The article rejects the argument that a First Amendment defense to plaintiff's right of publicity claims was unavailable because a bobblehead doll is not a "traditional" medium of expression for ideas. The article recognizes that overly expansive assertions of rights of publicity and other intellectual property rights threaten to stifle creative expression and diminish the cultural commons. The article also calls for clearer and more consistent recognition of defenses to right of publicity claims, particularly for cases where a defendant's unauthorized appropriation of another's image or likeness is for purposes of caricature, parody, or satire¿especially where the image is that of a politician. It concludes that the settlement of the Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll case illustrates how "strategic" assertions of even objectively non-meritorious rights of publicity can allow powerful plaintiffs to censor unflattering depictions of them and to unduly expand intellectual property rights without full adjudication on the merits of such claims.This insight is critical, because while other scholars have suggested that the "over-protection" of intellectual property rights (including rights of publicity) has a deleterious effect on freedom of expression and the public domain, these criticisms focus almost exclusively on published appellate cases. Yet, as this article reminds us, most cases settle and never become litigated cases, much less published appellate decisions. And most disputes - including intellectual property disputes - never result in formal litigation in the first instance. As with most other areas of the civil disputing process, intellectual property disputes are processed in the "shadow of the law", where repeat players have strategic advantages to shape the outcomes of disputes in their favor. Thus, if we want to know whether intellectual property rights are over-protected, we need to know what happens (and why) in the shadow of intellectual property law. This insight is the basis for the author's empirical research-in-progress focusing on "strategic intellectual property enforcement" by owners of trademarks, copyrights, and patents, including enforcement that never results in litigation and is thus under the radar of what most legal scholars in this area of law examine. (shrink)

I propose to examine here, at the outset, what I call the asymmetry in Thomas Hobbes's thought between his treatment of civil war and war between states, that is to say, between the departure from the state of nature - when that is a condition prevailing between individuals - and the permanency in the state of nature when it forms a condition existing between states. Secondly, I will address the Kantian progression beyond this asymmetry through the dual introduction of the (...) idea of progress and of ‘cosmo-political’ peace. The attention given in recent years by Habermas to the Kantian idea of perpetual peace [Habermas, 1996], the recent events in Kosovo and Chechnya, and their implications for the shape of an international penal tribunal to judge crimes against humanity, invigorate the questions of civil peace and of rights which transcend state frontiers. (shrink)

The paper examines the justification of warfare. The main thesis is that war is very difficult to justify, and justification by invoking “justice” is not the way to succeed it. Justification and justness are very different venues: while the first attempts to explain the nature of war and offer possible schemes of resolution, the second aims to endorse a specific type of warfare as correct and hence allowed – which is the crucial part of “just war theory.” However, “just war (...) theory,” somewhat Manichean in its nature, has very deep flaws. Its final result is criminalization of war, which reduces warfare to police action, and finally implies a very strange proviso that one side has a right to win. All that endangers the distinction between ius ad bellum and ius in bello, and destroys the collective character of warfare. Justification of war is actually quite different – it starts from the definition of war as a kind of conflict which cannot be solved peacefully, but for which there is mutual understanding that it cannot remain unresolved. The aim of war is not justice, but peace, i.e. either a new articulation of peace, or a restoration of the status quo ante. Additionally, unlike police actions, the result of war cannot be known or assumed in advance, giving war its main feature: the lack of control over the future. Control over the future, predictability, is a feature of peace. This might imply that war is a consequence of failed peace, or inability to maintain peace. The explanation of this inability forms the justification of war. Justice is always an important part of it, but justification cannot be reduced to it. The logic contained here refers to ius ad bellum, while ius in bello is relative to various parameters of sensitivity prevalent in a particular time, with the purpose to make warfare more humane and less expensive. (shrink)

Before military action, and even before mobilization, the decision on whether to go to war is debated by politicians, pundits, and the public. As they address the right or wrong of such action, it is also a time when, in the language of the just war tradition, the wise would deeply investigate their true claim to jus ad bellum (“the right of war”). Wars have negative consequences, not the least impinging on human life, and offer infrequent and uncertain benefits, yet (...) war is part of the human condition. James G. Murphy’s insightful analysis of the jus ad bellum criteria—competent authority, just cause, right intention, probability of success, last resort, and proportionality—is grounded in a variety of contemporary examples from World War I through Vietnam, the "soccer war" between Honduras and El Salvador, Afghanistan, and the Middle East conflict. Murphy argues persuasively that understanding jus ad bellum requires a primary focus on the international common good and the good of peace. Only secondarily should the argument about going to war hinge on the right of self-defense; in fact, pursuing the common good requires political action, given that peace is not simply the absence of violence. He moves on to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the jus ad bellum criteria, contending that some criteria depend logically on others—and that competent authority, not just cause, is ultimately the most significant criterion in an analysis of going to war. This timely study will be of special interest to scholars and students in ethics, war and peace, and international affairs. (shrink)

Autonomous and automatic weapons would be fire and forget: you activate them, and they decide who, when and how to kill; or they kill at a later time a target you’ve selected earlier. Some argue that this sort of killing is always wrong. If killing is to be done, it should be done only under direct human control. (E.g., Mary Ellen O’Connell, Peter Asaro, Christof Heyns.) I argue that there are surprisingly many kinds of situation where this is false and (...) where the use of Automated Weapons Systems would in fact be morally required. These include cases where a) once one has activated a weapon expected then to behave lethally, it would be appropriate to let it continue because this is part of a plan whose goodness one was best positioned to evaluate before activating the weapon; b) one expects better long-term consequences from allowing it to continue; c) allowing it to continue would express a decision you made to be resolute, a decision that could not have advantaged you had it not been true that you would carry through with it; d) the weapon is mechanically not recallable, so that, to not allow it to carry through, you would have had to refrain from activating it in the first place, something you expected would have disastrous consequences; e) you must deputize necessary killings to autonomous machines in order to protect yourself from guilt you shouldn’t have to bear; f) it would be morally better for the burden of responsibility for the killing to be shared among several agents, and the agents deputizing killing to machines can do this, especially where it’s not predictable which machine will be successful; g) a killing would be morally better done with elements of randomness and lack of deliberation, and a (relatively stupid) machine could do this where a person could not; h) the machine would be acting as a Doomsday Device, so that it could not have had its hoped for deterrent effect had you not ensured that you would be unable to recall it if enemy action activated it; i) letting it carry through is a necessary part of its own learning process, and you expect that this learning will have salutary effects later on; j) human intervention in the machine’s operation would disastrously impair its precision, or its speed and efficiency; k) using non-automated methods would require human resources you just don’t have in a task that nevertheless must be done (e.g., using land-mines to protect remote installations); l) the weapon has such horrible and indiscriminate power that it is doubtful whether it could be actually used in ways compatible with International Humanitarian Law and the Laws of War, which require that weapons be used only in ways respecting distinctness, necessity and proportionality, but its threat of use could respect these principles in affording deterrence provided human error cannot lead to their accidental deployment, this requiring that they be controlled by carefully designed autonomous and automatic systems. I then consider objections based on conceptions of human dignity and find that very often dignity too is best served by autonomous machine killing. Examples include saving your village by activating a robot to kill invading enemies who would inflict great indignity on your village, using a suicide robot to save yourself from a less dignified death at enemy hands, using a robotic drone to kill someone otherwise not accessible in order to restore dignity to someone this person killed and to his family, and using a robot to kill someone who needs killing, but the killing of whom by a human executioner would soil the executioner’s dignity. I conclude that what matters in rightful killing isn’t necessarily that it be under the direct control of a human, but that it be under the control of morality; and that could sometimes require use of an autonomous or automated device. (This paper was formerly called "Fire and Forget: A Defense of the Use of Autonomous Weapons in War" on Philpapers; the current title is the title of the published version.). (shrink)

The military might of the modern era poses devastating threats to humankind. Wars result from struggles for material or ideological power. In this context the probability of flouting agreements made during peaceful times is great. The rights of victims and the rights of medical personnel are vulnerable to State and military momentum in the quest for sovereignty. Scholars, scientists and physicians enjoy little enough influence during times of peace and we should be sanguine about their influence during (...) war. But we also must avoid becoming co-opted by partisan political forces. The universal ideals for which we strive, need to be cherished and kept central in our field of vision if we are to rise above man's basest instincts and if we are to preserve professional integrity, individuality and humanitarian concern for the sanctity of life — even the lives of our foes who are engaged in battle against us. Such compassion also recognizes the coercion implicit in recruiting persons into wars they detest and which pits them against their own image. Man's inhumanity to man, most evident during war, must not be allowed to pervade the sanctuary of medical care. Health professionals must constantly be encouraged to serve humankind with empathy and compassion and great social effort needs to be expended to facilitate this role globally and under all conditions. (shrink)

The concept of jus post bellum deals with moral considerations in the aftermath of conflict and is concerned with how a just peace should look like. This paper analyses the concept of jus post bellum as developed by contemporary Just War theorists. Its aim is to provide a critical perspective on the proposed substantial scope of this concept. In other words, it will consider the question: in restoring peace after war, is it justified for just combatants to change (...) the political structure of a defeated aggressor? The piece will be divided into two main parts. First, through a review of the literature, I define the current state of the art on jus post bellum thinking in relation to a number of key aspects of this concept. What does241 it entail? Which principles is it made of? What sort of activities do just war theorists speak about when they speak of creating a just peace? Second, I focus on the principle of ?political rehabilitation? of the defeated state: is it permissible? Under what circumstances? While considering these questions and authors' views on this matter, the paper will provide a critical reappraisal of the current debate on the justifiability of political reconstruction in post-conflict states. (shrink)

Based on the experiences of anthropologists and others who document abuses and serve as expert witnesses, case studies from around the world offer insight into reparations proceedings; the ethical struggles associated with attempts to secure reparations; the professional and personal risks to researchers, victims, and human rights advocates; and how to come to terms with the political compromises of reparations in the face of the human need for justice.".

In a significant early case, the ICTY commented: “The essence of the whole corpus of international humanitarian law as well as human rights law lies in the protection of the human dignity of every person…. The general principle of respect for human dignity is . . . the very raison d'être of international humanitarian law and human rights law.” Is it true that international humanitarian law and international human rights law share the same “essence,” and that essence (...) is the general principle of respect for human dignity? Is it true that, in the words of Charles Beitz, humanitarian law is “perhaps better described as the law of ‘human rights in armed conflicts’”? To answer yes, I argue, amounts to a reinterpretation of IHL that drifts far from its history. This reinterpretation is what I label human rights thinking . In its origins, IHL was not designed to protect human dignity, but to reduce human suffering; it was a form of disaster relief. Human rights law, by contrast, originated as a blueprint for the kind of peacetime societies that would no longer plunge the world into what the UN Charter calls the “untold sorrow” of war. Nevertheless, law changes. Perhaps the nature of IHL has evolved over time in the direction of human rights thinking, and should evolve that way. That is the view I defend-–with some qualifications-–in the final sections of this essay. First, I explore the very different genealogies of IHL and human rights law, and explain how human rights thinking migrated into IHL. I attribute the migration to international criminal law, military occupations, and reactions to the U.S. war on terrorism. In the final sections, I explore two ways human rights thinking can be pursued in wars. One of them, I will argue, overplays and overestimates what human rights thinking can accomplish. It does so by, in effect, willing away fundamental differences between war and peace. The other is an approach that I have defended for more than three decades. It consists, at bottom, of taking a civilian’s-eye view of the disasters of war and reading the law accordingly-–recognizing, one might say, that Mother Courage and her children matter just as much to the law of war as Henry V and his band of brothers. (shrink)

Veteran scholar and peace activist David Cortright offers a definitive history of the human striving for peace and an analysis of its religious and intellectual roots. This authoritative, balanced, and highly readable volume traces the rise of peace advocacy and internationalism from their origins in earlier centuries through the mass movements of recent decades: the pacifist campaigns of the 1930s, the Vietnam antiwar movement, and the waves of disarmament activism that peaked in the 1980s. Also explored are (...) the underlying principles of peace - nonviolence, democracy, social justice, and human rights - all placed within a framework of 'realistic pacifism'. Peace brings the story up-to-date by examining opposition to the Iraq War and responses to the so-called 'war on terror'. This is history with a modern twist, set in the context of current debates about 'the responsibility to protect', nuclear proliferation, Darfur, and conflict transformation. (shrink)

Although Plato writes less about war than we might expect--especially considering the fact that his dialogues are historically set during the Peloponnesian War--the right conduct of war constitutes a crucial concern for Plato. In both the Alcibiades and Laches dialogues, rightful conduct of war is linked to the practice of virtue. Neither a good statesman nor a good military man can ignore this link, which joins military pursuits not only to courage, but to the whole of virtue, including justice. In (...) the Republic , the passage from a luxurious city to a well-ordered and virtuous city is described by means of the proper education of the city's military guardians, and a teaching of ius in bello --to use a just-war term--for wars between Greeks is outlined. Finally, in the Laws , peace, not war, is presented as the true aim of good laws, and the importance of legitimate authority in war-making is duly emphasized. (shrink)

For over a century, Hegel’s view of war is seen as controversial that results in mutually exclusive interpretations. To reach a proper evaluation of Hegel’s views, it is necessary to consider both Hegel’s initial states of philosophical doctrine about war and peace, and the development of his understanding of war from early works to mature ones. In the first part of the paper, I characterize Kant’s position on war, since it was the starting point for Hegel. Contrary to popular (...) representations about Kant as an exclusive pacifist, the philosopher of Koenigsberg had a philosophical-historical treatment of war, in which the war appeared as something sublime. However, both legal-ethical peace understanding and veto of war from the point of practical reason were not dominant in Kant’s philosophy, subordinating the sublime treatment of war. Kant’s next contemporaries could not already keep this position, emphasizing either one or the other side of war interpretation. Starting from the early writings (the paper “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law” or manuscripts “System of Ethical Life” and “The German Constitution”), Hegel stresses an ethical aspect of war and its necessity, so that the shield is arranged on the way of systems isolation and individuals atomization, and the unity in its ethical health is saved. Perpetual peace, on the contrary, leads to diseases. The statement about equality of claims and the same truthfulness of warring parties’ rights is the originality of Hegel’s view. It makes absolutely impossible the war evaluation from the point of its justice and injustice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity by Rob Arner, and: Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Justice and Peace ed. by Paul Alexander, and: Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy by Eli Sarasan McCarthyBrian D. BerryReview of Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity ROB ARNER Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010. 136 pp. (...) $15.56Review of Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Justice and Peace EDITED BY PAUL ALEXANDER Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 182 pp. $19.80Review of Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy ELI SARASAN MCCARTHY Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 259 pp. $27.00In Consistently Pro-Life, Rob Arner (who teaches at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia) makes the case that Christians should not kill other human beings—regardless of the circumstances. Taking as his point of departure the vigilante killing of abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, in 2009, he argues not only that abortion is always morally impermissible but so also is [End Page 217] the murder of abortion doctors and the use of the death penalty to punish those who murder them. In addition, he turns to the early church fathers to contend that, prior to Constantine, “without exception, the church strongly condemned the taking of human life in any form whatsoever”—thus rejecting abortion and infanticide, the blood sport of the Roman games, suicide, and killing in war (120). This was because the New Testament witness to Jesus and his death on the cross required early Christians to view “the means as just as important, if not more important, than the ends” (xiii).Arner supplements this deontological argument for Christian pacifism, which he learned from John Howard Yoder, with a brief consideration of the virtue of patience cultivated in the early churches, reflecting the influence of Stanley Hauerwas on his thought. This “cardinal virtue” connoting “longsuffering, forbearance, patient endurance”—as found in Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:38–48)—enabled early Christians to practice non-violent resistance “deferring personal revenge in favor of God’s vindicating justice” (98). If Christians were to adopt this same consistently pro-life ethic today, argues Arner, it would “lead to greater healing and peace in our blood-soaked world” (121). The book closes with three appendices—one of which is a chart of terminology that dehumanizes vulnerable victims, including unborn human beings. Unfortunately, the book does not have an index.Christ at the Checkpoint, edited by Paul Alexander (professor of Christian ethics and public policy at the Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University), includes thirteen plenary addresses delivered at a conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict organized by Palestinian Evangelical Christians at Bethlehem Bible College in March 2010. Almost all of the contributors to this volume—including biblical scholars, theologians, ethicists, pastors, activists, and others—criticize the ideology of Christian Zionism and its support of a theology of dispensationalism that, in their view, distorts the scriptures and fosters violence rather than reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In his own presentation titled “What Can Pentecostals and Charismatics Do for Peace with Justice in Israel and Palestine?,” Alexander—who describes himself as a former “one-sided” Christian Zionist who later discovered the writings of Yoder and Hauerwas—appeals to Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and urges Pentecostals to create church communities “that cultivate persons of character and conviction, who through habits, practices, and action live out the core of our faith” (69). Along with being faithful to the “greater challenges” of love, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, he argues that they should publicly declare that Jesus does not want Israel to continue the occupation of Palestine, and they should engage in the “easier tasks” of promoting human rights, lending support to United Nations Resolutions, and working toward a two-state solution (72). “The time has come in human history,” writes Alexander, “for Pentecostals to speak and act prophetically regarding this present injustice … [End Page 218] and to use every nonviolent weapon in our arsenal—stories, preaching... (shrink)

Is there an intimate connection between nationalism and war? Does the right to national self-determination invariably lead to bellicose relations with others? These have been central concerns in the literature on nationalism and war. They have also been concerns of political thinkers/activists who have worried about these connections and have sought to fashion a conception of national identity free of its warlike proclivities. This essay explores the link of war, nationalism, and national self-determination with reference to the founding of the (...) state of Israel. And it reflects on the views of Martin Buber whose writings on Zionism constantly engaged these questions in searching for a peace-oriented nationalism. (shrink)

War is Hell is a study of the philosophy of war and peace, ranging critically from ancient peace thinking to today. The author uses a Socratic method, focused on political philosophy rather than on cultural or psychological aspects of war and peace making. The book is not a treatise on ethics, but rather an analysis of some aspects of the nature of war and peace. This book is a study of war – and by extension, (...) class='Hi'>peace – from the standpoint of political theory. For all those who think there is too much war, and to deal with that we need to search for new ways of thinking. (shrink)

The two concepts "war" and "peace" and the two sets of social phenomena underlying them exercise a profound influence on the minds of men and on their historical destiny. Therefore, it is natural for everyone to think about these phenomena in one way or another, to try to understand their nature, essence, and role in history and, in the final analysis, to come to some conclusions about the possibility and means of preventing war and attaining a firm peace (...) on earth. (shrink)

Nearly four decades after a revolution, experiencing one of the longest wars in contemporary history, facing political and ideological threats by regional radicals such as ISIS and the Taliban, and having succeeded in negotiations with six world powers over her nuclear program, Iran appears as an experienced Muslim country seeking to build bridges with its Sunni neighbours as well as with the West. "Ethics of War and Peace in Iran and Shi'i Islam explores the wide spectrum of theoretical approaches (...) and practical attitudes concerning the justifications, causes and conduct of war in Iranian-Shi'i culture. By examining primary and secondary sources, and investigating longer lasting factors and questions over circumstantial ones, Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati seeks to understand modern Iranian responses to war and peace. His work is the first in its field to look into the ethics of war and peace in Iran and Shi'i Islam. It provides a prism through which the binary source of the Iranian national and religious identity informs Iranian responses to modernity. By doing so, the author reveals that a civilization-conscious soul in modern Iran is re-emerging. (shrink)

Can war ever be just? By what right do we charge people with war crimes? Can war itself be a crime? What is a good peace treaty? Since the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, many wars have erupted, inflaming such areas as the Persian Gulf, Central Africa and Central Europe. Brutalities committed during these conflicts have sparked new interest in the ethics of war and peace. Brian Orend explores the ethics of war and peace from (...) a Kantian perspective, emphasizing human rights protection, the rule of international law and a fully global concept of justice. Contending that Kant’s just war doctrine has not been given its due, Orend displays Kant’s theory to its fullest, impressive effect. He then completely and clearly updates Kant’s perspective for application to our time. Along the way, he criticizes pacifism and realism, explores the nature of human rights protection during wartime, and defends a theory of just war. He also looks ahead to future developments in global institutional reform using cases from the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda to illustrate his argument. Controversial and timely, perhaps the most important contribution War and International Justice: A Kantian Perspective makes is with regard to the question of justice after war. Orend offers a principled theory of war termination, making an urgent plea to reform current international law. (shrink)

This book considers historical and current events from the standpoint of moral philosophy. It describes: real wars and the ways in which they have or have not been fought according to principles of justice; terrorism, torture and the effects of scientific discoveries on the way war is conducted; peace movements and the influences of religion on the ideology surrounding warfare. The book criticises the ethical theories of analytical philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Ethics of War and Peace is a lively introduction to one of the oldest but still most relevant ethical debates. Focusing on the philosophical questions surrounding the ethics of modern war, Helen Frowe presents contemporary just war theory in a stimulating and accessible way. This 2nd edition includes new material on weapons and technology, and humanitarian intervention, in addition to: theories of self-defence and national defence jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum the moral status (...) of combatants the principle of non-combatant immunity and the nature of terrorism and the moral status of terrorists. Each chapter uses examples and concludes with a summary, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading to aid student engagement, learning and revision. The glossary has been expanded to cover the full range of relevant terminology. This is the ideal textbook for students of philosophy and politics approaching this important area for the first time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity by Stanley HauerwasStephen M. VantasselWar and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity STANLEY HAUERWAS Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011. 188 pp. $19.99Stanley Hauerwas continues his prodigious publishing schedule with a book exploring the complex idea of war and the formation of American identity. In his introduction, Hauerwas makes three claims: (1) (...) war has been abolished in Christ; (2) Christians, and likely others, do not recognize how war has taken on religious trappings and become a false liturgy; and (3) the church in its localized placement should embody—and not simply proclaim—an alternative to war. Hauerwas seems to assume the first point since he avoids discussing how war has been abolished in Christ and instead focuses on the second and third points.The book is divided into three sections. Part 1, “America and War,” surveys how Christian terms such as “sacrifice” and “redemption” were interwoven into the nation’s understanding of war. War, Hauerwas argues, has been elevated to an essential component of American identity. He notes that some have argued that war is necessary for democracy to be sustained and flourish since it unites Americans and defends our wealth. Hauerwas decries how Christians, and Protestants in particular, have allowed non-Christian ideas (i.e., notions of America’s use of war) to enter the church. In chapter 3, Hauerwas turns arguments in favor of just war theory on their head by stating that it is not as realistic as claimed. [End Page 243]Part 2, “The Liturgy of War,” engages the moral justification for war. Hauerwas disputes the notion that it is easy to morally separate the violence of war from other forms of violence (44). Although openly admitting his inability to provide an adequate definition of war, Hauerwas continues to believe that war should be abolished. He decries the idea that war-making is virtuous and a proper source for giving society its story and meaning.Part 3, “The Ecclesial Difference,” attempts to outline how the local church can embody principles of nonviolence and thereby show the world another way of living. The local church is critical to Hauerwas’s view because he questions the value of universal notions of justice. Justice, he argues, is identified and understood in the concrete display of a people (114). It is in the church’s diversity that it can model for the world how unity can be maintained without the use of violence.Hauerwas’s insights into the insidious ways war can be baptized in Christian thought and practice should cause all Christians to pause and consider how their allegiance to Christ might have been blurred by an improper allegiance to the state. His use of contemporary scholarship is thought provoking and raises serious questions regarding notions of justice, the Church, and how we understand and frame the use of violence. He rightly exhorts Christians not to make peace with the status quo because we have a down payment on the next age in our possession now. But I think Hauerwas’s suggestion that war is abolished is either an expression of an overrealized eschatology or moral supersessionism. Likewise, I would suggest that America’s use of the language of “sacrifice” and “higher purpose” in discussions about war is not just an attempt to harness the power of religious language but an attempt to moderate the glorification and triumphalism of war. One would only need to compare how America discusses war with that of the ancient Assyria or Egypt to understand the difference. In the end, I suspect readers will find Hauerwas’s arguments to be more evocative than demonstrative. [End Page 244]Stephen M. VantasselKing’s Evangelical Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Throughout the text of the Han Feizi, we see opposition to traditional (and often Confucian) perspectives on a wide range of state activities, both internally and externally. This antipathy towards the traditional morally-based criteria for justifying state actions extends to the questions of when, how, and if to wage war. In what we may today think of as reasoning akin to Western conceptions of political realism, Han Fei argues that considerations of morality have no place, either in questions of war (...) and peace or, indeed, in broader questions of politics more generally. This is not, though, to say that Han Fei is uninterested in broader questions of when ware and peace are justified. However, such justifications are based not to be justified by appeal to moral concerns. Rather, the fundamental question to be answered is how the strength, security, and flourishing of the state would be affected by warfare. By viewing questions of war and peace from the perspective of state consequentialism, Han Fei believes that we can ascertain the answers to questions not only about when and if to engage in warfare, but also to questions of what particular actions can be justified within the context of war. (shrink)

The author analyzes three waves of the crisis of democracy during the 20th and early 21st centuries. The first crisis of democracy in the early 20th century is caused by the emergence and development of public politics, which challenged the possibility to govern the masses having conflict potential, it balanced the power of the people and universal suffrage with the control of the media in order to maintain the stability of political system. The second wave of the crisis of democracy (...) (the last third of the 20th century) is associated with the destruction of the conventional world and the weakening of the nation-state; and its markers were: the imbalance between the branches of government, the domination of economics over politics, the predominance of equality over freedom, the problematic implementation of human rights, and, as a consequence, the inability to put into practice the national form of democracy. The third wave of crisis (early the 21st century) is accompanied by the transformation of democracy into post-democracy, in which the power of the people is replaced by the power of global capital, and the illusion of consent is reinforced by the prohibition of alternative points of view and the narrowing of the space of issues allowed for discussion in the name of public security. The crisis of the policy to achieve peace through the transformation of the balance of powers into a balance of interests called into question the principles of democracy. On the contrary, post-democracies justify the use of force to spread democracy around the world, and they take an active part in contemporary military conflicts, which can rightly be defined as hybrid proxy wars. Drawing on J. Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality, the author concludes that to overcome the crisis of democracy it is necessary to accept the very possibility of an alternative to this form of government and allow to discuss these previously marginalized issues as well as to maintain the return of the majority to genuine communication and politics, contribute to its enlightenment. (shrink)

I am going in this lecture on ‘Philosophy and Practice’ first to say something about philosophy and then something about practice, in order to show you how they bear on one another. But I must start by paying a tribute to the President of the Society for Applied Philosophy, Professor Sir A. J. Ayer, who has kindly agreed to take the chair at this lecture. I can honestly say that he is more responsible than anybody else for putting me on (...) the right track in moral philosophy. He did this by convincing me, when young, that the ways people were doing it at that time had no future. In the famous chapter on ethics in his marvellously readable and exciting book,Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer was thought to be trying to show that moral philosophy itself, and perhaps even ordinary first-order moral thinking, was a waste of time. From later work of his, and from his occasional pronouncements about moral and political questions, it is evident that the second of these slanders was false. But even on the theoretical side the lessons I learnt from his book were positive as well as negative. That is not to say that the negative lessons were unimportant. Some people have still not absorbed them, and continue to waste our time. But here are two positive points which you will find in Ayer's book, and which for me were crucia. (shrink)

Examines political philosophies of the classic theorists as a means to understand international dilemmas in the post-Cold War world.

The present epoch is one of transition from capitalism to socialism, within which two opposite social systems exist simultaneously. Inasmuch as one of the systems - that of capitalism - is a source of wars, and the system of socialism is the source of peace, questions pertaining to the place of military means in the struggle between the two systems, questions of the struggle between the forces of war and peace and for the cessation of wars between peoples, (...) constitute one of the most important elements in the meaning of the epoch. The resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU "On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution" [0 60-i godovshchine Velikoi Oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii] states: "The Great October opened a new epoch - that of the transition of humanity from capitalism to socialism, the epoch of struggle for liberation of people from imperialism, for cessation of wars between peoples, for overthrow of the dominance of capitalism, for socialism.". (shrink)

"The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the 17th century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers draw on ideas that figure prominently in Kant's moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not been brought into their proper place within these discussions and debates. Kant argues that a special morality governs the permissible use of force because (...) of wars distinctive immorality. He characterizes war as barbaric, because in war might makes right - which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right. The very thing that makes war wrongful also provides the appropriate standard for evaluating the conduct of war, and the only basis for law governing war"--. (shrink)

Theologians have repeatedly addressed the issues of the common and different in Islam and Christianity. With respect to the concepts of war and peace, despite some differences, there is a great deal in common in how they view conflict with violence and how they limit the harmful effects of such a conflict. Both religious traditions rate war as evil. Emphasis is placed on the need for peace as a basis for human existence. The commandment "do not kill" in (...) one form or another is given both in the Bible and in the Qur'an: "Jesus said to him, '... you know the commandments: do not kill...'; "Whoever killed even one soul - except for the punishment for killing or spreading disobedience on earth - is like killing all mankind." The use of military force is an inevitable evil and is only allowed as a last resort. Both traditions agree that there should be no forced conversion to religion, and that there should be restrictive conditions to limit the use of force, violence and war. These restrictions are traditionally divided into those relating to the initiation of war and war. (shrink)

This paper studies both Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government. It suggests that there is a much closer relationship between them than has usually been assumed. In particular, there is a community of language, and of argumentation, underlying their justifications of resistance. This hinges upon the rights, and the law, of war. This language was a Dutch inheritance: it derived specifically from Hugo Grotius' classic The Law of War and Peace (1625). But its development (...) here also drew upon two English contexts: both the political crisis of 1678-83 and the earlier experience of the English civil wars. I have argued elsewhere that the crisis of 1678-83, usually called the exclusion crisis, was at one level a reliving of the experience of the civil wars. It was the Restoration crisis, and it was triggered by a collapse of confidence in the Restoration settlement. Indeed beneath the constitutional veneer of the Restoration period as a whole -- a restoration of constitutional normality as superficial as it was brief -- lay the proximity, and eventually the fact, of political (and judicial) violence. It was within this context that there emerged, in the work of Locke and Sidney, an ideology of political and judicial violence that drew upon the experience of half a century of England's troubles. In so tracing their use of Grotius we will be considering the reflections of some of Early Modern Europe's most influential writers upon what was the primary political problem of their age. (shrink)

The Twenty-fifth Congress of the CPSU exercised a major influence on research on cardinal problems of world development, including the problems of war and peace, which were defined by the congress as the principal question of our time. The Peace Program propounded by the Twenty-fourth Party Congress was pursued and developed so extensively and integrally at the Twenty-fifth Congress that this historical document as a whole came to be termed the Peace Program of the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth (...) Congresses of the CPSU. The Party undertook exceptionally extensive measures to implement the decisions of the Twenty-fifth Congress, and theoretical aspects of the problem of war and peace were comprehensively and profoundly argued and elaborated in the works of L. I. Brezhnev - and other leaders of the Party and Soviet government. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes Just Peace from its closest ‘moral’ neighbours — a stable peace and positive peace. Drawing on both consequentialist and deontological considerations, Allan develops an international ethical scale to evaluate different acts from a moral standpoint, with different levels of conflict as the baseline of ethical behavior. The more extreme the discord, the worse it is considered on the scale; the more harmonious, the better. Arguing that absolute unhappiness and absolute happiness are not of this (...) world, Allan presents eight intermediary moral situations, each being superseded by the next one in ethical terms: genocide, war, non-war, Just War, stable peace, Just Peace, positive peace, and Global Care. He develops an ethic of ‘global care’ based on feminist theories of care, religious and secular declarations on a global ethic, evolutionary theory arguments, and a critique of a liberal human rights approach. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Peace Tobin Siebers University ofMichigan To Perpetual Peace. Whether this satirical inscription on a certain Dutch shopkeeper's sign, on which a graveyard was painted, holds for men in general, or especially for heads ofstate who can never get enough of war, or perhaps only for the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, is not for us to decide. However, the author of this essay does (...) set out one condition.... The practical politician must not claim, in the event of a dispute with a theorist, to detect some danger to the nation in those views that the political theorist expresses openly and without ulterior motive.... By this clausula salvatoria, the author ofthis essay will regard himselfto be expressly protected in the best way possible from all malicious interpretation. (Immanuel Kant, Preface to Perpetual Peace) My goal is to work my way back to Kant's defensive preface to Perpetual Peace, the prophetic essay situated by many at the origin ofmodern conceptions ofpeace and international diplomacy. Suffice it to say for the moment that the following reflections are intended to reveal the epitaph in Kant's epigraph—the eternal repose residing in perpetual peace. Imagining relation One of the master ideas to come down to us from the eighteenth century holds that the imagination is central to all relations between self and other, however one might designate this otherness. The imagination is central to Adam Smith's idea of sympathy, and Kant uses it as a bridge to 86Tobin Siebers unify his critical philosophy. Whether referring to objects or other people, we require a faculty by which to extend understanding to them, and this faculty continues even today to be described as imaginative. Postmodern theorists, for example, conceive of human relations in terms of identity politics, but at the core of identification is the power to imagine, be it the power to sympathize or to conceive of a party different from oneself. In effect, then, relation is itself a function of the imagination. Moreover, no relation, I want to claim, exists for long that cannot be well imagined, for which some symbolic object or idea cannot be found. The four dominant modes of relation are religion, aesthetics, ethics, and politics.1 They deserve to be called modes insofar as they name different others to which the self (or another principal) may relate imaginatively. Religion is about the relation of goodness between subject and god called the sublime. Often nature, fate, or providence as personified forces or overarching systems are also called sublime. Aesthetics is about the relation of goodness between subject and object called beauty. Ethics is about the relation of goodness between subjects called character or virtue. Finally, politics is about the relation ofgoodness between communities called peace. Peace may seem at first glance to be an odd choice to name the relation of goodness in politics. A more obvious candidate might be the idea of utopia. But utopia comes into being as a concept only with Thomas More's treatise in 1516, and this late invention seems to exclude its being considered as the privileged good of politics. Moreover, the traditional opposition between ethics and politics exposes the unfitness ofutopia as a candidate for the political good. Ethics and politics are often at war because ethics does not want to sacrifice even one person to improve the relations among other people. Ethics strives for a wholly inclusive community, but it defines this community as a collection of autonomous individuals having value in themselves only as ends and never as means to an end. If ethics aims at a wholly inclusive community of individuals, then "utopia" may be described by rights as an ethical concept, regardless ofthe fact that Utopian desire seems to stress the wrong perspective on this community, coming as it does from the collective rather than the individual point of view. The ethical dimension of the Utopian is made obvious by the realization that a 1 I will not discuss cognition, although it is surely dominant, because its objects are various, whereas the modes ofrelation of interest to me here tend to represent their objects as being of a certain kind. Politics and Peace87 utopia... (shrink)

This book analyses the war against drugs, violence in streets, schools and families, and mining conflicts in Latin America. It examines the nonviolent negotiations, human rights, peacebuilding and education, explores security in cyberspace and proposes to overcome xenophobia, white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia, where social inequality increases injustice and violence. During the past 40 years of the Latin American Council for Peace Research (CLAIP) regional conditions have worsened. Environmental justice was crucial in the recent peace process in (...) Colombia, but also in other countries, where indigenous people are losing their livelihood and identity. Since the end of the cold war, capitalism aggravated the life conditions of poor people. The neoliberal dismantling of the State reduced their rights and wellbeing in favour of enterprises. Youth are not only the most exposed to violence, but represent also the future for a different management of human relations and nature. (shrink)

1. In the opening chapter of his arresting book on Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of international and cosmopolitan right, Kant and the Law of War,1 Arthur Ripstein presents Kant’s position as a respon...

The time that has elapsed since the Twenty-sixth Congress of the CPSU has confirmed the accuracy and profundity of the congress's analysis of the principal processes taking place in the development of humankind today. This analysis is very relevant for an understanding of the dialectics of war, peace, and social progress in our epoch. The congress emphasized that the struggle to reduce the threat of world war and to curb the arms race has been, and continues to be, the (...) central direction in the foreign political activity of the CPSU and the Soviet State. "In defending peace," L. I. Brezhnev stated in the Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU, "we are working not just for people living today, and not just for our children and grandchildren: we are working for the happiness of countless future generations.". (shrink)

Islam means "peace" and "submission to God." With its ethical system of instruction for a balanced life based on faith and reason, how did this "religion of peace" come to be feared? After the 9/11 tragedy, Islam was judged by many in the West to be a hub of terrorism and a threat to world peace. People everywhere voiced concern over its concepts of war and Jihad. Ashraf traces these and related concepts from their inception in Qur'anic (...) injunctions and the Prophet's precepts to their current interpretation, evaluating them in their spiritual, moral, juridical, and cultural contexts. Misunderstandings about Islam lie at the core of much bitterness and violence. With no central authority to definitively interpret its teachings, misconceptions regarding Islam's ideology of war and peace abound. To label Islam as militant is to misinterpret jihad as simply a call to war and to ignore its laws governing warfare, which emphasize restraint as far as possible. Islamic Philosophy of War and Peace explains the spirit of Islam, its mandate for peace, and what the pluralistic notion of jihad stands for in the hope that clearing up ambiguities will foster peaceful relations between Muslims and the rest of the world. (shrink)

The First World War forced the Russian intelligentsia to rethink its values—values that had been constructed in the nineteenth century. Distancing itself from pacifism and cultural relativism, it began to search for a moral meaning to the war that broke out in 1914—i.e. to defend the war as morally right and having a higher spiritual purpose. Russian philosophers were central to these debates, as they tried to interpret the war, and the relationship between war and peace, from a metaphysical (...) point of view. The paper will look at philosophical, ethical and religious aspects of these debates, and some of the philosophers who participated in them. (shrink)

The issue of human nature is very complex and elusive, and mankind has been trying to unveil its elements since the beginnings of any philosophical reasoning. Whether they were questions of ontology, gnoseology, or ethics, it has been an uneasy task to uncover the complexity of the term. This article concentrates on finding ideas that support the existence of human nature and consequently searches for its possible ethical implications. I focused on the traditional issues of good vs evil, especially in (...) terms of dichotomy between committing violent acts and waging wars in contradiction to creation of conditions for peaceful and just societies. In the article, I compare various ideas on human nature and analyse their potential in unveiling its ethical implications. I also comment on the possibility of war and peace being consequences of human nature and its connection to our disposition of being moral subjects. (shrink)