Posted on by Robert J. Delahunty · 2 Comments

The Just War in Greek Tragedy: Euripides’ “Suppliants”

Woman and Skull
American Woman Writes a Thank You Note for Souvenir Japanese Skull, Life Magazine, 1944

I am very grateful to the editors of this website for offering me the opportunity to return to its pages. I would like to use the opportunity to pursue what I hope will be a fresh approach to the just war tradition. I plan to explore just war thinking through an extended consideration of Greek tragedy – specifically, Euripides’ Suppliants (or Suppliant Women).

Just war theory has undoubtedly become the predominant account of the morality of war in contemporary secular thought. As Michael Walzer, who has done so much to stimulate the development, has observed, ever since the War in Vietnam, American debates over the morality of war have been structured in terms of Just War theory. See Michael Walzer, The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success) (2002). So firm is its hold that it was not surprising to hear President Obama consider it at some length in his 2009 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, or to read that his Administration claims to be following it in its military activities, including drone warfare. (For critical discussion, see this piece. Likewise, just war theory has long been the mainstream tradition in Catholic and other Christian thought about peace and war.

The Just War Canon

Part of the explanation for the dominance of just war theory is the pedigree that scholars have assigned to it. In most standard accounts, such as Alex Bellamy’s excellent Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (2008), the tradition of just war thinking begins with the Roman politician, orator and thinker Cicero, is Christianized by St. Augustine, is then reconfigured by St. Thomas Aquinas, and afterwards is handed down through the early modern Spanish scholastics and their secular successors, including Hugo Grotius and Emer de Vattel to the modern period. In this narrative, the tradition waned in the “positivist” period of international law in the nineteenth century, but was revived in the aftermath of the First World War, see Cornelius van Vollenhoven, Three Stages in the Evolution of the Law of Nations (1919), and then came into its own in this country with writers of the Cold War period such as Paul Ramsey, see The just war: Force and political responsibility (1968) and others.

In my judgment, this standard narrative is at best incomplete, at worst false. If nothing else, it fails to account for the centuries-long gap between Augustine and Aquinas. As Philip Wynn has recently argued in a monumental work of scholarship, Augustine on War and Military Service (2013), Augustine’s writings on the justice of war are scattered and episodic, reflecting more his pastoral concerns as a bishop than his intellectual preoccupations as a systematic theologian. Moreover, as I have argued myself, the long interval between Augustine and Aquinas, Christian thought and practice concerning war and peace was not filled by continuing reflection on, and elaboration of, a just war doctrine stemming from Augustine. Instead, Christian thought exhibited several different tendencies, one of which emphasized the sinfulness of all wars, including just ones, and required returning warriors who had taken life in their campaigns to confess their sin and do penance for it. See Robert Delahunty, The Returning Warrior and the Limits of Just War Theory (2014). Just war theory, with purported roots in Augustine, was in fact largely the creation of canon lawyers working for the Papacy in the great eleventh century Reform (or Revolution) undertaken by Popes such as Gregory VII (Hildebrand).   Later scholars have accepted as legitimate the pedigree that these canonists confected for just war doctrine.

A Different “Canon”

There is, moreover, another important, but largely neglected, stream of Western thought about just war that flows outside the current canon. I would hesitate to say that these other writings constituted a “tradition,” but they certainly equal the current just war canon in terms of antiquity, depth, and the distinction of their authors. This body of thought and reflection is found primarily in works of literature and history, rather than in theology, philosophy, jurisprudence, or statecraft. In this counter-canon (to call it that), the Roman historian Sallust would loom as large as Cicero does in the current canon, and Shakespeare would be as important as Aquinas or Grotius. In this series of postings, I will argue that the Athenian tragic poet Euripides, writing in the late fifth century BC, deserves inclusion in any canon of great Western writers on the subject of justice in war.

I am not, of course, arguing that one can find the term “just war,” or any near equivalent, in the writers of drama and history whom I have in mind. (For that matter, it is not so easy to find occurrences of the term in any ancient writers, including Cicero.) What I am saying is that the concept of a just war can be identified there, and that the application of that concept is studied in ways that can be of profound interest. To be sure, dramatists and historians pursue their studies in ways that are necessarily different from those of philosophers or lawyers, whose function it is to frame general rules. The former are essentially concerned with individual situations, and their presentation of the issues is concrete and unsystematized. To use Wittgenstein’s distinction, they show rather than say. But the very complications that are added by fixing on the unique and unrepeatable can deepen and enrich our reflections on the morality of war.

The Relevance of “The Suppliants”: Humanitarian Intervention

I am not especially concerned with whether Euripides’ play is relevant to contemporary concerns or not, but in fact it is.

Written (likely) sometime in the late 420s, The Suppliants is the product of wartime conditions. Athens and its great rival Sparta had gone to war for hegemony in Greece some years earlier, in 431. The end of the conflict came only in 404, long after any plausible date for the play. The war saw the collision of two very different types of system: Sparta was a conservative, land-based power of a somewhat autocratic cast, Athens had been a popular democracy for decades (an unusual political régime in the ancient world), a naval power, and a commercial hub, the center of a sea-based empire. Euripides’ drama is not overtly about the Peloponnesian War (though many readers have heard echoes of it in the play), but about a mythic conflict many centuries before, between Athens under its legendary King Theseus and the city-state of Thebes, long a rival and often an enemy of Athens.

In the play, Theseus and Athens are persuaded to intervene militarily against Thebes on behalf of a third Greek city state, Argos. Argos has gone to war against Thebes in support of a claimant to the Theban throne. Argos’ war, as the play will reveal, was impious and unjust. Argos has been defeated, and many of the warriors in the Argive expeditionary force have been killed in battle before the gates of Thebes. The Greek war convention called for the defeated side to request a truce so that it could recover the bodies of its battle-dead and bury them; the victorious side was expected to grant the truce and permit the recovery of the dead bodies. Thebes had denied the Argive request, and the bodies of the Argive soldiers remained unburied. Led by Adrastus, the King of Argos, the bereaved mothers of the unburied Argive soldiers come as “supplicants” to Athens, seeking its intervention against Thebes, whether by arbitration or, if need be, by war, to recover their sons. After considerable delay and debate, Theseus and Athens finally agree to march on Thebes. Their campaign is bloody and closely fought, but successful, and the bodies are recovered and brought back to Athens. That might seem a natural point at which to end the play, but Euripides has several surprises left for us, including the spectacular suicide of the widow of one of the Argive soldiers (a scene without precedent in Greek tragedy) and the unexpected appearance of the goddess Athena, a dea ex machina, at the end, who issues orders that countermand those just given by King Theseus.

The action of the drama poses, in stark form, the core questions arising from armed military interventions for humanitarian purposes. In recent decades, the United States has repeatedly faced the same question: in Kosovo; in Libya; in central Africa (against the Lord’s Resistance Army); and currently in Syria. Euripides forces his audiences and his readers to ask themselves what humanitarian interventions ultimately achieve, and whether they resolve conflict or only perpetuate it. Further, the play provokes reflection on the question of the motivations for humanitarian intervention: is the intervening power truly acting altruistically or for the sake of some international common good, or does intervention usually stem from hegemonic or imperialistic motives? (On the contemporary debate, see Michael W. Doyle, The Question of Intervention: John Stuart Mill & the Responsibility to Protect (2015)).

The treatment of the bodies of dead enemy combatants

There is a second issue dramatized by the play that holds contemporary interest – though our concern with it seems less than that of the Greeks. This is the question of the treatment of the bodies of enemy warriors who have been killed in battle.

Our contemporary war convention is clear and emphatic in its rules for the treatment of battle-dead soldiers. Article 15 of the First Geneva Convention of 1949, requires the “Parties to the conflict” “particularly after an engagement” “to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled.” Article 17 further provides that the Parties to the conflict “shall further ensure that the dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged.” As the 1952 Commentary by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) notes, the Articles refer to the “Parties to the conflict,” thus making it plain that these obligations apply to both sides.

The ICRC Commentary also emphasizes the respect with which the dead bodies must be treated:

The dead must also be looked for and brought back behind the lines with as much care as the wounded. It is not always certain that death has taken place. It is, moreover, essential that the dead bodies should be identified and given a decent burial. When a man has been hit with such violence that there is nothing left of him but scattered remains, these must be carefully collected.

Similar prescriptions have also been laid down in religious teaching, and have long formed part of the customs and practices of war. Consider, e.g., early Islam. “Following the desecration of his own uncle by enemy soldiers, Mohammad (570-632) banned the mutilation of the dead. Following suit, Abou Bekr (571-634), explicitly told his soldiers going out to fight enemies that ‘see that none deals with treachery. You shall mutilate none.’ The scholar Abd al-Rahman al Awza’i (704-74) reiterated this rule against mutilation of the enemy dead.” Alexander Gillespie, A History of the Laws of War, vol. I (2011). Or consider the customs of war in early modern Europe. Shakespeare closes his Richard the Third with lines intended to show the magnanimity of the victor:

RICHMOND

What men of name are slain on either side?

DERBY

John Duke of Norfolk, Walter Lord Ferrers, Sir Robert Brakenbury, and Sir William Brandon.

RICHMOND

Inter their bodies as becomes their births.

Transgressions

Notwithstanding the clear prescriptions of international law and military custom, the norm in question has often been violated, even by democratic armies fighting in recent wars. For whatever reasons, men at war often experience an overpowering desire to dishonor, despoil or mutilate the bodies of the enemy soldiers they have killed. Short of that, they or their governments may refuse to release the bodies of enemy battle-dead. The norms against such practices have to be powerful indeed, because the urges that they attempt to control are so compelling themselves.

Instances of violations are plentiful. In 2012, photographs and a video of four US Marines in Afghanistan urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. An outcry ensued, and the military promised a criminal investigation. In 1967, a US Army sergeant was court-martialed after photographs came to light in which he was shown holding the decapitated heads of two enemy corpses. The Army declared the mutilation of dead enemy bodies to be “subhuman” and “contrary to all policy.”

The United States military is of course not alone in this. Israeli human rights groups have complained of their government’s policy of refusing to return bodies of Palestinians killed in bomb attacks they initiated or in conflict with the Israeli army. And in the civil war in Syria, both ISIS forces and those fighting them appear to have mutilated enemy combatants’ dead bodies.

Moreover, there is nothing new about these practices, nor are they common only in developed societies. In Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior (1967), Peter Nabokov presents the autobiography of Two Leggings, a celebrated nineteenth century Native American. Towards the end of his story, Two Leggings reminisces about the joys of warrior life. He recounts the fate of a dead Sioux whom he had killed the day before:

Riding over into the bushes, I found the Piegan’s body. After scalping his whole head I cut it into four parts, giving one to White Eye, one to Short Bull, and keeping the other two. Also I carried away his rifle. We discovered that they were Sioux and not Piegans. . .

When we returned to our camp we drove the captured horses through the tipis and I carried my scalp pieces tied to the end of a long pole. Soon the camp was alive, men brought out their drums, and the women began the scalp dance. . . .

Everyone joined in. For several days there was feasting and dancing. I was invited everywhere and told the story over and over again.

We were happy.

Why?

Why this happens is not well understood. Frances Larson, an anthropologist at Durham University in England, has studied the question of mutilation in her fascinating book Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (2014). During the Second World War in the Pacific, American servicemen regularly mutilated the corpses of dead Japanese soldiers, often decapitating them and preserving their skulls as trophies. “It was not particularly hard to find human heads on display during the Pacific Campaign of the Second World War. . . Skulls were hung from bulletin boards and lashed to the front of US tanks and truck cabs as macabre mascots.” Later inquiries seem to confirm the anecdotal evidence. “One forensic report estimated that the heads were missing from 60 per cent of the Japanese dead repatriated from the Mariana Islands in 1984. And a Japanese priest who visited Iwo Jima regularly in the decades after the war to conduct services for the dead reported that skulls had been taken from many of the remains . . . . Customs officials in Hawaii, the gateway home for returning American troops, routinely asked soldiers whether they had any bones in their bags.”   Larson’s book illustrates her narrative with remarkable images and photographs, one of which, taken from Life magazine, shows an attractive young American woman gazing smilingly on a Japanese soldier’s skull. She is writing a “Thank you” note to her Navy boyfriend for sending the souvenir to her. Around the time the photograph was first published, a Pennsylvania Congressman presented President Franklin Roosevelt with a letter-opener fashioned from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier. (Roosevelt returned it.)

Legal warnings accomplished little if anything. The War Department pronounced the desecration of the Japanese dead to be a “grave violation of law and decency.” US Navy commanders in the Pacific theater threatened servicemen with “stern disciplinary action” if any of them were caught taking enemy body parts as souvenirs. But the harvesting of heads, teeth and fingers continued.

What causes such behavior? Larson refers to the work of another anthropologist, Simon Harrison’s Dark Trophies (2012), for a possible explanation. Harrison has argued that “trophy-taking tends to take place when men’s virility and power is expressed through hunting metaphors,” as when the military tracks “kills” and “body counts.” And a possible explanation is that such trophies have “conferred status” on their owners. Larson herself suggests what seems to me more plausible explanations. “[I]n the field of battle they performed many different functions. As heterogeneous as the soldiers who acquired them, they could symbolize fury or fear. Some were treated like hunting trophies, but others were transformed into tokens of love, mascots, pseudo-scientific specimens or playthings. And they were as likely to inspire moments of introspection as they were to encourage displays of bravado: after all, a human skull is the shell of a person that sits deep within us all. It is little wonder that soldiers, so close to death in more ways than one, were drawn to human skulls.”   Taking enemy skulls “helped soldiers regain a sense of empowerment, because the trophy head, held aloft, is an assertion of control in the chaos of battle. The same could be said of the executioner who holds up a traitor’s head on the scaffold: order is declared anew.”

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Capizzi, “Politics, Justice, and War”

In July, Oxford University Press will release Politics, Justice, and War: Christianczpi Governance and the Ethics of Wartime, by Joseph E. Capizzi (Catholic University of America). The publisher’s description follows:

The just war ethic emerges from an affirmative response to the basic question of whether people may sometimes permissibly intend to kill other people.

In Politics, Justice, and War, Joseph E. Capizzi clarifies the meaning and coherence of the “just war” approach, to the use of force in the context of Christian ethics. By reconnecting the just war ethic to an Augustinian political approach, Capizzi illustrates that the just war ethic requires emphasis on the “right intention,” or goal, of peace as ordered justice. With peace set as the goal of war, the various criteria of the just war ethic gain their intelligibility and help provide practical guidance to all levels of society regarding when to go to war and how to strive to contain it.

So conceived, the ethic places stringent limits on noncombatant or “innocent” killing in war, helps make sense of contemporary technological and strategic challenges, and opens up space for a critical and constructive dialogue with international law.

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“Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics” (Sifton, ed.)

This month, the Library of America released “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics” edited by Elisabeth Sifton. The publisher’s description follows:

From the 1920s through the 1960s, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was among America’s most prominent public intellectuals. As a pastor, teacher, and writer, he bridged the divide between religion and politics with perspicacity, grace, and singular intelligence, whether writing about pacifism and “just war” theory, the problem of evil in history, or the crises of war, the Depression, and social conflict. His provocative essays, lectures, and sermons from before and during World War II, in the postwar years, and at the time of the Civil Rights Movement offered searching analyses of the forces shaping American life and politics. Their profound insights into the causes of economic inequality, the challenges of achieving social justice, and the risks of adventurism in the international sphere are as relevant today as they were when he composed them.

This volume, prepared with extensive notes and a chronology by the author’s daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, is the largest, most comprehensive edition of Niebuhr’s writings ever published. It brings together the books Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929), his personal reflections on his experiences as a young pastor in Detroit as it was being transformed by the explosive growth of the auto industry; Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), a brilliant and tough-minded work that draws out the implications of Niebuhr’s view that while individuals can sometimes overcome the temptations of self-interest, larger groups never can; The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), a passionate defense of democracy written during World War II; and the essential study that Andrew Bacevich has called “the most important book ever written on U.S. foreign policy”: The Irony of American History (1952), a consideration of American conduct in the early Cold War years that takes equal aim at Soviet communism and at the moral complacency of the United States in its newfound global ascendancy.

These four works are supplemented with essays, lectures, and sermons drawn from Niebuhr’s many other books, as well as prayers—among them the well-known Serenity Prayer. The volume also includes a chronologically arranged selection of his journalism about current events, many of the pieces appearing here in book form for the first time. “We are bound to go back to Niebuhr,” the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once wrote, “because we cannot escape the dark heart of man and because we cannot permit an awareness of this darkness to inhibit action and abolish hope.”

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Bakircioglu, “Islam and Warfare”

This November, Routledge Press will release “Islam and Warfare: Context and Compatibility with International Law” by Onder Bakircioglu (School of Law at the University of Leicester).  The publisher’s description follows:

The question of how Islamic law regulates the notions of just recourse to and just conduct in war has long been the topic of heated controversy, and is often subject to oversimplification in scholarship and journalism. This book traces the rationale for aggression within the Islamic tradition, and assesses the meaning and evolution of the contentious concept of jihad. The book reveals that there has never been a unified position on what Islamic warfare tangibly entails, due to the complexity of relevant sources and discordant historical dynamics that have shaped the contours of jihad.

Onder Bakircioglu advocates a dynamic reading of Islamic law and military tradition; one which prioritises the demands of contemporary international relations and considers the meaning and application of jihad as contingent on the socio-political forces of each historical epoch.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of international law, Islamic law, war and security studies, and the law of armed conflict.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Pope Francis on the Crisis in Iraq

Pope_Francis_in_March_2013In an airborne press conference on the way back from Korea yesterday, Pope Francis addressed the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Iraq. In response to a question about the American bombing of ISIS targets, the Holy Father made three important points. One, unfortunately, was not helpful.

First, the Pope said, under Just War theory, it is “licit” for third parties to intervene in order to “stop” the “unjust aggression” by ISIS. Pope Francis emphasized that he did not endorse bombing, specifically, but action to stop ISIS generally. Second, the decision how best to deal with ISIS must be made by nations acting together in consultation, at the United Nations. Consultation is necessary, he said, in order to prevent any one nation–implicitly, the United States–from succumbing to the temptation to become an occupying force.

There isn’t very much danger of the US seeking to occupy Iraq at this stage, frankly. If anything, Americans in 2014 are disposed to avoid the region altogether. But the Pope’s statements are consistent with Just War theory and entirely appropriate. And perhaps Pope Francis feels justified in offering an oblique criticism of the US, which ignored his predecessor’s plea to get UN approval for the 2003 Iraq invasion, and reaped the consequences.

The Pope seems to have gone a little astray, though, in his third point. Responding to a question about religious minorities, including Catholics, he said this:

Secondly, you mentioned the minorities. Thanks for that word because they talk to me about the Christians, the poor Christians. It’s true, they suffer. The martyrs, there are many martyrs. But here there are men and women, religious minorities, not all of them Christian, and they are all equal before God.

Pope Francis is right that minorities other than Christians are suffering in Iraq. And Christians would not object to the idea that God loves all people equally, Christians and non-Christians. But the implication of the Pope’s statement– at least in the way his remarks have been translated and transcribed–is that the suffering of Christians gets disproportionate attention, and that it’s necessary to widen the focus to make sure other groups are not forgotten.

With great respect, this misstates the situation. The danger is not that the outside world pays too much attention to Christian suffering, but too little. The media routinely downplays that suffering, notwithstanding the fact that Christians–as Pope Francis himself recently stated–suffer the greatest share of religious persecution in the world today. As for the great powers, they typically look the other way. The United States, for example, did absolutely nothing to help the 100,000 Christian refugees displaced by ISIS in recent weeks, but sent in helicopters to distribute relief to 40,000 Yazidis.

As I say, the transcript may not fairly reflect the sense of Pope Francis’s remarks. Transcripts do not capture inflections. But many in the media will no doubt seize on the  remarks to justify their comparative inattention to Christian suffering. That would be most unfortunate. Although non-Christians are surely suffering in Iraq, and although it’s entirely appropriate to remember and help them, there is nothing wrong with stressing the suffering of Christians, especially when one is Pope. Unless people speak out, continually, there is a grave danger that Iraq’s Christians will simply be forgotten.

Posted on by JCPW

Reichberg & Syse (eds.), “Religion, War, and Ethics”

9780521738279Next month, Cambridge University Press will publish Religion, War, and Ethics: A Sourcebook of Textual Traditions edited by Gregory M. Reichberg (International Peace Research Institute, Oslo) and Henrik Syse (Peace Research Institute). The publisher’s description follows.

Religion, War, and Ethics is a collection of primary sources from the world’s major religions on the ethics of war. Each chapter brings together annotated texts – scriptural, theological, ethical, and legal – from a variety of historical periods that reflect each tradition’s response to perennial questions about the nature of war: When, if ever, is recourse to arms morally justifiable? What moral constraints should apply to military conduct? Can a lasting earthly peace be achieved? Are there sacred reasons for waging war, and special rewards for those who do the fighting? The religions covered include Sunni and Shiite Islam; Judaism; Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity; Theravada Buddhism; East Asian religious traditions (Confucianism, Shinto, Japanese and Korean Buddhism); Hinduism; and Sikhism. Each section is compiled by a specialist, recognized within his or her respective religious tradition, who has also written a commentary on the historical and textual context of the passages selected.

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Shogimen & Spencer (eds.), “Visions of Peace: Asia and the West”

9781409428701This month, Ashgate published Visions of Peace: Asia and the West edited by Takashi Shogimen (University of Otago) and Vicki A. Spencer (University of Otago). The publisher’s description follows.

Visions of Peace: Asia and the West explores the diversity of past conceptualizations as well as the remarkable continuity in the hope for peace across global intellectual traditions. Current literature, prompted by September 11, predominantly focuses on the laws and ethics of just wars or modern ideals of peace. Asian and Western ideals of peace before the modern era have largely escaped scholarly attention. This book examines Western and Asian visions of peace that existed prior to c.1800 by bringing together experts from a variety of intellectual traditions.

The historical survey ranges from ancient Greek thought, early Christianity and medieval scholasticism to Hinduism, classical Confucianism and Tokuguwa Japanese learning, before illuminating unfamiliar aspects of peace visions in the European Enlightenment. Each chapter offers a particular case study and attempts to rehabilitate a ‘forgotten’ conception of peace and reclaim its contemporary relevance. Collectively they provide the conceptual resources to inspire more creative thinking towards a new vision of peace in the present. Students and specialists in international relations, peace studies, history, political theory, philosophy, and religious studies will find this book a valuable resource on diverse conceptions of peace.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

Reflections from the City of God: On the Miseries of Just War

I am blessed to be on sabbatical this semester. In addition to beginning several City of Mennew writing projects, I thought it might be good to take on some meaty reading projects. One of these projects will be to read through St. Augustine’s City of God and to become familiar with some of the secondary literature related specifically to his political thought (the project is not purely a private one–future students in my spring Professional Responsibility course, take note!). In connection with that project, I hope to post a weekly reflection from the City of God that is relevant to some law and religion issue of current moment.

I’m confident that I will say nothing original about Augustine’s political thought. Indeed, I am sure that many readers of this blog will know much more about Augustine than I will learn in these few months and well beyond that. But because I have been enjoying greatly what I have read so far, and because what I have read relates in various ways to many of the questions we consider at the Center for Law and Religion, and because it may be a pleasure for readers to see some of Augustine’s words again before their eyes (and a pleasure for me to re-write them), and simply for the joy that comes in replowing well-tilled fields, I thought to give it a try. Those of our readers who are Augustine scholars or otherwise knowledgeable: please let me know in the comments what secondary literature I ought to be reading. I am reading the Marcus Dods translation (would that I could read it in Latin, but as Dods–writing in 1871–said, “[T]here are not a great many men nowadays  who will read a work in Latin of twenty-two books”).

Here is a passage from of the famous Book XIX on the miseries of war, including of just war:

But the imperial city has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace, so that interpreters, far from being scarce, are numberless. This is true; but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity! And though these are past, the end of these miseries has not yet come. For though there have never been wanting, nor are yet wanting, hostile nations beyond the empire, against whom wars have been and are waged, yet, supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description–social and civil wars–and with these the whole race has been agitated, either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed outbreak. If I attempted to give an adequate description of these manifold disasters, these stern and lasting necessities, though I am quite unequal to the task, what limit could I set? But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars. For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars; and this wrongdoing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrongdoing. Let everyone, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if anyone either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.

One striking feature of this paragraph is the ubiquity of misery in all matters related to war. The misery not only of the initial wrongdoing that leads to war, and not only of war itself, but also of the waging of just war in response to (in fact, ‘compelled’ by) the existence of miserably wrongful conduct.

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“Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice” (Lang et al., eds.)

This July, Georgetown University Press published Just Law: Authority, Tradition, and Practice edited by Anthony F. Lang Jr. 9781589019961(University of St. Andrews), Cian O’Driscoll (University of Glasgow), and John Williams (Durham University). The publisher’s description follows.

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.

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Biggar, “In Defence of War”

9780199672615_450This September, Oxford University Press will publish In Defence of War by Nigel Biggar (University of Oxford). The publisher’s description follows.

Pacifism is popular. Many hold that war is unnecessary, since peaceful means of resolving conflict are always available, if only we had the will to look for them. Or they believe that war is wicked, essentially involving hatred of the enemy and carelessness of human life. Or they posit the absolute right of innocent individuals not to be deliberately killed, making it impossible to justify war in practice.

Peace, however, is not simple. Peace for some can leave others at peace to perpetrate mass atrocity. What was peace for the West in 1994 was not peace for the Tutsis of Rwanda. Therefore, against the virus of wishful thinking, anti-military caricature, and the domination of moral deliberation by rights-talk In Defence of War asserts that belligerency can be morally justified, even though tragic and morally flawed.

Recovering the Christian tradition of reflection running from Augustine to Grotius, this book affirms aggressive war in punishment of grave injustice. Morally realistic in adhering to universal moral principles, it recognises that morality can trump legality, justifying military intervention even in transgression of positive international law-as in the case of Kosovo. Less cynical and more empirically realistic about human nature than Hobbes, it holds that nations desire to be morally virtuous and right, and not only to be safe and fat. And aspiring to practical realism, it argues that love and the doctrine of double effect can survive combat; and that the constraints of proportionality, while real, are nevertheless sufficiently permissive to encompass Britain’s belligerency in 1914-18. Finally, in a painstaking analysis of the Iraq invasion of 2003, In Defence of War culminates in an account of how the various criteria of just war should be thought together. It also concludes that, all things considered, the invasion was justified.