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Expanding Responsibility for the Just War

There is an interesting debate going on in the field of reflections about morality and war, also known as the just war theory. Starting as a religious (especially Christian) tradition of thought, just war theory gained a significant strength in the 20th century, when it served as an underlying theoretical framework for international law and agreements such as the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Hague Conventions and the International Criminal Court. The main classical book in the field is Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (2015; first published in 1977), where he presents the orthodox or classical version of just war theory. However, major parts of the theory have been recently contested by the so-called revisionists, who argue that certain constitutive aspects of the classical just war theory, like the division between jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles or the collective ontology, are not suitable tools for moral reflections about war.1 The book called Expanding Responsibility for the Just War: A Feminist Critique (2019) by Rosemary Kellison provides another important insight into the lively debate about morality and war. Kellison is an associate professor of philosophy and religion at the University of West Georgia and she has written several articles about just war, violence and ethics of war. In this, her first book, as the subtitle suggests, she tries to present a feminist critique of the just war theory. As Kellison acknowledges at the beginning of her book, feminists have largely failed to engage the just war reasoning as a tradition (p. 9) and being among the first ones who tries to enter the field, she introduces an account that largely differs from the usual understanding of just war. However, as she notes: “I seek neither to deconstruct just war reasoning nor to propose an alternative to it, but rather to engage in a feminist immanent critique of it” (p. 13). After a brief overview of the feminist debate on war and also after structuring the book within this debate, Kellison presents three identifying characteristics of feminist ethics that she will employ in her discussion about just war. First, she argues for a different understanding of human personhood. According to Kellison, in the contemporary just war debate, human personhood consists primarily in a claim to inviolable rights derived from humans’ natural autonomy and rationality. As opposed to that, Kellison focuses her attention on personhood as embedded within and constituted by social relationships. Second, she understands morality as a set of practices maintained in the context of social relations rather than a universal and objective reality one can often find in the contemporary just war debate. As she writes: “Morality is something that people do” (p. 35). And finally, she recognises that relations among people are not relations of equality and reciprocity, and therefore morality cannot be properly distinguished from power. Specifically, one group of people is made much more vulnerable in the context of war because of their particular situation within power relationships and that is civilians living in areas where violent force is being used. Kellison argues that contemporary just war reasoning denies the violence of war by suggesting that many forms of harms are necessary or unavoidable and there has not been much of a discussion about the harms that war itself may do to persons, their relations and communities. For that reason, Kellison devotes most parts of