Introduction: surfacing submerged assumptions

For the theory and practice of just war, is it the end of the matter when the fighting ends? Does the quality of the peace matter? Does it matter who made the peace and how? This chapter will suggest that it is not the end of the matter and that they both do, respectively.

Rousseau observed that the axiomatic question in all politics is what produces legitimate authority. Statesmen who have reflected on the matter subsequently have agreed with him. What then shall be the moral and the practical basis for judgement of legitimacy in the governance arrangements which follow a war? Post-war moments are often fraught and contested. The legitimation of the peace in fraught circumstances is less often a dogmatic judgement than a question of choosing the lesser evil. Michael Ignatieff has re-stated the case for the simultaneous centrality and unavoidability of this type of moral choice in war-related contexts in his essay on the subject. Choosing the lesser evil is, like Rousseau's question, one of the oldest questions in politics and one of the hardest to answer. So the nurturing of legitimacy in post-conflict situations, and adoption of the lesser evil within them as a foundation for the consequent construction of public good, provide the moral calibrators for this essay.

Are the issues of legitimacy and of adjudicating between greater and lesser evils affected by just war criteria? Can they affect those criteria?