Just and Unjust Warriors: Marking the 35th Anniversary of Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars

• Kritsiotis, Dino

Abstract

This contribution to the symposium on Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (1977) engages with Jack Goldsmith’s assessment of cyber warfare in the context of both the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello. In so doing, its purpose is to register the intended significance of the moral argument contained in Walzer’s text from the meaning of ‘war’ that emerges from its pages; however, international law has long since abandoned this concept as the operational premise for the regulations offered by way of the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, and Just and Unjust Wars is opened up to a much more rigorous reading of its contents – including the Afterword on ‘Nonviolence and the Theory of War’ as well as a fuller inventory of the precedents actually used by Walzer in original and subsequent editions – that argue for a significance of the lessons of this work altogether more encompassing and enduring than may greet the reader on initial contact.