There is at least some evidence that, as Sartre put it, “when the rich wage war, it’s the poor that die”. The world’s armies are composed extensively of people from poorer socio-economic groups: the class of non-combatants at greater risk of (permissible) attack in war is largely composed of workers involved in the “war effort”. Poor civilians are more likely than rich civilians, ceteris paribus, to be killed or rendered destitute by war. Just war theory is largely silent on the salience of these relationships between poverty and war. Indeed, our 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.
It might be thought, then, that whilst poverty may be morally problematic, this is not an issue for just war theory. In this paper, I reject such a view. After offering a brief discussion of the nature of poverty and the evidence connecting poverty and war, I argue that poverty is indeed relevant to the question of who is liable to killing in war, and why. Whilst other scholars have argued that poverty might yield “just cause” for war, here I take up the suggestions, also, that it can excuse those who fight, and condemn those who order the poor to fight. However, poverty cannot be brought wholly within the scope of just war analysis. Consideration of socio-economic injustice points to a lens through which any particular war - or indeed, warfighting in general - can seem unjust, despite fulfilling all just war criteria. This, I argue, should trouble just war theorists, since it demonstrates that the theory is incomplete as an account of the morality of violence.
