ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces one of the seminal figures in the historical development of the just war tradition: Jean Bethke Elshtain. The text, which, more than any other sets up the parameters of Elshtain's engagement with the just war tradition, is Women and War. The story Women and War, she tells us, "is the result of overlapping recognitions of the complexity hiding behind many of our simple, rigid ideas and formulations". The rest of the book continues to problematize simplistic narratives of gender and war and does so very powerfully indeed, but for our purposes, her course has been set. Elshtain was fighting a war on at least two fronts: chiding on the one hand the "humanists" and on the other, Realists of a non-Christian sort who see the international order simply as a struggle for power and interest.
