ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces one of the seminal figures in the historical development of the just war tradition: Michael Walzer. Walzer's opposition to the Vietnam War quite naturally ruled out the adoption of a political realist, Clausewitzian understanding of war as simply an act of policy, with no particular moral freight attached to the choice of violence. For Walzer, the default setting is that to wage war is to commit a crime. The positions Walzer adopts on aggression and the rules of war are broadly compatible with the contemporary legal regime governing the use of force in international relations. One area where Walzer departs from the modern legal regime is with respect to "supreme emergency", which is not recognized by lawyers as a legitimate basis for suspending the rules of war. Walzer's work remains relevant and his commentaries on current affairs, international and domestic, have such force.