America and the Just War Tradition

This is a book that anyone interested in the just war tradition should read. It challenges scholars to respond to the ethical dilemmas that arise in the course of war, not simply by interpolating them via scholastic debate, but by situating them in the historical stream of international relations. The editors of this volume, Mark David Hall and J. Daryl Charles, achieve this effect by collating twelve essays that draw upon the just war tradition to interrogate the wars waged by the United States from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. The scholarship on display in each instance is exemplary. There is no browbeating here, no polemics, no special pleading, no Whiggery, just thoughtful analysis that offers a careful weighing of the evidence that is sensitive to, but not overwhelmed by, the demands of historical context. The pitfalls associated with edited volumes are successfully avoided. The chapters that comprise America and the Just War Tradition are of a uniformly high rather than patchy standard, and they combine to form a cohesive whole, where, in lesser hands, they might have pulled against one another. This, then, is a superior book and a very welcome addition to the just war canon.

Context (archaeology) · Just war theory · Pleading · Political science · Scholarship · Spanish Civil War · Classics · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · History · Law · Torture, Ethics, and Law · War, Ethics, and Justification