ABSTRACT
The present age, defined by the war on terror, has been characterized by President Bush as a time of ‘chaos and constant alarm’ (Bush 2003b). It might also be described as a time of flux or change. Indeed, some commentators have suggested that the current period reflects a great degree of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘disequilibrium’ (Clark 2005: 224–80; Hurrell 2002). In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, they argue, a whole series of truths, conventions, and practices, previously taken for granted, have been called into question. This is certainly evident with respect to the just war tradition. The right of states to wage war in certain circumstances has been subject to concerted scrutiny as theorists and interested observers have examined whether received doctrine should be retained unaltered, scrapped, or modified to fit today's security environment. This chapter will argue that there is, at present, a move afoot within the just war tradition towards re-casting the idea of the just war along more morally expansive lines which extol the imperatives of justice, responsibility, judgement, and struggle-against-evil. This is more in tune with classical articulations of the jus ad bellum than with the legalist approach to war dominant in the twentieth century. This chapter further contends that this move is echoed in the public rhetoric of state leaders today and is potentially very consequential: at the same time as it fosters a broader right to war, this expansion sets the possibility of restraint in war, the jus in bello, on a precarious footing. This is surely something to be guarded against lest we allow war to resume the semblance of ‘monstrous barbarity’ and riotous fury that Grotius warned against in his 1625 masterpiece, The Rights of War and Peace (2005: 106).
