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Just war theory after colonialism and the war on terror

Reexamining non-combatant immunity

Bibliographic Data

ID12915852
AuthorsGabriel Mares (0000-0002-6643-3787, University of Massachusetts Amherst, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume13
Issue3
Pages483-505
Publication date2020-10-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1752-9719 • E-ISSN: 1752-9727
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1752971920000482
OpenAlexW3091931279
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited36

I challenge a recent trend in just war theory – that civilians might be complicit with terrorists and lose non-combatant immunity – by reversing the gun sights and asking whether colonizing populations complicit with empire might compromise their non-combatant status. Employing colonial settlers as a thought experiment, I demonstrate the logic of expanded civilian culpability that has been proposed in the wake of the War on Terror would be unacceptable in other scenarios, and that these revisionist proposals are in service of ends incompatible with just war. In the process, I identify an important ambiguity regarding the performativity of non-combatant status, and show how this is used to aggressively expand civilian culpability for violence

Ambiguity · Colonialism · Combatant · Criminology · Culpability · Political science · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · Philosophy · Torture, Ethics, and Law · War, Ethics, and Justification

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Unique citing works1
Citations per year1
Citation span2025 - 2025 (1)
Citation velocityrecent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 1
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