Debates about the relationship between the violence inflicted on the battlefield and the restraints that are meant to limit or moderate the violence have been a recurring feature in the Review since its inception. Trawling through the archive, I have found several articles that examine whether it is possible to restrain this violence and what restraints might be desirable, but I have also found several articles that draw attention to the how these restraints can sometimes work to rationalise and reinforce this violent conduct. In his article, which was written when the journal was still known as the British Journal of International Studies and whilst the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions were still being discussed, Terry Nardin admits that international humanitarian law often seems insufficient when it comes to regulating wartime violence, but he warns against overburdening this legal framework with unreasonable expectations. For him, international humanitarian law serves to establish authoritative common standards—alongside various legal positions, with the requisite rights and obligations—but is not there to secure the immediate application of moral rules to military conduct. Geoffrey Best adopts a similar position in his contribution to the Review. He argues that international humanitarian law can be understood as a fragile compromise between humanity and necessity—a compromise that recognises some wars as inevitable but refuses to accept that these wars are unrestrainable. What is distinct about his approach is his attention to the historical context in which these compromises emerged—anticipating the more recent historical turn within legal debates.
Whereas these articles both focus on the legal codes that are supposed to regulate the violence inflicted on the battlefield, the Review has also hosted some robust debates on the moral norms that are meant to restrain the violence inflicted in conflict. In their contributions to the Review, Ronan O’Callaghan and Kimberly Hutchings examine how the just war tradition has shaped and circumscribed these debates. O’Callaghan argues that the just war tradition is premised on the idea that combatants can be killed without sacrificing their rights but argues that just war theorists have failed to provide a compelling case to support this basic claim. O’Callaghan insists that this is not a minor oversight but an unresolved and irresolvable tension that threatens to undermine the argument that wars can be just. Hutchings also critiques the just war tradition, albeit from a slightly different direction. She draws on Jane Addams—a feminist and pacifist—to show how just war theorists are implicated in the ideas and institutions that make war possible and seem permissible. In contrast to just war theorists, who have busied themselves arguing about the various rules that are supposed to govern the game, she argues that we need to scrutinise the entire game itself—a game that she considers to be morally stupid. Nevertheless, it is interesting to read these pieces alongside Benjamin Banta’s contribution to the Review, which could be seen as a response to these pieces even though it preceded them. Banta warns against adopting a hypercritical stance towards the just war tradition—and becoming accidental pacifists in the process—because that war might be needed to correct certain injustices, and that it is important these wars are fought with certain restraints.
The articles discussed above all focus on the moral and legal principles that are supposed to restrain the violence inflicted on the battlefield, but several articles in the Review have also focused on how these principles are practiced. In her article, Maja Zehfuss argues that there is an unresolved contradiction in the justifications for liberal warfare. On the one hand, she notes that soldiers have been responsibilised to act ethically, which also means that soldiers should refuse to act when instructed to do something that is unethical. On the other hand, she notes that soldiers who refused to return to Iraq—and invoked ethical considerations to defend their decision—faced significant penalties for taking this stance, including imprisonment. In her work, Moya Lloyd examines the visual regimes that circumscribe how the harm inflicted upon civilians and how these visual regimes inform what is considered (un)acceptable. Focusing Operation Protective Edge in Gaza (2014), she argues that even when Palestinian casualties were counted, these casualties were reduced to mere statistics, which worked to dehumanise the dead and render their deaths ungrievable. Yet, she also examines efforts to name the dead—from graffiti scribbled on walls to images uploaded to social media—in an effort to contest the normative violence that reduces Palestinian lives to mere abstractions.
Joanna Tidy and Christopher Finlay also examine visual regimes in their contributions to the Review. The former focuses on the Collateral Murder video that Chelsea Manning released to WikiLeaks, which depicts an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed several Iraqi civilians—including two Reuters journalists. Contrasting the view from above with the view from below, she argues that the aerial view promises an omnipotent perspective on the battlefield, enabling the helicopter to differentiate between those individuals who can be killed and those individuals who should be spared. Yet, she argues that the view from the ground revealed this perspective to be incomplete because it lacked important contextualising information that would have revealed the victims to be civilians. This has important implications when it comes to thinking about the moral and legal constraints on war because these visual regimes circumscribe what will be seen and what will be seen as acceptable. The latter takes a different approach in his article for the Review, focusing not on how individual incidents are depicted—so that these individual assessments can be assessed in accordance with the appropriate moral and legal norms—but on how this normative framework is depicted in cinema. Finlay notes that few people are going to sit down and read Just and Unjust Wars from cover to cover. Instead, most people will learn these rules from other sources—including Hollywood blockbusters—so it is important to examine what is being taught. Whilst cinema could help to cultivate a more informed public, he also warns that cinema can undermine these rules, making illegitimate conduct seem more legitimate.
- Thomas Gregory, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Thomas Gregory is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His most recent book is Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2025).
The articles below are free to read until the end of February 2026.