As the 20th century drew to a close and the 21st century began, civil wars, “wars among the people” in Rupert Smith's phrase, became the predominant mode of warfare, often involving mass killings, rapes, and ethnic cleansing. In response to these developments, the central question of Just and Unjust Peace is “What does justice consist of in the wake of its massive despoliation?” Daniel Philpott's answer is: justice as political reconciliation, “the restoration of right relationship within or between political communities” (16).

This concept is defined and defended on philosophical and practical grounds in Part One. Part Two defends the concept on religious grounds, pointing to the key role played by reconciliation in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Part Three then details six interlocking and mutually reinforcing practices, which are necessary to heal the multiple wounds caused by political injustice and so restore the right relationship within and between communities. The practices are: building socially just institutions to protect human rights in the future (including democracy and the rule of law), and acknowledgment by the new political order of past wrongs, reparation, apologies, punishment of the perpetrators, and forgiveness.

This is a splendid, rich, and multilayered book, argued with passion, eloquence, and conviction. One of its many strengths is the way the philosophical, religious, and practical strands are interwoven mutually to reinforce each other, with the latter drawing on the author's practical experiences of peace-building in Kashmir and elsewhere. For some the religious arguments may prove a stumbling block but their concerns are addressed in chapter six where Philpott robustly defends the role of religious discourse in the public space.

Liberal philosophers have argued against reconciliation on the grounds that it requires achieving a degree of consensus on values that is inconsistent with the plurality of values that a democracy should promote. Philpott is rightly sceptical of the notion that a society could successfully flourish on the thin gruel of concordance on values that such liberals prescribe. Indeed, I would argue that the successful defence of liberal democracy against extremism itself requires a rather more robust account of moral values, including recognition of the important role in our communal life of the virtues. Philpott underlines how religious beliefs inspired the anti-slave campaign in the 19th century and the civil rights movement in the 20th century, while noting that it was the atheistic philosophies of Marxism and Nazism that led to most of the mass slaughter of the 20th century. We might also doubt if slavery would have been abolished when it was or civil rights secured when they were had the recommendation of John Rawls, the American philosopher, to restrict the use of religious discourse in the public space then been in force. For both movements were inspired by leaders convinced that the practices they sought to abolish were at odds with their belief that human beings – black or white — were created in the image of God.

Philpott convincingly demonstrates that there is a rich quarry of ethical insights mined over the centuries by religious thinkers, as they wrestled with the perennial questions of human existence, which it would be folly for us to ignore. Such insights include the importance attached by the Abrahamic religious traditions to practices such as apologies and forgiveness, which, however distasteful to some tough-minded liberals, have, nonetheless proved very helpful in promoting reconciliation in places such as South Africa. Archbishop Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission contributed to the peaceful transition from apartheid South Africa to a new multiracial democracy. Nelson Mandela helped re-forge his fractured nation by his readiness to forgive his enemies, even supporting and spurring on their once detested Springbok rugby team to victory in the 1995 World Cup.

By drawing on the religious traditions, Philpott also neatly rehabilitates the neglected virtue of mercy. Mercy has often been dismissed by liberals as a “religious” virtue at odds with political justice. But mercy in the broad sense advocated by St. Thomas Aquinas is the virtue that relates us to our neighbor through our grief for the distress of another. Such mercy, far from being inconsistent with justice, animates all the practices of reconciliation. Philpott argues that the ethic of political reconciliation “honors the just war tradition” (180) and accepts that armed struggle, as in South Africa, may be needed to end oppression. So where does restorative justice fit within the just war tradition?

In recent years, just war commentators have advocated the case for adding an extra condition — that of jus post bellum — to the classic just war tests in order to emphasise the importance of establishing a just peace after military operations have concluded. They have in the main, however, not had a great deal to say on what would constitute such a just peace and how it would be achieved. The ethic of reconciliation, with its detailed practical prescriptions for restoring broken relations, makes an important and timely contribution to filling that gap.

Philpott develops a powerful and, in my view, convincing case for the importance of restorative justice in re-forging relationships fractured by war and, particularly, by civil conflicts. He judiciously entitles Part One in which he introduces the theme, “Reconciliation as a concept of Justice.” In his enthusiasm for restorative justice he often speaks, however, as if it is not merely a concept but the concept or at least the most important concept of justice. So he proclaims that, “The central justification for restorative justice is that it promotes wider and fuller human flourishing than competing claims of justice” (66). That is a bold claim but I wonder if it is always so.

Aristotle noted that we use the term justice in three different senses. We use the word “just” as a general ethical concept rather like the term “moral” or “morally good,” covering a wide range of behavior based on showing respect for others and concern to promote their welfare. Such justice is the virtue that governs our relations with others. It is also in my view the central concept of justice in just war theory. There are also two specialized senses of “just.” The first is justice as fairness: the virtue we look to when goods or penalties are distributed to ensure the distribution is fair. The second is the justice of the law courts, the virtue we require of judges when they mete out punishments to those who have broken the law. This has a number of variants, such as corrective, deterrent or retributive justice, as well, of course, as restorative justice.

Restorative justice certainly has an important role to play in post-conflict situations. But even in the aftermaths of conflicts other concepts of justice may come into play. Philpott advocates that restorative justice should be the basis for justifying and determining punishment, which should be allocated according to a principle of “soft proportionality” — “allowing punishment to be adapted to the range and kind of harms done and the kinds of restorations that need to take place within a given political community” (224). He concedes that such adaptability may conflict with “due process” and that, where the punishments meted out are substantial, due process may need to prevail. But that is surely not only because due process is important but because apportioning different penalties for the same offence is judged unjust. Restorative justice may thus conflict with our sense of justice as fairness and may then be overridden by the latter.

Moreover, where there are grave threats to the lives of innocents from vicious criminals the preventive or deterrent roles of punishment may come to the fore in the interests of protecting innocents from harm. Philpott notes that the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was justified to “put an end to impunity for these (war) crimes and so contribute to the prevention of crimes” (213). He argues — correctly — that the deterrent value of international courts is unproven. But that may be, not because deterrence does not work, but because of the very uneven and patchy application of international law, with the ICC in its infancy and as yet unsupported by major players such as the United States, China, and Russia. As in the domestic sphere, effective deterrence requires the consistent and universal enforcement of the law. Even in post-conflict situations other concepts of justice may be needed and may at times be judged more important than restorative justice.

This seems, moreover, all the more so if we are looking at how to assess the justice of a war. Restorative justice may be critical in helping us to assess jus post bellum but we may need other concepts of justice to help us judge when a war is just (jus ad bellum) and whether it is fought justly (jus in bello). Defense against aggression is often regarded as the prime just cause for war but restorative justice does not define the justice of this cause, nor does it shape the requirements for conducting a war justly — the principles of non-combatant immunity and proportion.

Indeed, it may even be possible to fight a just war, while failing the jus post bellum test. That may depend on the kind of war being fought and, crucially, the cause for which it is fought. For the just cause condition has a degree of logical primacy, shaping the scope and application of other conditions, including jus post bellum. Where the international community intervenes to prevent atrocities in a failed state or to stop a Government massively oppressing its own people some political reconstitution, including regime change, is likely to be a necessary constituent of any post-bellum settlement. Without political reconstitution, the oppression that gave rise to the intervention is likely to recur. So restorative justice may have a crucial role to play in ensuring that the just cause is achieved.

But what if the just cause is self-defense against external aggression, such as Britain and the United States' defense against Hitler in the Second World War? After that war, and learning the lessons of their failure to do this following the First World War, the Allies wisely established democracy and the rule of law in Germany and Japan. But what if they had not done so? They would certainly have failed to establish a just peace. But would that have made a war that prevented Hitler from completing his plans for world domination and the extinction of the Jews unjust? Surely not. There is, moreover, a recent, non-hypothetical example of this in the 1990–91 First Gulf War. That war succeeded in defending Kuwait against Iraqi aggression — the cause for which it was fought — but it failed to establish democracy and the rule of law in Iraq (or even Kuwait). A just peace was not established. But most commentators would argue that it was, nonetheless, a just war — fought for a just cause and, on the whole, in a just manner. Indeed, many have praised the restraint with which President George H. W. Bush, unlike President George W. Bush, declined to meddle in the internal affairs of Iraq once the just cause for which the war was fought — the liberation of Kuwait — had been achieved.

In assessing the justice of wars, as elsewhere in our moral lives, restorative justice is not the only concept of justice that we need nor does it always override other concepts. But Philpott has made an impressive case for the crucial role of restorative justice in allaying the messy aftermath of conflicts, particularly civil wars, and so helped define what in those circumstances constitutes jus post bellum. He has thereby made an important contribution to just war thinking.