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How do we frame decisions to use - or not use - military force ? Who should do the killing ? Do we need new paradigms to guide the use of force ? And what does 'victory' mean in contemporary conflict ? In many ways, these are timeless questions. But they should be asked again in light of changing circumstances in the twenty-first century. The post-Cold War, post-9/11 world is one of contested and fragmented sovereignty. Contested because the norm of territorial integrity has shed some of its absolute nature. Fragmented because some states do not control all of their territory and cannot defeat violent groups operating within their borders. Humanitarian intervention, preventive war, and just war are all framing mechanisms aimed at convincing domestic and international audiences to go to war (or not), as well as to decide who is justified in legally and ethically killing. The international group of scholars assembled for this book critically examine these frameworks to ask if they are flawed, and if so, how they can be improved. Finally, the volume contemplates what all the killing and dying is for if victory may prove, ultimately, to be elusive.

WAR--MORAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS --- PEACE--MORAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS

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Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West's ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox : Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book examines how we have responded to this dilemma and challenges the vision of ethical war itself, exploring how the commitment to ethics shapes the practice of war and indeed how practices come, in turn, to shape what is considered ethical in war. The book closely examines particular practices of warfare, such as targeting, the use of cultural knowledge, and ethics training for soldiers. What emerges is that instead of constraining violence, the commitment to ethics enables and enhances it. The book argues that the production of ethical war relies on an impossible but obscured separation between ethics and politics, that is, the problematic politics of ethics, and reflects on the need to make decisions at the limit of ethics.

WAR--MORAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS

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Military ethics. --- War --- Armed Forces. --- Moral and ethical aspects. --- Armed Forces.Moral and ethical aspects. --- War - Moral and ethical aspects.

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This book provides a richly nuanced examination of the moral justifications democracies often invoke to wage war. The author argues that democratic principles can be both fertile and toxic ground for the project of limiting war's violence. Only by learning to view war as limited by our democratic values - rather than as a tool for promoting them - can we hope to arrest the slide toward the borderless, seemingly endless democratic 'holy wars' and campaigns of remote killings we are witnessing today, and to stop permanently the use of torture and secret law. The author shows how our democratic values, understood incautiously and incorrectly, can actually undermine the goal of limiting war. He helps us better understand why we are tempted to believe that collective violence in the name of politics can be legitimate when individual violence is not. In doing so, he offers a bold new account of democratic agency that acknowledges the need for national defense and the promotion of liberty abroad while limiting the temptations of military intervention. The author demonstrates why we must address concerns about the means of waging war - including remote war and surveillance - and why we must create institutions to safeguard some nondemocratic values, such as dignity and martial honor, from the threat of democratic politics. This book reveals why understanding democracy in terms of political agency, not institutional process, is crucial to limiting when and how democracies use violence.

DEMOCRACY --- WAR--MORAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS

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MILITARY ETHICS --- WAR--MORAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS