Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo City Hall in December 2009, US President Barack Obama claimed that the security challenges of the twenty-first century compel us to “think in new ways” about the old ideas of just war and just peace. If he has the time to keep up with such things, one imagines that the president will have been quietly impressed by the response this challenge has generated. In the two years since his speech, the academy has produced a rich stream of excellent and frequently innovative texts that reconsider both the character and utility of the just war tradition in light of the complexities of what we might term the “9/11 Wars.” The two books reviewed here—David Fisher's Morality and War and Howard M. Hensel's edited volume, The Prism of Just War—sit comfortably in this company.

As a former member of the British government, Fisher is perfectly placed to bridge the divide between academic interest in the just war tradition and the “real-life” needs of the military and defense policy communities (p. 1). In Morality and War, his superbly satisfying first monograph, he does exactly this. The book commences with a thoughtful discussion of the just war tradition and its place in public life. It elucidates the key principles and categories of the tradition in limpid prose, blending analytical clarity and historical illustration to powerful effect. Moving beyond mere description, it then proceeds to diagnose the twin ills of contemporary just war thought and propose a remedy that may cure them.

The first ill arises from the way in which the principles and categories of just war thought have become detached from the broader context in which they were initially conceived and grounded. Where once they were anchored in particular theological doctrines and understandings of political authority, they now resemble free-floating reminders of a past that no longer exists. They now lack, Fisher claims, a secure connection to the foundations from which they ostensibly derived their formative content and dimension. And no new foundations have yet emerged in their place. Fisher submits that the results of this development are clearly discernible in Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars (1977), wherein the author demonstrates how just war principles might be effectively invoked but then fails to offer any systematic justification of the principles themselves.

The second ill relates to the disembodied, technical form of knowledge that contemporary just war thought seeks to impart. As a code that stipulates rights, duties, laws, and consequentialist maxims, it offers politicians and soldiers a rule book but no practical instruction on how to implement it. Knowing the rule book is one thing, Fisher writes, but having the moral judgment to make the right decision in the heat of battle is another: “The wisdom of the just war tradition needs not only to be expounded in the officer's classroom but also to be embedded in the daily practice and experience of the barracks and battlefield” (p. 4). Fisher's response to these flaws, which he sets out over the remainder of the text, is to recommend that just war theorists revive the long-forgotten Aristotelian conception of virtue as a way of, on the one hand, reanchoring the tradition in moral theory and, on the other, connecting it more effectively to the practice of soldiers and state leaders.

When we shift our focus to the virtues and vices of this text, the former outweigh the latter. Chief among these virtues is the author's capacity to go beyond Walzer and ask what actually underpins the just war principles that lie behind today's international law of armed conflict. This commitment to critically interrogate even those norms that appear natural or commonplace is to be commended, as is his willingness to think imaginatively about how to address the blind spots he identifies in contemporary thought. His efforts to broker a dialogue between the just war tradition and an Aristotelian conception of virtue ethics strike me as a breath of fresh air, welcome and daring in equal measure. Because modern theorists tend to adhere rigidly to an account of the tradition that traces the idea of just war back to Augustine and no further, Fisher's bold smash-and-grab raid on “the Philosopher” opens up a rich array of overlooked sources and ideas.

Staying with Aristotle for the moment, but turning to what I have harshly termed the vices evident in Morality and War, one might query Fisher's framing of the argument. Why does he introduce the just war and Aristotelian virtue ethics as if they were strangers, new to one another, never having met before except via the good offices of Thomas Aquinas acting as interlocutor? This makes sense only if one joins most theorists in assuming that the tradition does not extend all the way back to Aristotle, but reaches only as far as Augustine. This assumption is contestable. The irony for Fisher, of course, is that it is this choice of starting point that excludes, in the first instance, the Aristotelian content he now champions for inclusion in the tradition. One might also grumble about Fisher's reductive depiction of Thucydides as the red-in-tooth-and-claw realist. But these are minor cavils and should not detract from the enjoyment of this otherwise excellent text.

Howard Hensel's The Prism of Just War also aims to prise the just war tradition open to new angles and ideas. However, where Fisher sought to expand our horizons by harking back to Aristotle, this set of essays looks much further afield. As Hensel puts it, this volume examines “the degrees to which Western and Asian thinkers from very diverse religious and cultural backgrounds have sought to delineate limits regarding the use of armed force as an instrument in the resolution of conflict” (p. 271). What this means in practice is that the volume provides a comparative analysis of the ethics of war as practiced in both Western and Asian political thought. Looking at the Western tradition of political thought, from Homer to Kant, and at the major Asian religious and cultural groups, it investigates what, if any, just war categories and principles are common across them.

In support of this end, the book is divided into three sections. The first section treats the Western just war tradition, and comprises chapters by Hensel, Gregory Raymond, and Tyler Rauert on, respectively, Christian political theology, Greco-Roman political practice, and early-modern political thought. All are of a superior standard; advanced students and experts in the field will take a great deal from them. The second section attends to the concept of just war in Southwest and South Asian thought. It offers high-caliber chapters on Sunni Islam, Shi'ite Islam, and Hindu perspectives on just war by such specialists as John Kelsay and Valerie Morkevicius. The final section evaluates the ethics of war in East Asian thought. David Graff and Edward Olsen supply the relevant entries here on, respectively, Chinese and Japanese and Korean approaches to just war. Each is excellent in its own right, and each contributes to the success of the overall volume.

The effect as a whole is to tease out the “tremendous diversity of perspectives” contained both within and across the various cultures it examines (p. 272). The volume draws attention to the points of difference that emerge between not just Western and Asian approaches but also those that are internal to particular Western and Asian approaches over time. At the same time, it underlines those areas of convergence or commonality that are evident across the full range of Western and Asian approaches to the just war. The resulting picture depicts certain standard just war categories (for example, “just cause” or “discrimination”) as possessing a cross-cultural or even universal quality, while also highlighting the divergent range of meanings these categories have acquired in different cultural settings. The upshot is that if one wishes to fully understand the nature of the various approaches to just war that are operative across both the Western and the Asian world, one must both recognize and appreciate the importance of the theological, historical, ideological, and cultural foundations that shape them.

Standing back from the detail of the argument, one may call this a very fine book. The essays that comprise it are both strong (and sometimes first class) in their own right and dovetail nicely with one another. It is also clever in terms of the topics it covers. In particular, the decision to devote two chapters to Islam was well judged. This ensures a level of detail and analysis that surpasses that available in the standard primer on the Islamic ethics of war. This reader also appreciated the manner by which the chapters switched back and forth from textual analyses of historical traditions to the present-day significance of the ideas culled from those traditions. Alongside Kelsay's piece, the latter chapters are especially strong in this regard.

On a slightly more glib note, the decision to structure this book by setting chapters aside for each of the different traditions under discussion has the possible side effect of, on the one hand, obscuring the points where they cross-cut and intersect and, on the other, reifying the lines we draw between them. The fact that the table of contents allocates discrete chapters to different traditions rather gives the impression that they, too, are discrete entities. This is unfortunate because presumably it is obviously not the editor's or the authors' intention to leave this impression; the substance of their arguments certainly suggest it is not. Of course, this issue is not unique to this book. It is common across much of the literature on comparative ethics. Happily, where The Prism of Just War is concerned, this structural issue is rendered moot by two outstanding factors: first, the ability of the individual authors to suggest connections across chapters and traditions, and second, the editor's considerable skill in tying it all together.

Both Fisher's monograph and Hensell's edited volume not only triumph on their own terms but also serve to remind us of a salutary lesson. That is, in the rush to think in new ways about the ethics of war, we should take care to acquaint ourselves first with the old ideas of the just war tradition. For it is only when we are familiar with the old ideas, such as they are, that, returning to President Obama's exhortation, we can begin to “think in new ways” about them.