Origins Of The Just War

America and the Just War Tradition examines and evaluates each of America’s major wars from a just war perspective. Using moral analysis that is anchored in the just war tradition, the contributors provide careful historical analysis evaluating individual conflicts. Each chapter explores the causes of a particular war, the degree to which the justice of the conflict was a subject of debate at the time, and the extent to which the war measured up to traditional ad bellum and in bello criteria. Where appropriate, contributors offer post bellum considerations, insofar as justice is concerned with helping to offer a better peace and end result than what had existed prior to the conflict. This fascinating exploration offers policy guidance for the use of force in the world today, and will be of keen interest to historians, political scientists, philosophers, and theologians, as well as policy makers and the general reading public. Contributors: J. Daryl Charles, Darrell Cole, Timothy J. Demy, Jonathan H. Ebel, Laura Jane Gifford, Mark David Hall, Jonathan Den Hartog, Daniel Walker Howe, Kerry E. Irish, James Turner Johnson, Gregory R. Jones, Mackubin Thomas Owens, John D. Roche, and Rouven Steeves

Some of the most basic assumptions of Just War theory have been dismantled in a barrage of criticism and analysis in the first dozen years of the twenty-first century. 'The Ethics of War' continues and pushes past this trend. This anthology is an authoritative treatment of the ethics and law of war by eminent scholars who first challenged the orthodoxy of Just War theory, as well as by 'second-wave' revisionists.

This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of warfare ethics in early China as well as its subsequent development. Chinese attitudes toward war are rich and nuanced, ranging across amoral realism, defensive just war, humanitarian intervention, and mournful skepticism. Covering the five major intellectual traditions in the "golden age" of Chinese civilization: Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, Legalist, and Military Strategy schools, the book’s chapters immerse readers in the proper historical contexts, examine the moral concerns in the classical texts on their own terms, reframe those concerns in contemporary ethical idioms, and forge a critical dialogue between the past and the present. The volume develops fresh moral interpretations of classical texts such as The Art of War, Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, and the Daodejing and discusses famous philosophers such as Han Fei and Wang Yang-ming, representing antithetical schools of thought about warfare. Attention is also given to the military ethics of the People’s Liberation Army, examining its thinking against the backdrop of its own civilizational context. This book will be of much interest to students of just war theory, Chinese politics, ethics, and philosophy, military studies, and International Relations in general.

The just war tradition is central to the practice of international relations, in questions of war, peace, and the conduct of war in the contemporary world, but surprisingly few scholars have questioned the authority of the tradition as a source of moral guidance for modern statecraft. Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice brings together many of the most important contemporary writers on just war to consider questions of authority surrounding the just war tradition. Authority is critical in two key senses. First, it is central to framing the ethical debate about the justice or injustice of war, raising questions about the universality of just war and the tradition’s relationship to religion, law, and democracy. Second, who has the legitimate authority to make just-war claims and declare and prosecute war? Such authority has traditionally been located in the sovereign state, but non-state and supra-state claims to legitimate authority have become increasingly important over the last twenty years as the just war tradition has been used to think about multilateral military operations, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and sub-state violence. The chapters in this collection, organized around these two dimensions, offer a compelling reassessment of the authority issue’s centrality in how we can, do, and ought to think about war in contemporary global politics.

'A remarkable book, small in size but with great clarity and insight into moral and ethical principles that need to be understood and reaffirmed' - Henry Kissinger Every society and every period of history has had to face the reality of war. War inevitably yields situations in which the normal ethical rules of society have to be overridden. The Just War tradition has evolved over the centuries as a careful endeavour to impose moral discipline and humanity on resort to war and in its waging, and the tradition deserves our attention now as much as ever. Tracing the origin and nature of the tradition from its roots in Christian thinking and providing a clear summary of its principles, and drawing examples from Kosovo, Afghanistan and the wars in Iraq, Charles Guthrie and Michael Quinlan look at the key concepts in relation to modern armed conflict. This short but powerful book sets out the case for a workable and credible moral framework for modern war before, while and after it is waged.

This book provides a stimulating discussion of, and introduction to, just war theory.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest, among both philosophers, legal scholars, and military experts, on the ethics of war. Due in part due to post 9/11 events, this resurgence is also due to a growing theoretical sophistication among scholars in this area. Recently there has been very influential work published on the justificaton of killing in self-defense and war, and the topic of the ethics of war is now more important than ever as a discrete field. The 28 commissioned chapters in this Handbook will present a comprehensive overview of the field as well as make significant and novel contributions, and collectively they will set the terms of the debate for the next decade. Lazar and Frowe will invite the leading scholars in the field to write on topics that are new to them, making the volume a compilation of fresh ideas rather than a rehash of earlier work. The volume will be dicided into five sections: Method, History, Resort, Conduct, and Aftermath. The contributors will be a mix of junior and senior figures, and will include well known scholars like Michael Walzer, Jeff McMahan, and David Rodin.

A profound and timely examination of the moral underpinnings of the War Between the States The Civil War was not only a war of armies but also a war of ideas, in which Union and Confederacy alike identified itself as a moral nation with God on its side. In this watershed book, Harry S. Stout measures the gap between those claims and the war’s actual conduct. Ranging from the home front to the trenches and drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Stout explores the lethal mix of propaganda and ideology that came to justify slaughter on and off the battlefield. At a time when our country is once again at war, Upon the Altar of the Nation is a deeply necessary book.