Post-war Justice, Victory and Coloniality

In the last decades, just war theory has dominated philosophical debates on justice after war. Its proponents are often interested in the analysis of the rights and responsibilities of victors once the violent conflict is over (Bass 2004; Bellamy 2008; McCready 2009; Orend 2008; 2002; Patterson 2012; Walzer 2012; Johnson 2012; Pattison 2015). This is often perceived as one of the latest developments in just war theory. US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequent state-building operations, for instance, are normally regarded as archetypical scenarios of justice after war. The idea of justice after war in this framework is grounded on a sharp distinction between ‘just victors’, on the one hand, and ‘unjust aggressors’ or ‘inherently murderous regimes’ defeated on the battlefield, on the other. There has been, more recently, a growing interest in this normative framework with the development of new works on the interplay between victory and war (O’Driscoll 2020a; 2019; 2020b; Patterson 2017; Hom, O’Driscoll, and Mills 2017). The interest in the problems of justice after war, however, is not entirely new. In fact, it finds its historical roots in seminal debates on the rights and responsibilities of colonial and imperial powers in just war theory. In this paper, I trace back the origins of this focus on post-war questions to the connection between modernity and coloniality as two sides of the same intellectual tradition of political thought. Drawing on some of the decolonial accounts of just war theory (Mbembe 2019, chap. 1; Hutchings 2019; Whyte 2018; Cavallar 2008; Bohrer 2018; Mares 2020), I argue that an image of a ‘just victor’ with the moral responsibility to punish, protect and educate its enemies is not only of historical interest but it also influences some of the ideas of justice after war in their contemporary form. One eloquent example of this in just war theory is the analysis of the ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘territorial occupation’ of defeated enemies once the smoke clears. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section reconstructs and critically evaluates what I call here ‘the paradigm of victory’ in just war theory and its idea of justice after war. This notion revolves around the rights and responsibilities of victors in the aftermath of war. In the second section, I outline some of the decolonial critiques to just war theory and its colonial and imperial influences in modern times. This line of criticism calls into question the humanitarian origins and altruistic interests often associated with the notion of just wars. The third section assesses whether this critical interpretation sheds some light on contemporary ideas of justice after war. I illustrate my conclusion in this last section with the debate on the ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘territorial occupation’ of defeated enemies in just war theory. This paper is, most importantly, an invitation to reflect on the historical baggage of just war theory and our potential to imagine justice after war otherwise.