Anything but a detached theorist, Clausewitz was as fully engaged in the intellectual and cultural currents of his time as in its political and military conflicts. Late-eighteenth century thought ...helped shape the analytic methods he developed for the study of war. The essays in this volume follow his career in a complex military society, together with that of other students of war, both friends and rivals, providing a broad perspective that leads to significant documents so far unknown or ignored. They add to our understanding of Clausewitz's early ideas and their expansion into a comprehensive theory that continues to challenge our thinking about war today.
Just War and Christian Traditions introduces readers - lay persons and clergy alike - to classical Christian thinking across denominational lines on the tradition of just war thinking. Representing a ...two-millennia-old conversation in our wider cultural tradition, just war thinking (often going by the misnomer "just war theory") is rooted in biblical texts from the Old and New Testaments, historic Christian thinkers such as Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Vitoria, Suárez, and Grotius, ethical principles such as the "Golden Rule" and neighbor-love, as well as natural law principles embedded in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian thought. As such, it is a shared tradition that unites the vast majority of the world's Christians across denominational and theological divides.
A moral compass for the use of limited force that draws on the just war thought of Thomas AquinasOne of the most contentious developments in contemporary international relations has been the ...increased use of limited force. On the one hand, insofar as it signals greater constraint, the shift away from the mechanized slaughter of large-scale warfare toward more calibrated applications of force may be hailed as a step in the right direction. On the other, because uses of limited force appear more compartmentalized and therefore containable, it may encourage states’ more frequent recourse to arms. How, then, are we to make moral sense of this shift toward the small-scale use of force? When are these operations morally justifiable? Limited Force and the Fight for the Just War Tradition offers a moral compass for just war theorists and extends the limited scholarship on jus ad vim (the just use of limited force). Based on a historical approach to just war and case studies, this book provides practical arguments on the question of how the practice of targeted killing and punitive airstrikes should be regulated in order to be morally defensible. Drawing from a historical reading of the just war thought of Thomas Aquinas, Braun demonstrates how classical just war thinking not only helps us grapple with the moral questions of limited force but can also make an important third-way contribution to a field of study that has been engaged in a metaphorical fight about the just war tradition.
This vibrant collection of essays reveals the intimate politics of how people with a wide range of relationships to war identify with, and against, the military and its gendered and racialised norms.
Justice After War Himes, OFM, Kenneth R; Kwon, David Chiwon
05/2023
eBook
Justice After War is aimed especially to both
undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general
audience who want to understand the significance of a recent
development within the just war ...tradition, namely, the increasing
attention given to the category of jus post bellum
(postwar justice and peace). While examining the interrelated
challenges of moral and social norms in both political and legal
domains, as well as church practices, this work proposes an
innovative methodology for linking theology, ethics, and social
science so that the ideal and the real can inform each other in the
ethics of war and peacebuilding. The main task of this project,
then, is to identify what the author views as three key themes of
jus post bellum , and three practices that are essential to
implementing jus post bellum immediately after a war: just
policing, just punishment, and just political participation. David
Kwon endeavors to challenge the view of those who suggest that
reconciliation, mainly political reconciliation, is the foremost
ambition of jus post bellum . Instead, he attempts to
justify the proposition that achieving just policing, just
punishment, and just political participation are essential to
building a just peace, a peace in which the fundamental
characteristic must be human security. It thus demonstrates that
human security is an oft-neglected theme in the recent discourse of
moral theologians and that a more balanced understanding of jus
post bellum will direct attention to the elements composing
human security in a postwar context.
Larry May argues that the best way to understand war crimes is as crimes against humanness rather than as violations of justice. He shows that in a deeply pluralistic world, we need to understand the ...rules of war as the collective responsibility of states that send their citizens into harm's way, as the embodiment of humanity, and as the chief way for soldiers to retain a sense of honour on the battlefield. Throughout, May demonstrates that the principle of humanness is the cornerstone of international humanitarian law, and is itself the basis of the traditional principles of discrimination, necessity, and proportionality. He draws extensively on the older Just War tradition to assess recent cases from the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia as well as examples of atrocities from the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The book articulates and defends a cosmopolitan theory of the just war. It takes the following two views as its starting point: first, the individual is the fundamental locus of concern and respect; ...second, political borders are arbitrary from a moral point of view and largely irrelevant to individuals' entitlements central. With those two assumptions in hand, the book shows that some key principles of just-war ethics — notably, the just-cause requirement, the requirement of legitimate authority, the principle of discrimination, and the requirement of proportionality — need defending. It does so by examining different kinds of war in the light of those assumptions: wars of national defence, wars over scarce resources (subsistence wars), civil wars; humanitarian wars, wars in which private actors such as mercenaries are deployed, and asymmetrical wars.
The nature of war philosophy in Late Antiquitiy remains largely unexplored. Nevertheless, the analysis of warfare and the military constitutes a philosophical constant since Plato. For instance, in ...The Republic and The Laws Plato examines extensively the military establishment, its training, education and the composition of the army. Perhaps the greatest philosopher in Middle Platonism is Onesander, known for his military treatise Strategikos, where he takes a close look at the characteristics and knowledge a good general should possess. This philosophical tradition of analyzing the theoretical and practical aspects of warfare was taken up in Late Antiquity by the Neoplatonic philosophers. They explored the nature of war, what its goal, features and properties are; its ethical and behavioral aspects, focusing on the related virtues, its link with state rulers and whether or not it functions as a governing tool and how it differs from peace. War tends to be defined cosmologically as a manifestation on the political plane of the tension and conflict between opposites elements of the world. It is also conceived as an intervention meant to restore the previous, now-lost balance. In later works it has even been explored in terms of substrates, with each competing element attempting to occupy the opposing substrates. Hence, starting from the classical precedents of Plato and Onesander, these aspects in primary sources by Porphyry, Proclus, Olympiodorus and Themistius, among other contributions, will be analyzed in relation with Platonism's own tradition in order to reconstruct the philosophical approach to warfare during Late Antiquity.
Un aspecto poco estudiado de la tradición filosófica neoplatónica de la Antigüedad Tardía es el de la filosofía de la guerra. Sin embargo, el examen de la guerra y el ejército es una constante en la escuela ya desde Platón; por ejemplo, en La República o Las Leyes, donde habla extensamente de la clase militar, su formación y preparación y la composición del ejército. En el platonismo medio el máximo exponente en Onesandro, conocido por su tratado militar
Strategikos
, donde analiza las características y conocimientos que debe tener un buen general. Esta tradición del análisis de los aspectos bélicos, tanto teóricos como prácticos, es recogida en la Antigüedad Tardía por los filósofos neoplatónicos, quienes analizan qué es la guerra, cuáles son sus objetivos, características y propiedades; cuáles son sus aspectos conductuales y éticos —sobre todo en lo referente a la clase de virtudes que le son aplicables—; cuál es su vinculación con el gobernante, si es una herramienta de gobierno y en qué se diferencia de la paz. La guerra tiende a definirse en clave cosmológica como una manifestación en el plano político de la tensión y conflicto entre contrarios propia de los diferentes elementos del mundo. También se concibe como una intervención para restituir un estado de desequilibrio al equilibrio previo que se ha visto alterado. En elaboraciones tardías se plantea incluso en términos de substratos, donde las cosas que están en guerra entre sí buscan mutuamente ocupar los substratos opuestos. Partiendo por lo tanto de los antecedentes clásicos de Platón y Onesandro, se investigan estos aspectos en las fuentes primarias de Porfirio, Proclo, Olimpiodoro y Temistio, entre otras aportaciones, poniéndolas en relación con la tradición propia del platonismo, con el propósito de reconstruir cuál era el acercamiento filosófico al hecho bélico en la Antigüedad Tardía.
The just war theory is a doctrine, which is related to and at times interchangeable with such concepts as military tradition, military ethics, the doctrines of military leaders, conflict theology, ...ethical policy-making, and military tactics and strategy. The purpose of the just war doctrine is to attempt to guarantee that a war is morally justifiable through a series of criteria, all of which must be met for a war to be considered just. The criteria are split into two groups: right to go to war (jus ad bellum) and right conduct in war (jus in bello). The first concerns the morality of going to war, and the second the moral conduct within war. Recently there have been calls for the inclusion of a third category of just war theory known as jus post bellum that is concerned with the morality of post-war settlement and reconstruction. Just war theory postulates that war, while terrible, is made less so with the right conduct. It also assumes that war is not always the worst option. Important responsibilities, undesirable outcomes, or preventable atrocities may justify war. There is a just war tradition, a historical body of rules or agreements that have applied in various wars across the ages. The just war tradition consists primarily of the writings of various philosophers and legal experts through history. This tradition examines both their philosophical visions of war's ethical limits and whether their thoughts have contributed to the body of conventions that have evolved to guide war and warfare.
