The fundamental aims of this book are two: to explore the interaction between religion and secular society in the formation as well as the dissolution of just war doctrine; and to investigate just war doctrine as an ideological pattern of thought, expressive of a greater ideology. The author reconstructs the development of classic just war doctrine, showing it to be a product of secular and religious forces. From it he traces the growth of the doctrines of holy war and of modern just war. He demonstrates that the blending of two distinct traditions in the late Middle Ages has its counterpart in the century following the Reformation. The secularized just war doctrine exemplified in the writings of Grotius, Locke, and Vattel are related to the problems of war in our time. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Renewed ethnic and nationalist strife, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, rogue states that disregard elementary norms of international conduct, brutal regimes that torture their own citizens, the widespread use of terrorism, and other trends demonstrate the dangerous and unpredictable nature of international politics in the Post-Cold War Era. The prominent contributors to this edition reassess these problems from a moral-philosophical perspective in an effort to move beyond familiar ways of thinking. These insightful essays draw on a long and rich tradition of Christian political reflection to cast a moral light on international politics and to enrich public discourse on these pressing matters. Sovereignty at the Crossroads? is important reading for everyone concerned about the political stability, economic development, and ecological integrity of the post-cold war world. Sponsored by the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship.

Despite the supreme political and economic significance of boundaries--and ongoing challenges to existing national boundaries--scant attention has been paid to their ethics. This volume explores how diverse ethical traditions understand the political and property rights reflected in territorial and jurisdictional boundaries. It is the first book to bring together thinkers from a range of traditions, both religious and secular, to discuss the ethics of boundaries. Each contributor represents a tradition's views on questions surrounding the use of boundaries to delimit property and political rights. What does it mean to own something? What resources should not be privately owned? What justifies the erection of political boundaries between one people and another? How ''hard'' should such boundaries be? What rights extend to minorities within a state? Should territorial boundaries coincide with social ones? Does national autonomy have an ethical basis, or is it an aspect of modern power politics? Should we aim for a more inclusive community than that afforded by modern nation-states? Cross-chapter dialogue and a substantive conclusion draw out similarities and differences among the traditions represented, traditions that include Christianity, classical liberalism, Confucianism, international law, Islam, Judaism, liberal egalitarianism, and natural law. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Nigel Biggar, Joseph Boyle, Joseph Chan, Russell Hardin, Will Kymlicka, Loren Lomasky, Robert McCorquodale, Richard B. Miller, David Novak, Sulayman Nyang, Michael Nylan, Raul C. Pangalangan, Daniel Philpott, Jeremy Rabkin, Hillel Steiner, M. Raquibuz Zaman, and Noam J. Zohar.

Over the centuries, societies have gradually developed constraints on the use of armed force in the conduct of foreign relations. The crowning achievement of these efforts occurred in the midtwentieth century with the general acceptance among the states of the world that the use of military force for territorial expansion was unacceptable. A central challenge for the twenty-first century rests in reconciling these constraints with the increasing desire to protect innocent persons from human rights deprivations that often take place during civil war or result from persecution by autocratic governments. Humanitarian Intervention is a detailed look at the historical development of constraints on the use of force and at incidents of humanitarian intervention prior to, during, and after the Cold War.

Texts about war pervade the Hebrew Bible, raising challenging questions in religious and political ethics. The war passages that readers find most disquieting are those in which God demands the total annihilation of the enemy without regard to gender, age, or military status. The ideology of the "ban," however, is only one among a range of attitudes towards war preserved in the ancient Israelite literary tradition. Applying insights from anthropology, comparative literature, and feminist studies, Niditch considers a wide spectrum of war ideologies in the Hebrew Bible, seeking in each case to discover why and how these views might have made sense to biblical writers, who themselves can be seen to wrestle with the ethics of violence. The study of war thus also illuminates the social and cultural history of Israel, as war texts are found to map the world views of biblical writers from various periods and settings. Reviewing ways in which modern scholars have interpreted this controversial material, Niditch sheds further light on the normative assumptions that shape our understanding of ancient Israel. More widely, this work explores how human beings attempt to justify killing and violence while concentrating on the tones, textures, meanings, and messages of a particular corpus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Originally published in 1985, this book surveys how NATO policy sought to come to terms with the revolution in thinking about war which was brought about by the advent of nuclear weapons. It also examines the logic of deterrence. The book assesses the ethical issues involved, using as a framework the tradition of the idea of the Just War. A detailed modern version of the theory is elaborated and defended from an ethical viewpoint that gives due weight both to the mental states of the agent and to the consequences of his agency. The principle of non-combatant immunity is also examined for its clear relevance to the debate. Further considerations involve the effectiveness of deterrence and its morality, and the question whether deterrence can be effective even if its use is prohibited. The book also discusses the implications of various possible changes in NATO policy.

Through a careful examination of religious and philosophical literature, the contributors to the volume analyze, compare and assess diverse Western, Islamic, Hindu and East Asian perspectives concerning the appropriate criteria that should govern the decision to resort to the use of armed force and, once that decision is made, what constraints should govern the actual conduct of military operations. In doing so, the volume promotes a better understanding of the various ways in which diverse peoples and societies within the global community approach the question of what constitutes the legitimate use of military force as an instrument of policy in the resolution of conflicts.

The Law of Armed Conflict is usually understood to be a regime of exception that applies only during armed conflict and regulates hostilities among enemies. It assigns privileges to states far beyond what they are allowed to do in peacetime, and it mandates certain protections for non-combatants, which can often be defeated by appeals to military necessity or advantage. The Laws of War in International Thought examines the intellectual history of the laws of war before their codification. It reconstructs the processes by which political and legal theorists built the laws' distinctive vocabularies and legitimized some of their broadest permissions, and it situates these processes within the broader intellectual project that from early modernity spelled out the nature, function, and powers of state sovereignty. The book focuses on four historical moments in the intellectual history of the laws of war: the doctrine of just war in Spanish scholasticism; Hugo Grotius's theory of solemn war; the Enlightenment theory of regular war; and late nineteenth-century humanitarianism. By looking at these moments, Pablo Kalmanovitz shows how challenging and polemical it has been for international theorists to justify the exceptional and permissive character of the laws of war. In this way, he contributes to recover a sense of the historical foundations and many still problematic aspects of the Law of Armed Conflict.

This collection examines the role of the just war tradition and its criteria in solving pressing present-day challenges. In particular, it deals with three types of challenges to world public order. One is anticipatory self-defense, in which one state attacks another to pre-empt or prevent an attack on itself, as the United States claimed in relation to Iraq in 2003. The second challenge is humanitarian intervention, in which one state attacks another to stop gross, large-scale violations of human rights, as NATO claimed to be doing on behalf of Kosovo in 1999. Both practices may erode world public order, given the normative strength of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibiting the threat or use of force against other states. However, both practices pose dilemmas, in that they also preserve world public order by not allowing impunity for human rights abusers or the misuse of international law to the advantage of genuine aggressors. The third challenge is the execution of warfare in a new geopolitical environment characterized by new technologies and asymmetry of belligerents. The chapters in this book, written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, turn to the just war tradition to attempt to resolve these tensions.This book was based on a special issue of the Journal of Military Ethics.

With the new wave of terrorism, scholars, politicians, members of the military and even ordinary people, all of whom have been startled by the extreme kind of violence, have raised many questions. With an interesting spectrum of viewpoints, this text covers many challenging themes.