Abstract
When if ever is the resort to war justified? What limits should be placed upon its conduct? And how should we hold the perpetrators of war crimes accountable for their wrongdoing? The just war tradition provides a set of answers to these questions. This chapter provides a critical overview of that tradition. It offers not just a detailed history of the tradition’s development from classical times to the present day, but also an analysis of how the tradition is in danger of becoming a captive of its own past. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges facing the just war tradition today, paying specific attention to the need to ground just war reasoning so that it speaks to the muddy realities of the contemporary battlefield.
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O’Driscoll, C. (2023). Just War Theory: Past, Present, and Future. In: Williams, H., Boucher, D., Sutch, P., Reidy, D., Koutsoukis, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36111-1_18
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