Are the Popes Leaving Behind Just War and Embracing JustPeace?

Since the mid-nineteenth century a significant, though not yet complete, shift in both the politics and the teachings of popes regarding war and peace has occurred, in an increasingly pacifist direction. More specifically, the emphasis of the papal office has noticeably changed from endorsing violence and war toward embracing the essential coupling of peace and justice, holistic peacebuilding, and active nonviolence.

Moving beyond the tendency in academic literature to focus solely upon the Catholic Church’s teaching on just war, this essay demonstrates how the papacy went through a transformation in their attitudes to war and peace since the accession of Pius IX (r.1846–1878). Mapping developments from the mid-nineteenth century down to the time of this writing in March 2018, this essay demonstrates that while the contemporary popes have left intact certain aspects of the teaching of just war, they nonetheless lend a large measure of support to JustPeace outcomes, defined by the authors as combining peace and social justice in a mutually enhancing and creative tension.     

What's in a War? (Politics as War,War as Politics)

Abstract. This paper combines reflections on the current “state of war” in the Middle East with an epistemological discussion of the meaning and implications of the category “war” itself, in order to dissipate the confusions arising from the idea of a “War on Terror.” The first part illustrates the insufficiency of the ideal type involved in dichotomies which are implicit in the naming and classifications of wars. They point nevertheless to a deeper problem which concerns the antinomic character of a collective institution of violence. The second part discusses the extent to which, in spite of the historical transformations in the means and political objectives of wars, the contemporary confrontation still obeys the rules of warfare described by Clausewitz, particularly with respect to temporality (“friction”). The third part discusses “non‐clausewitzian” aspects of the “new wars” defined by Martin Van Creveld and Mary Kaldor, while suggesting that they have left aside the most salient contradiction illustrated by the US interventions, which results from the combination of a claim to universal sovereignty and a reduction of war to generalized police operations.     

The Effects of Belief in a Just World and Victim's Innocence on Secondary Victimization,Judgements of Justice and Deservingness

Several studies have shown that victims judged to be innocent are more liked and helped by observers than victims judged to be noninnocent. Nevertheless, objectively innocent victims are very often secondarily victimized (blamed, devalued, avoided, or have their suffering minimized), and judged as deserving or as being in a just situation. An impressive amount of literature shows that high believers in a just world victimize the victims more than low believers, judge them as more deserving and think they are in a fairer situation. But the evaluation of the joint impact of the innocence of the victim and of the observers' BJW (belief in a just world) on the observers' reactions to the victim has been left undone. This study aims to throw some light on this subject. An experimental study was conducted using a 2 BJW (high; low) by 2 victim's innocence (innocent; noninnocent) between-subjects design. No interaction effects were found, but the forms of secondary victimization, as well as the judgements of justice and deservingness, were more positively correlated in the condition where the threat to BJW is higher.     

Complicity,Collectives, and Killing in War*

Recent work on the ethics of war has struggled to simultaneously justify two central tenets of international law: the Permission to kill enemy combatants, and the Prohibition on targeting enemy noncombatants. Recently, just war theorists have turned to collectivist considerations as a way out of this problem. In this paper, I reject the argument that all and only unjust combatants are liable to be killed in virtue of their complicity in the wrongful war fought by their side, and that noncombatants are not permissible targets because they are not complicit. I then argue that just combatants have some reason to direct force against unjust combatants rather than unjust noncombatants, because they should respect the reasonable self-determining decisions of other political communities, when those communities settle on the distribution of a negative surplus of cost for which they are collectively but not individually responsible. These collectivist reasons will not fully justify the Permission and the Prohibition, but they can contribute to that justification.     

The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule

This article argues that the semiotics of the war on terrorism points at a significant shift in United States' discourses on security. This shift can best be described as a move from defence to prevention or from danger to risk. Whereas the notion of defence is closely connected to the state of war, this article claims that the war on terrorism instead institutionalises a permanent state of exception. Building upon Agamben's notion that the state of exception is the non-localisable foundation of a political order, this article makes two claims. First, it argues that semiotic shifts in United States' security politics point at a general trend that, to some extent, structures international American interventions. In a sense, the semiotic shifts in American security discourse declare the United States as the sovereign of the global order: they allow the United States to exempt itself from the (international) framework of law, while demanding compliance by others. Second, it claims that this production of American sovereignty is paralleled by reducing the life of (some) individuals to the bare life of homo sacer(life that can be killed without punishment). In the war on terrorism, the production of bare life is mainly brought about by bureaucratic techniques of risk management and surveillance, which reduce human life to biographic risk profiles.     

Fabre’s Crusade for Justice: Why We Should Not Join

Cosmopolitan War is characterized by a tension between moral demandingness and moral permissiveness. On the one hand, Fabre is strongly committed to the value of each and all human beings as precious individuals whose value does not depend on their national or other affiliation. This commitment leads to serious constraints on what may be done to others in both individual and national self-defense. Yet the book is also unambiguously permissive. It opens the gate to far more wars than traditional just war theory would ever permit, in particular to what Fabre has dubbed ‘subsistence wars’, and it rejects the most fundamental constraint imposed by traditional jus in bello, namely, the prohibition against the deliberate killing of civilians. While both the demanding and the permissive aspects of the book seem troublesome to me, the latter seem more so and most of my paper is devoted to a critical examination of them. In the last part of the paper, I point to a different outlook to the one defended in the book and try to show that this outlook is less foreign to Fabre’s outlook than one might expect.     

Can someone fabricate verifiable details when planning in advance? It all depends on the crime scenario

In the current study we examined the effect of having the opportunity to plan an alibi in advance on the suitability of the verifiability approach in two crime scenarios that differed in their opportunity to carry out innocent activities at the time of the crime. One hundred and two participants imagined being involved in stealing money either from a café at a time when it was open (allows innocent activities) or from a bank at a time when it was closed (does not allow innocent activities). We asked participants about their strategies and difficulties in preparing a verifiable alibi in advance, and to write down their prepared alibis. The participants in both groups found this task difficult and did not differ in the difficulties they experienced, however they differed in their strategies (plans to include true witnesses) and actual success in the task. Participants in the Café scenario provided 30% more verifiable details than the participants in the Bank scenario. Strategies and difficulties mentioned by the participants are presented in the paper, and the implications of the study's results on the application of the verifiability approach are discussed.     

Cross-Cultural Lessons on Anger and Social Connectedness

I first started thinking about anger and its role in the experiences of people who have fought in wars when I was in Sierra Leone, about a year after the cease-fire ended the civil war. I was working as a research assistant on a study with girls who had been child soldiers and who had given birth to children during the war. We were living in a community in the west, on the border with Guinea. At first, we met only a few young women. We listened to their stories—about the war, and about what life had been like for them and their children since the end of hostilities.

As days passed, word got around in this rural community that women had come to listen to the experiences of young mothers who had been child soldiers. Girls and young women living in small huts in the jungle surrounding the town, or sharing a house on the edge, began to come with their babies and introduce themselves and tell us their stories. Amid the grief and despair, the worry about how they would have enough food for the next day, I could hear a simmering rage from many young women: anger at not just what had occurred during the war, but how they had been treated when they returned.     

Self-Defense, Punishing Unjust Combatants and Justice in War

Some contemporary Just War theorists, like Jeff McMahan, have recently built upon an individual right of self-defense to articulate moral rules of war that are at odds with commonly accepted views. For instance, they argue that in principle combatants who fight on the unjust side ought to be liable to punishment on that basis alone. Also, they reject the conclusion that combatants fighting on both sides are morally equal. In this paper, I argue that these theorists overextend their self-defense analysis when it comes to the punishment of unjust combatants, and I show how in an important sense just and unjust combatants are morally equal. I contend that the individualistic and quid pro quo perspective of the self-defense analysis fails to consider properly how the international community, morally speaking, ought to treat combatants, and I set forth four elements of justice applicable to war, which, together, support the conclusion that in principle the international community should not take on the activity of punishing combatants solely for fighting on the unjust side.     

War,crime, empire and cosmopolitanism

The millions of deaths produced by states and governments make the 20th century ‘unnameable’, a century far more lethal than all previous ‘pre-civil’ epochs. It does not appear that contemporary state violence tends to decline or to temper the brutality commonly attributed to archaic armies, nor that the rules and limitations internationally imposed on that violence, throughout the last decades, have reduced its effects. The 20th century having gone, and while hope was growing that mass murder and destruction would also go with it, recent events appear to suggest that the twenty-first century is poised to become unnameable in its turn. In this paper a reflection is presented of the notion of war as annihilation, which emerges in contemporary international conflicts. This is followed by a review of the debate on the relationship between war, empire and crime. As a logical extension of the argument developed, war is described as a particularly devastating form of crime of the powerful. Finally, reflecting on the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’, the discussion suggests that such a concept may offer legitimacy to those who invest their enthusiasm in supporting contemporary wars as well as to those who fight against them. The latter may find inspiration in the idea of a ‘critical’ cosmopolitanism.     

On War,Peace and Armed Conflicts

In general, the relationship between rule and conduct is dominated by the concept of linear causality: the legal rule causes effect in social practice. The case study on Article 96 of the Dutch Constitution (democratic procedures for the war declaration) and Article 102 of the Dutch Penal Code (the offence: aiding the enemy in war time) makes clear that this concept is too simplistic for the complex processes that took place. The clear dividing point between war and peace — i.e., the war declaration that initiates the legal state of war — no longer exists, since a third category —'armed conflicts' — that was 'constituted' in social practice and is positioned 'somewhere' between peace and war. Exact demarcation for this category is problematic. This phenomenon has far-reaching consequences for the meaning of the Articles, mentioned above.     

Soldiers as Public Officials: A Moral Justification for Combatant Immunity

How can we make moral sense of the international humanitarian law doctrine of combatant immunity? The doctrine is morally shocking to many: It holds soldiers on both sides of a war immune from criminal prosecution for their otherwise criminal acts of killing, maiming, destroying property, etc., carried out as part of their country's war effort. That is, soldiers who kill as part of an attack benefit from the immunity just as much as those defending their country. Traditionally, just war theorists have tried to provide situation‐specific arguments to show that soldiers on both sides had a good moral justification for their actions. Recently, self‐styled “revisionist just war theorists” have suggested that the doctrine of combatant immunity is just a convention designed to minimize harm. In this article, I suggest that the moral foundation of the doctrine lies in the status of soldiers as public officials in the service of their country. The reason why we hold them immune from prosecution for their war‐making acts is that such acts are properly thought of as acts of a state, rather than as acts of a particular individual. And the reason why states are immune from prosecution for their acts is one of moral standing: No other state has the moral standing to tell another how to carry out the matters that define its jurisdiction. So as long as a country deems (however implausibly) that it must use force to defend itself from aggression, then it may do what is required to defend itself. No other state has the standing to prohibit such acts or to punish those who carry them out. This argument is rooted in an understanding of how individuals may interact as free and equal under law. It does not aim at the perfection of human action, but it does serve to eliminate the worst forms of tyranny.     

Seeing War as Criminal: Peace Activist Views and Critical Criminology

A hallmark of critical criminology is its critique of the traditional definition of crime. For decades, critical scholars have proposed humanistic definitions of crime that bring state violence into the purview of academic criminology—although outside of critical criminology this is a matter of great contentiousness. This study investigates the views of those involved in peace activism, but not in any way associated with academic criminology, about the application of the term ‘crime’ to war, specifically the recent US war on Iraq. Given that there is no existing research on this subject, the article also examines how peace activists define crime generally and whether they believe those responsible for the war should be regarded as war criminals. Not surprisingly, semi‐structured interviews with 13 anti‐war activists reveal significant support for elements of critical criminological definitions of crime but an unexpected concern on the part of some that the application of the term ‘crime’ to war could be counterproductive in efforts to stop state violence. The rationales for this concern, as well as those for other issues addressed in the study, are largely presented in the interviewees’ own words.     

Justice,Context, and Violence: Law Enforcement Officers on Why They Torture

How do police explain their support for torture? Findings from 12 months of fieldwork with police in India complicate previous researchers’ claims that violence workers tend to morally disengage and blame circumstances for their actions. The officers in this study engage in moral reflection on torture, drawing on their beliefs about human nature and justice to explain their support for it. They admit that they use torture more widely than their own conceptions of justice allow, but see this as an imperfect implementation of their principles rather than as a violation of them. Previous research on the spread of human rights norms has focused on how these norms can be adapted to the local beliefs that support them, rather than on understanding the beliefs that conflict with human rights. I argue that illuminating the self‐understanding of state actors who support or engage in torture is crucial to building theory on why such violence occurs, as well as to designing interventions to prevent it.     

Self-Defense and Giving Rise to Cost: On Innocent Bystanders,Threats, Obstructors,and Obstacles,and the Permissibility to Harm Them

Philosophers have had trouble defending the common sense view that it is permissible to impose significant cost on an innocent person who is about to harm you to prevent the harm from occurring. In this paper, I argue that such harm can be justified if one pays attention to the moral significance of imposing a cost on others. The constraint against harming people who give rise to cost by their presence or movements is weaker than the constraint against harming bystanders. Moreover, I argue that people who give rise to cost have a duty to take on some of that cost to help protect the person under threat.     

Cruelty and the Imperative to Wage Virtuous War

This paper considers the newly imperative force of the jus ad bellum, when it acts as a guarantee of the moral. An emotive sense of cruelty now mobilizes as legitimate some forms of virtuous killing, whether in the 'war on crime' waged upon a country's own citizens, or in the conduct of war upon other nations. The recoil against cruelty authorizes virtuous wars against 'brutal' regimes, and underwrites the imposition of maximal penalties for atrocious crimes. Cruelty obliges military force, that naked arm of sovereign power, to be placed at the service of an ailing humanity. This turn towards a pitiful virtuous war suggests a jurisprudence critical of those intimations of cruelty that tend to secure compassion as an authorizing stamp, or guarantor, of the moral.     

From War to Prison: Examining the Relationship Between Military Service and Criminal Activity

In February of 2008 the New York Times ran a series—War Torn—on Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and their adjustment to civilian life upon return from the war zone. The authors assessed the criminal involvement of veterans by using newspaper accounts and other open source data to identify homicides in which the offender was an Afghanistan or Iraq war veteran. This particular aspect of the series drew a great deal of criticism, in part because of disagreements about the wisdom of the wars, but also because the sources of data used were perceived as less than systematic and accurate. This series and the debate that it engendered raised once again to prominence the issue of whether veterans are disproportionately involved in crime upon their return from service and specifically from combat assignments. The series also raised the question of whether media accounts of violent behavior by returning combat veterans are simply anecdotal or if they portend a more system-wide problem. This paper uses data from the Surveys of Inmates of State and Federal Correctional Facilities and the Current Population Surveys from 1985 to 2004 to estimate more systematically the prevalence and nature of the offending by military veterans in civilian society. The study seeks to avoid some of the methodological weaknesses of earlier studies that examined the criminal behavior of returning veterans. Specifically, the research considers whether criminal behavior, as reflected in the likelihood of imprisonment, is affected by military service, era of service, or service during wartime after controlling for social and demographic characteristics associated with offending. The findings indicate that military service in general is not predictive of incarceration when key demographic and social integration variables are taken into account. Service during wartime was found to be inversely related to subsequent incarceration, while veterans of the post-1973 All Volunteer Force were more likely to be incarcerated than were civilians and veterans who served during the draft era.     

Belief in a Just World and Commitment to Long-Term Deserved Outcomes

We investigated whether people need to believe in a just world in part because such a belief helps people to work toward long-term goals and to do so in such a way that they are deserved. We assessed participants' long-term goal focus and also their commitment to deserving their outcomes (via a psychopathy scale). In a second session, participants were then exposed to a victim whose situation did or did not contradict a belief in a just world. When the victim's situation contradicted a belief in a just world, the greater the participants' tendency to focus on long-term outcomes, the more they blamed the victim for her misfortune; but this relation only occurred for participants with a strong commitment to deserving their outcomes (i.e., those low in psychopathy). The results are consistent with our argument that, given the function of the belief in a just world proposed in this article, people would have a greater need to preserve the belief (e.g., by blaming victims of injustice) the greater their investment in long-term and deserved outcomes.     

When Will a Victim Be Secondarily Victimized? The Effect of Observer's Belief in a Just World,Victim's Innocence and Persistence of Suffering

According to the belief in a just world (BJW) theory, the most threatening victim for the observers' BJW is the innocent victim whose suffering persists. Consequently the innocent victim whose suffering persists should be more secondarily victimized by high-BJW participants than by low-BJW participants. However, research has never systematically tested this basic prediction of the theory. In these two studies we tried to determine the impact of the observer's BJW, the victim's innocence, and the persistence of the victim's suffering on secondary victimization. In study 1, an interaction between BJW and victim's innocence was found on the attractiveness of the victim. In study 2, an interaction between BJW, victim's innocence, and persistence of suffering was found on the derogation of the victim.     

Comparing Discourse to Officer Perceptions: The Problems of War and Militarization in Wildlife Crime Enforcement

‘War’ has become a common model and metaphor for biodiversity conservation in Africa. By discussing the specific challenges of wildlife crime enforcement in Uganda, this article challenges the ‘war on wildlife crime’ discourse. It concludes that in the context of Uganda, the discourse is profoundly unhelpful because of a lack of alignment between the problems highlighted by Ugandan law enforcement officers interviewed and the solutions typically favoured in the ‘wars on crime’. Most wildlife crimes are subsistence-driven and interviewees’ requests are for basic equipment and conventional capacity building. Findings demonstrate that the language of war, militarization and securitization should be used with caution as it risks constructing an image of wildlife crime that is misleading—and one that prevents responses that are effective in the long term.