Just war, international law, and world order are all historically conditioned realities that interrelate with one another in complex ways. This paper explores their historical development and current status while critically examining their interrelationship. It begins with exploring just war as a basic frame for analysis and interconnection with the other two realities. Just war is not an abstract body of moral thought but instead a practically informed morality of war rooted in Christian thought and law, Roman law, and the practice of statecraft. The essay notes the importance of the ideas of jus gentium and jus naturale in just war's fundamental formation, as well as the parallel between its three basic features—sovereign authority, just cause, and the end of peace—and the three goods or ends of politics as classically defined, namely, order, justice, and peace. The essay then moves out to explore the historical and thematic relations between just war tradition and international law, especially the law of war, arguing that these together define a moral and legal structure that is normative for world order. The final section of the paper considers the functioning of the institutions of world order in the context of challenges from rival cultural understandings of war, law, and world order and from the rise of nonstate actors in the international sphere, arguing for dialogical efforts aimed at strengthening both the moral and legal basis for world order against contemporary threats to that order.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, lasting memories of two world wars and astonishment over the power of nuclear weapons left both policymakers and scholars of war largely preoccupied with the possibility of a catastrophic World War III. Instead, however, the face of war since 1945 has been that of regionally limited small wars and insurgencies fought with conventional weapons. Many of these conflicts began as armed rebellions against colonial regimes, but often later evolved into armed conflicts between and among various subgroups seeking control of state government. Such conflicts have usually been asymmetrical, with the party holding the reins of state power using aircraft, artillery, and armored vehicles, while those fighting against the regime have been limited to weapons that individuals can carry, such as automatic rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and improvised weapons of various sorts. The asymmetries have also typically gone deeper, with the fighters on the former side wearing uniforms and those on the latter often not; those on the former side making use of fortified bases and those on the latter side protecting themselves by blending in with the civilian population. Further, there have frequently been asymmetries in how each side has fought, with the militarily weaker side relying on stealth tactics, deception, and attacks against nonmilitary targets of more general public value, including direct attacks on people protected as noncombatants under the laws of war. The particular range of tactics classified as terrorism begins at this point, with the specific, direct, and intentional targeting of noncombatants. Such attacks not only have been the means of choice for transnational nonstate actors, including al-Qaeda and the self-styled Islamic State, but have also been used to considerable effect in local civil wars.

“Stab, smite, slay!” These are not the words of Bashar al-Assad telling his forces how they should deal with the Syrian rebel movement, or indeed those of any other contemporary political leader, but rather the words of Martin Luther exhorting the German nobility to a harsh response to the peasants' rebellion of 1524–1525. His writings show that he sympathized with many of the peasants' grievances so long as these did not issue in rebellion, but when they turned to force of arms, he responded sternly. This was not a peculiarity of Luther. Consider the following from an English courtier, Thomas Churchyard, writing admiringly of the treatment of Irish rebels in 1579 by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, commander of the English army sent to put down the rebellion:

This chapter begins with the observation that non-international armed conflicts pose serious challenges to the efforts to regulate war in both international law and recent ethical discourse, and argues that neither has responded well to these challenges. Various problems in both are identified. The second part of the chapter examines the historical conception of just war accepted as consensual in the West from the high Middle Ages till early in the modern period, arguing that it provides a helpful frame for thinking ethically about non-international armed conflicts. The third section of the chapter carries this reasoning forward, applying it to non-international armed conflicts generally and to the problem of detention in such conflicts specifically.

The increasingly widespread and energetic engagement with the idea of just war over the last fifty years of thinking on morality and armed conflict—especially in English-speaking countries—presents a striking contrast to the previous several centuries, going back to the early 1600s, in which thinkers addressing moral issues related to war did so without reference to the just war idea.

This article explores the Western cultural traditions of democracy and freedom which form a political ethic deeply rooted in the underlying philosophical and theological American heritage. Theories of Machiavelli, Montesqieu, and Niebuhr support the notion that the potential for virtue is found in all individuals, who, through their undeniable freedoms, responsibilities, and participation, have the capability to establish a political community based on democracy, justice, and respect for human rights. Virtue, justice, morality, ethics, freedom, and democracy are all necessary elements for establishing and maintaining the political community. Can history serve to uphold democracy as an ethical standard of governance? The author suggests that the basic and cross-temporal cornerstones of morality; the family and religion serve as “intermediate” social structures in attaining the central virtues of a moral democracy.

The fundamental question is whether the non-Western world is capable of developing our form of liberal democratic self-government, despite our differences in tradition and culture. The author taps on several critical differences of interpretation of what we consider to be integral to our form of government, such as John Locke's concept of “civil society”; the idea of “pluralism”; and the concept of “inherent human rights” counsel, which have distinctly different meanings in the West compared to those of Central and Eastern Europe. Interestingly, the differences are indicative of the profound cultural and historic differences of the societies engaged in the interpretation and adaption of these ideas. The author is optimistic in the regard of democracy “traveling,” provided that individuals recognize their own identity within the democratic society and acquire practice in exercising their freedoms. In this way, not only will democracy flourish under previously dictatorial regimes, but will continue to persist where it is already established.

We explain how higher homotopy operations, defined topologically, may be identified under mild assumptions with (the last of) the Dwyer-Kan-Smith cohomological obstructions to rectifying homotopy-commutative diagrams.

This essay explores the idea of just war in two ways. Part I outlines the formation, early development, and substantive content of just war tradition in its classic form, sketches the subsequent development of this idea in the modern period, and examines three benchmarks in the recovery of just war thinking in American thought over the last four decades. Part II identifies and critiques several prominent themes in contemporary just war discourse, testing them against the context, purpose, and content of the just war idea in its classic form. My argument throughout is that the historical substance of just war tradition needs to be respected in contemporary just war discourse, both to discipline that discourse and to engage contemporary moral reflection with the values embodied in just war tradition.