A postmodern view of just war

Abstract

From a postmodern perspective, just war - with its two components of ius ad bellum and ius in bello and their respective specifications - represents a heuristic construct, apt for delineating and considering the issues and aspects of the morality of war, rather than a theory, a doctrine, or even a tradition, according to which judgments can be made or conclusions drawn about the morality of particular wars or methods of warfare.1 Historically, the development of just war has not been an organic evolution, but a series of paradigm shifts in response to a dialectic between transformations of values and technological, political, social, and cultural innovations. Concomitantly, just war has vied with alternative ethics of war - militarism, pacifism, realism, and idealism - each with its own metaethical foundation. No wonder, then, that contemporary proponents of a just war ethic have interpreted it in diverse senses while reaching contrary opinions both about the resort to and conduct of war and about the morality of particular wars and modes of warfare, with the consequence that just war, variously interpreted and applied, appears reducible to one or another of the alternative ethics of war. In today's global and multicultural world, it is also evident that just war is, like its alternatives, a Western ethic of war, rather than a self-evidently universal framework for the evaluation of war. Yet it can still be argued that just war, precisely because of its lability and adaptability, remains an irreplaceable framework for assessing both the prospect of engaging in war and the merits of various forms of warfare: the last best hope for meeting the contemporary challenges to the ethics of warfare from preemptive and preventive war; from insurgency, intrastate conflict, and nonstate guerilla aggression; from humanitarian and police intervention; from weapons of mass destruction; from torture, terrorism, and genocide. © 2007 Springer.