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At all costs and in spite of all terror? The victory of just war

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2015

CIAN O’DRISCOLL
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Abstract

Derived from the Latin Victoria, which itself can be traced to vino victus, meaning ‘to conquer’, victory evokes a number of close synonyms, principally conquest and triumph. It occupies an ambivalent position in respect of contemporary war. Though in some regards a concept that is essential to the very idea of combat, the notion of winning wars has acquired an ironic ring in the aftermath of two brutal world wars and the advent of nuclear weapons. Victory in war is clearly a contentious subject. Yet scholars of the just war tradition have largely ignored it. This article fills that breach by asking what, if anything, victory can mean in relation to just war? It argues that victory has an aporetic quality insofar as it appears both integral to but incompatible with the just war ethos. As such, it reveals both the limits and possibilities of just war thinking.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 799 - 811
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

A number of people have helped me think through the ideas presented in this article. Thank you to: Alex Allen, Jen Bagelman, Daniel Brunstetter, Ian Clark, Toni Erskine, Andy Hom, James Turner Johnson, Matt MacDonald, Phil O’Brien, and Brian Orend. Thanks also to colleagues at the University of Glasgow who kindly commented on earlier drafts: Katherine Allison, Naomi Head, Ty Solomon, Karen Wright, and the Historical International Normative Theory (HINT) group. I am also grateful to the very helpful anonymous reviewers for the RIS, and to the ESRC for supporting the larger project, ‘Moral Victories’, from which this article derives.

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32 Isidore draws heavily on Roman conceptions of victory and the relation of this concept to the distinction drawn between bellum and duellum. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 359–73.

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37 I am not claiming that the jus post bellum is disconnected from jus ad bellum and jus in bello concerns; all three elements of just war reasoning clearly crosscut one another. I merely note that the jus post bellum has only recently been posited as a distinct category of analysis, worthy of its own Latinate name.

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47 Rodin regards the task of devising principles to guide the pursuit of victory is neglected in jus post bellum analysis, and proposes a jus ad terminationem belli to address it. Rodin, David, ‘Two emerging issues of jus post bellum: War termination and the liability of soldiers for crimes of aggression’, in Carsten Stahn and Jann K. Kleffner (eds), Jus Post Bellum: Towards a Law of Transition from Conflict to Peace (The Hague: TMC Asser Press, 2008), pp. 53–77Google Scholar. This proposal has found some resonance in legal writings: Blum, Gabriella, ‘The fog of victory’, The European Journal of International Law, 24:1 (2013), pp. 391–421CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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50 Quoted in Bond, The Pursuit of Victory, p. 142.

51 For example, Colin Gray’s writings on victory almost completely bypass its normative element. Gray, Colin S., Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory (Carlisle, PA: Institute of Strategic Studies, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gray, Colin S., ‘Nuclear strategy: The case for a theory of victory’, International Security, 4:1 (1979), pp. 54–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Exceptions to this rule, strategists who consider victory’s moral dimensions, include William Martel and Robert Mandel. See Martel, , Victory in War, p. 3 Google Scholar; Mandel, , The Meaning of Military Victory, pp. 53–69 Google Scholar.

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58 My current research project, Triumph and Tragedy: The Victory of Just War, addresses these issues. It examines how different historical societies and just war thinkers have conceived the relation between victory and just war.