ABSTRACT
Many people have an opinion on war. When it comes to justifying or condemning a particular war, many are quite ready to voice their opinion, to shout their belief out loud, to shout down others. In the context of what is commonly called the ‘war on terror’ our ears are pounded and battered by ever constant proclamations that this ‘war’ is ‘just’ and that it is the ‘right’ thing to do. More sporadically, more dispersed, but perhaps no less powerful, stands a groundswell of opinion that murmurs and mutters its discontent with such proclamations. Sometimes this muttering breaks out into public demonstration with an anger that shouts back that the war is unjust, illegal, illegitimate, or most basically, that it is not right. It is easy to say that a particular war is ‘right’ or that it is ‘not right’, however, it seems that it is more difficult to explain what is meant by this. What is the rightness of war? What place do concepts of right have in helping us judge acts of war? Are there differing concepts of right contained within our opinions on war? Taking the problem of war seriously involves asking and pursuing these types of questions. Under the shadow of the so-called ‘war on terror’ this chapter offers a cri-
tique of a discourse commonly known as ‘just war theory’. Just war theory dominates many contemporary debates related to war and terror. It is not merely an academic discourse, it is also widely invoked by politicians and many within the media to both justify and condemn acts of war, humanitarian intervention, and terrorism. This chapter will briefly look at a popular account of just war theory offered by Michael Walzer and point to the general inadequacy of his approach. Walzer’s just war theory fails because of its uncritical reliance upon a number of assumptions about the nature of ‘morality’, ‘justice’ and ‘reason’. Due to these assumptions his pronouncements about what does or does not constitute a ‘just cause’ resemble little more than the private and dubious opinions given by politicians and so-called media ‘experts’. The chapter probes a little deeper into some of the assumptions that are
relied upon by Walzer and other just war theorists. By looking at the classical just war theory of Francisco de Vitoria, the chapter examines the way in which
a well-meaning, careful, and principled approach to war via just war concepts too often ends up as an apology for, and justification of, aggressive violence and conquest. By situating Vitoria, one of the ‘early fathers’ of just war theory, within the colonial context, some of the inadequacies of the abstract nature of just war thinking come more readily to the surface. By holding on to this context, modern re-appropriations of just war theory are shown to be increasingly suspect and, at times, rather dangerous.
