Bergson scholars such as Leonard Lawlor, Alexander Lefebvre, Philip Soulez, and Frederic Worms have recently argued that Bergson “places the phenomenon of war at the center of his analysis” in Two Sources of Morality and Religion. We want to contribute to this line of interpretation. We claim that Bergson’s account of the causes of, and solution to, the problem of war can be effectively understood in light of a central tenet of classical political philosophy, namely, the City of God, both (...) the concept and Augustine’s great text, de Civitate dei contra paganos. We highlight the shared view of the root of war in Augustine and Bergson, namely the lust for domination, libido dominandi. Our contribution provides a useful heuristic for understanding Bergson’s account of war, not a claim of Augustine’s influence on Bergson. (shrink)

This book tries to answer two key questions. The first is why certain periods are more prone to war than others. The other is why certain wars that involve polar powers end with their territorial expansion whereas other wars end in their contraction or maintaining their territorial status. In conclusion, it is asked whether the polarity of the system affects these two outcomes, and if so, how.

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.

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's account of war and the controversies that have arisen from its interpretation. This book brings the ideas of Kant's critical philosophy to bear on one of the leading political and legal questions of our age: under what circumstances, if any, is recourse to war legally and morally justifiable?

Just war's engagement with pacifism has shaped the discourse of war within and beyond Christian ethics. Less attention has been given to Christian realism's relationship to just war thought or to the possibilities such a dialogue might disclose. This essay examines certain features of the Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr's moral, theological, and political thought to consider the promise of a Christian realist theory of justifiable war.

Since the 1990s various influential authors have argued that Clausewitz’s theory is no longer applicable, not only in relation to contemporary conflicts, but also in general. Some have suggested that it is harmful and even self-destructive to continue to use this theory as the basis for understanding and as a guide to political action, given the revolutionary changes in war and violence occurring in the world’s communities.2 Clausewitz, it is proposed, was only concerned with war between states employing (...) regular armies, whereas conflict today mainly involves non-state actors. (shrink)

War has changed so much that it barely resembles the paradigmatic cases of armed conflict that just war theories and international humanitarian law seemed to have had in mind even a few decades ago. The changing character of war includes not only the use of new technology such as drones, but probably more problematically the changing temporal and spatial scope of war and the changing character of actors in war. These changes give rise to worries about what counts as war (...) and thus what norms to use in evaluating a particular conflict. In this paper, I develop an argument that the changing character of war gives us reasons to take reductionist revisions of just war theory seriously. By reductionist theories of war I mean those revisions within the just war tradition that suggest that we can use ordinary peacetime interpersonal analyses of moral responsibility and liability to harm to decide what justice requires in times of war. (shrink)

The centrality of glory, contempt, and revengefulness to Leviathan’s account of war is highlighted by three contextual features: Hobbes’s displacement of the traditional conception of glory as intrinsically intersubjective and comparative; his incorporation of the Aristotelian view that revengefulness is provoked by expressions of mere contempt; and the evolution of his account between 1640 and 1651. An archeology of Leviathan’s famous chapter thirteen confirms that Hobbes’s thesis throughout his career was that disagreement is the universal cause of war because prickly, (...) glory-seeking humans view its expression as a sign of contempt: although Leviathan abandons Hobbes’s previous argument that war is primarily rooted in vainglorious individuals pursuing domination, Leviathan’s ‘glory’ argument for war is a descendent of the older ‘comparison’, not ‘vanity’, argument. (shrink)

English Editorial of the special Issue on Philosophical Theories of War: Contemporary Challenges and Discussions giving an overview of the latest state of the debate.

War often comes down to one thing: money. The role of economics in the study of both peace and war is arguably then the most important single factor when it comes to the study of defence. This excellent new book from Fanny Coulomb will be of interest not only to those involved in the burgeoning field of defence economics - it will also be of vital interest to students and academics from international relations, defence studies, philosophy and political science backgrounds.

In a paper published in 2006, I argued that the best way of defending something like our current practices of punishing war criminals would be to base the justification of this practice on an expressive theory of punishment. I considered two forms that such a justification could take—a ‘denunciatory’ account, on which the purpose of punishment is supposed to communicate a commitment to certain kinds of standard to individuals other than the criminal and a ‘communicative’ account, on which the (...) purpose of the punishment is to communicate with the perpetrator, and argued for a denunciatory account which I developed at some length. In this paper I would like to reconsider the plausibility of a communicative account. One difficulty that such accounts face is that the punishment of war criminals often involves the inflicting of harsh treatment on them by individuals who are members of states other than their own. On a communicative account this is problematic: on such an account—or at least on the version of it proposed by Duff (2000)—it is essential that those who are punish and those who punish them belong to a single community. When this requirement is not satisfied harsh treatment does not constitute punishment. Duff has argued that the problem can be solved by regarding all human beings as members of a single moral community: here I argue that this suggestion is unsatisfactory and propose an alternative. One consequence of my account is that if it is correct there may limitations on the range of kinds of war criminal that can legitimately be punished by international tribunals. (shrink)

This book examines how ideas of war and peace have organized frames of reference within the history of political theory. It argues for a political philosophy that takes both conditions seriously and for a style of political theory committed to questioning rather than closure.

The article is a philosophical response to the oped of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas Krieg und Empörung, published by him in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in April 2022. The oped demonstrates the philosopher’s view on ideological disputes and political debates or “indignation” (Empörung) in public sphere in both Germany and the EU concerning an attempt to develop a unanimous policy to help Ukraine with weapons against Russia’s military aggression. The authors presume that Habermas published the accountable message of a responsible (...) citizen that means it should be also taken as based on his theoretical achievements. The article consists of two parts. The first part sets out the main arguments of the philosopher’s newspaper article, which ends with a recommendation of compromise and partnership negotiations with the aggressor de facto due to the losses of Ukraine. The second part is an attempt by the authors to clarify the main preconditions and premises of Habermas’s communicative philosophy, which demonstrate the fundamental limitation of its explanatory power for this type of radical dissent, which is war. First of all, the authors suggest, it is the idea of pacification in interethnic relations, which forms the intellectual mood after World War II and finds its philosophical expression in the discovery of a priori foundations of understanding (Apel, Habermas) and ideas of developing formal pragmatics of communication. Attention to the latter allows the authors to demonstrate how consistent analysis of a priori (counterfactual) conditions of communication is considered by Habermas primarily in the historical perspective of positive dimensions of social integration - democratic equality, freedom, justice for participants of communicative interaction. The article concludes with a detailed analysis of the significance of the concept “lifeworld” as one of the central concepts within communicative theory and an analogue of “form of life” and “culture”. The authors argue the idea of perspective creating a common lifeworld for all in the processes of communication is fundamental to the works of the philosopher. The article concludes that the regulative idea of the single world as a basic ontological assumption of communicative theory does limit its explanatory capacity in terms of a war situation as a clash of different cultural worlds. (shrink)

Recent discussions in Just War Theory have been framed by a polarising debate between “traditionalist” and “revisionist” approaches. This debate has largely overlooked the importance of an applied account of Just War Theory. The main aim of this essay is to defend the importance of this applied account and, in particular, a nonideal account of the ethics of war. I argue that the applied, nonideal morality of war is vital for a plausible and comprehensive account of Just War (...) Theory. A subsidiary aim of the essay is to show that once we appreciate the importance of the applied, nonideal account, it becomes clear that the positions proposed by revisionists and traditionalists are, in fact, much closer than often presumed. (shrink)

As it is traditionally conceived, Just War Theory is not well suited for dealing with nation vs non-nation wars. It thus makes sense to create a second Just War Theory to deal with these wars. This article explores the differences and similarities between the two theories.

This new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary extensions and alternatives to the just war tradition in the field of the ethics of war.

In this article, the author aims to demonstrate how Agamben’s concept of Homo Sacer is ideally epitomized by a soldier in war. A soldier in war holds a peculiar position, as killing of soldiers is considered neither illegal by laws nor immoral by ethics, and so a soldier is not considered to be legally or morally “guilty” in the usual sense of the word if he or she kills another soldier in war. The author analyzes the notion of Homo Sacer (...) – a figure representing a human that can be killed without the killer being punished, but at the same time someone who cannot be sacrificed – and further demonstrates that a soldier in war can be said to hold precisely such a status. The reason why a soldier cannot be sacrificed resides in the fact that he has already been “sacrificed to war” by his own society, in exchange for the safety of all other members of society. Perceiving a soldier as Homo Sacer provides a novel explanation and an additional argument for the moral symmetry of combatants, one of the pillars of non-revisionist Just War Theory, as all soldiers can be understood as persons sacrificed by their own societies. (shrink)

Just war theory has a long history, during which it changed its nature and its constituent components. Its purpose was to justify and limit the evil of war. The term just war is found in Aristotle in his work "Politics" and is used in describing the wars fought by the Greeks "in the name of the spread of culture and civilization" against non-Greeks, because they were considered barbarians. In fact, the cause of these wars was the expansion of political (...) and economic control over new territories. (shrink)

This book provides a thorough critical overview of the current debate on the ethics of war, as well as a modern just war theory that can give practical action-guidance by recognizing and explaining the moral force of widely accepted law. Traditionalist, Walzerian, and "revisionist" approaches have dominated contemporary debates about the classical jus ad bellum and jus in bello requirements in just war theory. In this book, Uwe Steinhoff corrects widely spread misinterpretations of these competing views and spells (...) out the implications for the ethics of war. His approach is unique in that it complements the usual analysis in terms of self-defense with an emphasis on the importance of other justifications that are often lumped together under the heading of "lesser evil." It also draws on criminal law and legal scholarship, which has been largely ignored by just war theorists. Ultimately, Steinhoff rejects arguments in favor of "moral fundamentalism"-- the view that the laws and customs of war must simply follow an immutable morality. In contrast, he argues that widely accepted laws and conventions of war are partly constitutive of the moral rules that apply in a conflict. The Ethics of War and the Force of Law will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in just war theory, applied ethics, political philosophy, political theory, philosophy of law, and criminal and military law. (shrink)

This book-cover's announcement of a “new theory” of just war is likely just publisher's editorial hyperbole. The author, however, does not in the end require such outside assistance. From the outse...

Hobbesian war primarily arises not because material resources are scarce; or because humans ruthlessly seek survival before all else; or because we are naturally selfish, competitive, or aggressive brutes. Rather, it arises because we are fragile, fearful, impressionable, and psychologically prickly creatures susceptible to ideological manipulation, whose anger can become irrationally inflamed by even trivial slights to our glory. The primary source of war, according to Hobbes, is disagreement, because we read into it the most inflammatory signs of contempt. Both (...) cause and remedy are therefore primarily ideological: The Leviathan's primary function is to settle the meaning of the most controversial words implicated in social life, minimize public disagreement, neutralize glory, magnify the fear of death, and root out subversive doctrines. Managing interstate conflict, in turn, requires not only coercive power, but also the soft power required to shape characters and defuse the effects of status competition. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed rape and sexual violence used on such a massive scale and often in a widespread and systematic program that the international community has had to recognize that rape and sexual violence are not just war crimes but might be crimes against humanity or even genocide. I suggest that just war theory, while limited in its applicability to mass rape, might nevertheless offer some framework for making the determination of when sexual violence and rape constitute war (...) crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide. In addition, just war theory can provide the normative justification individual soldiers need to resist orders and actions that demonstrate egregious moral breakdown as found in instances of mass rape and systematic use of sexual violence, and just war criteria demonstrate that the use of rape and sexual violence in war time can never be legitimated, especially in the case of prisoner interrogation. (shrink)

Centuries before being included in Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis and De iure praedae, the subject of reprisal was already being discussed in medieval literature. The aim of this paper is to examine the medieval and early modern practice and theory of reprisal as it developed before and during Grotius’s lifetime. Its first part investigates a number of important foundational elements, such as the issues of definition and terminology, and the common characteristics of a reprisal case. In (...) the second half, the author explores why reprisals were deemed to be a ‘perversus mos’ or ‘bad custom’ and how continued reliance on this practice was nonetheless justified by inserting it into the medieval just war doctrine. The paper does not provide a systematic study of Grotius’s own engagement with medieval reprisal sources. Rather, it should be read in conjunction with another publication in this same volume, ‘Grotius on Reprisal’ by Randall Lesaffer. (shrink)

A singularity of the famous Art of War《孫子兵法》 attributed to Sunzi is the way this work conceives of knowledge as a resource for the military strategist. The idea is new in Chinese tradition, and new in the worldwide context of thinking about strategy, where Sunzi’s ideas about the value of knowledge are far in advance of the thinking of Western theorists like Machiavelli or especially Clausewitz. In this paper I analyze the role of knowledge in the Sunzi theory of (...) strategy, and show the consistency of what this work says about knowledge with a philosophical idea of knowledge that emerges in Warring States texts of diverse genres. (shrink)

Although there has been significant scholarly attention on just war (jus ad bellum) in Byzantium and an increasing interest in the study of the Byzantine culture of war, military trickery and jus in bello (just conduct of war) remain largely unexplored by Byzantinists. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the theory of military trickery and ethics in Byzantium, c. 900 -1204. It explores and analyses this aspect of jus in bello in Byzantium by employing methods and (...) concepts from Byzantine history, war studies and military ethics. The paper begins by examining the impact of dominant literary traditions (Classical and Biblical) on Byzantine perceptions of military trickery, and then explores the reception and development of Classical and Biblical notions of military trickery and ethics by different sub-cultures in Byzantium (e. g., theologians, jurists, tacticians, historians, orators, poets). The author then attempts to frame a more complete theory of Byzantine military trickery and ethics, and to reflect on the relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello in Byzantium. (shrink)

This article uses paradigms developed in the ethics of war debate, primarily jus in bello (just actions in war), and academic theories developed for the study of religion: the dialectic of the sacred and profane, and ritual studies – primarily sacrifice, festivals, and rites of passage – to analyze the Bhagavad-Gita and the sections of the Mahabharata that tell the story of the Kurukshetra War.11 The historicity of this war is in doubt. However, Hindu tradition places it in approximately 3100 (...) BCE, with Indian scholars proposing dates ranging from approximately plus/minus 2000 years from the traditional date. The article focuses attention on the fact that along with Krishna preaching Hindu dharma (religious socio-ethical duties) in the Bhagavad-Gita, a militarist ethic is forcefully put forth within Kshatriya dharma. The objective is to bring out salient points on human behavior expressed by combatants in war through their religious ethics and religious rituals. While some commentary is offered on the meaning of the teachings presented in these texts, the main goal is examining human behavior not textual meaning. The article builds on studies that show religious ritual as a powerful force in inculcating ethics and behavior in the pursuit of war. The article comments on religion and war in general in order to advance the understanding of human religious expression and behavior in regard to war. (shrink)

The Philosophy of War and Exile argues that our current paradigms for thinking about the ethics of war - just war theory - and the suffering of war - PTSD theory - judge war without a proper understanding of war. By continuing the investigations of J. Glenn Gray into the meaning of how war is experienced by combatants we can find an alternative understanding of not only war, but of peace, culminating in a new theory of responsibility (...) centered around embodiment and mortality rather than praise and blame. This conception of responsibility will in turn allow us to not only ask new questions about torture, unmanned warfare, and the treatment of veterans, but also to ask new questions about what it means for noncombatants to experience as home what combatants experience as exile. (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 article deals with the concept of war in modern political realism. Realism claims to have an original notion of war, which distinguishes it from empirical war studies and from other schools in international relations theory. Realism does not have a strict formal definition of war like empirical studies do, it focuses on understanding the causes and nature of war instead. The distinction between realism and other international relations theories like idealism, Marxism or constructivism consists in the realist notion (...) of politics. Realism understands politics as an eternal struggle for power that underlies all social life, while war is the most intense manifestation of this struggle. Thus, the possibility of war cannot be eradicated. The article shows the normative aspects of such understanding of war. Realism, unlike pacifism or just war theory, is less enthusiastic about ethical or legal regulation of war; furthermore, it shows the dangers that may be caused by political moralism and “criminalization” of war. On the other hand, realism fails to provide a set of norms or principles that would surpass the just war principles. The realist principles of national interest and prudence are as vague, unclear and prone to misuse as classic just war principles are. Author draws a conclusion that to be able to create a valid set of principles of war, realism needs to further converge with international relations theory schools and “enlarge” the set of its base theoretical notions. (shrink)

The new western way of war from Vietnam in Iraq -- Theories of the new western way of war -- The global surveillance mode of warfare -- Rules of risk-transfer war -- Iraq: risk economy of a war -- A way of war in crisis.

This book develops a new contractualist foundation for just war theory, which defends the traditional view of the moral equality of combatants and associated egalitarian moral norms. -/- Traditionally it has been viewed that combatants on both sides of a war have the same right to fight, irrespective of the justice of their cause, and both sides must observe the same restrictions on the use of force, especially prohibitions on targeting noncombatants. Revisionist philosophers have argued that combatants on the (...) unjust side of a war have no right to fight, that pro-war civilians on the unjust side might be targetable, and that lawful combatants on the unjust side might in principle be liable to prosecution for their participation on the unjust side. This book seeks to undercut the revisionist project and defend the traditional view of the moral equality of combatants. It does so by showing how revisionist philosophers fail to build a strong foundation for their arguments and misunderstand that there is a moral difference between collective military violence and a collection of individually unjustified violent actions. Finally, the book develops a theory defending the traditional view of military ethics based on a universal duty of all people to support just institutions. (shrink)

The current study examined how ingroup and outgroup Theory of Mind predicts children’s and adolescents’ reasoning for their acceptability judgments of intergroup bullying of Syrian refugee peers and group support of intergroup bullying. Participants included 587 Turkish middle and high school students. Participants read a bias-based bullying story with a Syrian refugee peer targeted by an ingroup Turkish peer. Then, participants rated the acceptability of bullying and group support of bullying and were presented with a reasoning question after each (...) acceptability question. Reasoning codes included Fairness, Refugee Status/War, Prejudice and Discrimination, Harm, Prescriptive Norms, Group Functioning, and Relationship with the Bully. Participants’ ingroup and outgroup ToM abilities were evaluated as predictors of reasoning. Results documented that middle school students were more likely to attribute mental states to their ingroup members compared to outgroup members while high school students’ ToM performance did not differ across contexts. Further, the more unacceptable participants judged bullying to be, the more they reasoned about the bullying by referencing fairness, refugee status, discrimination, and harm. Results also documented that ingroup and outgroup ToM were positively related to attribution to fairness and participants’ usage of multiple reasoning judgments while only outgroup ToM was a significant predictor of reasoning around refugee status/war, discrimination, and prejudice. The findings provide implications for intervention programs that tackle intergroup bullying by examining bystanders’ social cognitive skills in a specific context. (shrink)

This article surveys the major historical developments in Western philosophical reflection on war. Section 2 outlines early development in Greek and Roman thought, up to and including Augustine. Section 3 details the systematization of Just War theory in Aquinas and his successors, especially Vitoria, Sua´rez, and Grotius. Section 4 examines the emergence of Perpetual Peace theory after Hobbes, focusing in particular on Rousseau and Kant. Finally, Section 5 outlines the central points of contention following the reemergence of Just (...) War theory in the 1970s. (shrink)

The traditional theory of the just war comprises two sets of principles, one governing the resort to war and the other governing the conduct of war. One of the central pillars of the traditional theory is that the two set of principles are, in Michael Walzer ’ s words, “ logically independent. It is perfectly possible for a just war to be fought unjustly and for an unjust war to be fought in strict.

In this book Uwe Steinhoff describes and explains the basic tenets of just war theory and gives a precise, succinct and highly critical account of its present status and of the most important and controversial current debates surrounding it. Rejecting certain in effect medieval assumptions of traditional just war theory and advancing a liberal outlook, Steinhoff argues that every single individual is a legitimate authority and has under certain circumstances the right to declare war on others or the (...) state. He also argues that the just cause cannot be established independently of the other criteria of jus ad bellum (the justification of entering a war), except for right intention, which he interprets more leniently than the tradition does. Turning to jus in bello (which governs the conduct of a war) he criticizes the Doctrine of Double Effect and concludes that insofar as wars kill innocents, and be it as "collateral damage", they cannot be just but at best justified as the lesser evil. Steinhoff gives particular attention to the question why soldiers, allegedly, are legitimate targets and civilians not. Discussing four approaches to the explanation of the difference he argues that the four principles underlying them all need to be taken into account and outlines how their weighing can proceed if applied to concrete cases. The resulting approach does not square the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets with the distinction between soldiers and civilians, which has extremely important consequences for the conduct of war. Finally, Steinhoff analyses the concept of terrorism and argues that some forms of "terrorism" are actually not terrorism at all and that even terrorism proper can under certain circumstances be justified. (shrink)