“Justice is Conscience”: Hizbollah, Israel, and the Perversity of Just War

Abstract

This chapter uses the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbollah to investigate how just war conditions help shape and are shaped by discourses of power. Since these discourses are decidedly state centric, we assert that just war is ultimately a doctrine which protects material power by enshrining it with a legitimacy it often times does not deserve, and that this protection is becoming even more pronounced and troubling in an era of hegemonic crisis and hetero-sovereignty. We contend that, above all, ethical traditions and practices should be useful for addressing the dilemmas of international politics that we presently face, and we argue that in this regard the just war tradition has not adequately accommodated the role of non-state actors in conflict and, more generally, constitutes a problematic way of thinking about ethics. The point of our discussion is not just to express skepticism about the just war tradition, but also to suggest criteria for alternative ethical practices and traditions that may ultimately prove more satisfactory for navigating international politics. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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