Justice Versus Just War

Abstract

This panel explores how questions of justice arise in relation to conflict and the laws of war and how they come to challenge core elements of just war theory. The panel contributes to the section an exploration of how justice conflicts arise and how a grasp of these forces helps shape a critical response to those conflicts. Papers will seek to investigate, inter alia, the normative implications of arguments that proclaim the legality of preventative self-defence, or humanitarian intervention, or of treating terrorist suspects as illegal combatants. Such claims rely on a highly politicised approach to law and challenge core elements of just war theory in specific ways. Furthermore, the panel will explore arguments concerning the deep morality of war and the ways that the very foundations of just war theory are challenged by contemporary thinking. In addition the panel also calls for contributions on the role of distributive justice for just war theory. Just war theory for instance is largely silent on the salience of the relationships between poverty and war. Indeed, the account of justice in war seems to be designed to be insensitive to such issues of distributive justice, beyond those that bear on the distribution of just force.

Title	Details
Justice and the Legalisation of Just War	View Paper Details
Poverty, Just War Theory, and the Poverty of Just War Theory	View Paper Details
Just War Theory and the Deep Morality of War in Iraq and Afghanistan	View Paper Details
War and Poverty	View Paper Details