ABSTRACT
This book was inspired by Michael Walzer’s monumental and extremely influential book, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. Although I am explicitly critical of several of Walzer’s arguments, this project is written in the spirit of engaging and supplementing Walzer’s work, not in the spirit of demolition. This book aims to address the central questions of jus ad bellum in light of changing attitudes toward sovereignty that have become ascendant since Walzer wrote Just and Unjust Wars and also in light of the increasing number of intra-state conflicts relative to inter-state wars. Changing attitudes toward sovereignty are evident in the emerging norms of “sovereignty as responsibility,” the “responsibility to protect,” and the “responsibility to prevent,” as well as in the work of international relations theorists in the liberal and constructivist schools. Unlike the realists, to whom Walzer sees his work as responding, who tend to view international relations as the a-moral, rational pursuit of narrow self-interest by rational unitary sovereign states, liberals emphasize interdependence and the possibility of cooperation, while constructivists stress the centrality of ideas as important for explaining and understanding international relations. Walzer’s just war theory works well for a world where sovereign states are the only important actors and where inter-state conflict is the primary worry. However, as Thomas G. Weiss notes, there has been a “dramatic shift away from state-centric perspectives.”1 Presently, wars are most often internal wars between non-state actors and weak or repressive state authorities. Weiss quotes Kalevi Holsti, who puts the matter succinctly:
The major problem of the contemporary society of states is no longer aggression, conquest, and the obliteration of states. It is, rather, the collapse of states, humanitarian emergencies, state terror against segments of local populations, civil wars of various types, and international terrorist organizations.2
