Politics, Justice, and War extends a venerable strand of just war thinking that runs from Augustine and Aquinas to Paul Ramsey and Oliver O'Donovan, grounding the just war ethic in the love of neighbor and reenvisioning the use of force as an extension of political judgment. Taking inspiration from Augustine's counsel to the fifth-century Roman general Boniface, “Be a peacemaker, even in war,” Joseph Capizzi defends the counterintuitive thesis that war can be understood as a form of peacemaking. He does so by reclaiming the centrality of the criterion of right intention. On his account, the use of force is justified only when it intends to defend the innocent neighbor from harm and bring about a more just peace. Right intention serves as the unifying criterion of the just war ethic, giving the other criteria their coherence and intelligibility.
The argument proceeds in four dense, carefully argued chapters. The first addresses skeptics wary of the claim that war can be an instrument of policy, as well as those who would prefer to see the just war ethic as a humanitarian ethic, divorced from any substantial claims about justice or peace. Capizzi counters that moral discipline in war is not indifferent to political ends; it flows from them. To reconnect war to politics is to subordinate the use of force to limits, in both the resort to war and its conduct. It also introduces a broader international horizon that corrects a narrow focus on state self-defense and promotes the interests of all involved, bringing the potential benefits of peace not only to the innocent victim, but to the enemy as well (40).
The second chapter focuses on right intention and how it unifies the just war criteria. Right intention, Capizzi argues, concerns more than the subjective motivations of soldiers; it relates to the objective goals or purposes that animate the enterprise of war (110). This involves the retrospective task of determining the original offense (just cause) and who is responsible for rectifying it (just authority), as well as the prospective task of determining what a just peace requires, including whether other more peaceful means have been exhausted (last resort), whether the peace is realizable (reasonable chance of success), and whether war can be pursued in a way that does not inhibit a just peace from emerging (discrimination, proportionality).
The third and fourth chapters fill out the argument, responding to objections to the punitive dimension of the proposal and clarifying lingering issues surrounding intention, including whether the principle of double effect can license a departure from the prohibition on the intentional killing of noncombatants. For Capizzi, a just war ethic properly recentered around right intention rules out Michael Walzer's notion of the supreme emergency as well as halfway interventions that shift the burden of the costs of war from soldiers to civilians. The book ends on an Augustinian note, suggesting that while political communities represent great goods, they are ultimately penultimate goods, and the peace they offer should not be defended as if they were our ultimate good.
Capizzi thinks the right intention of just peace informs the entire just war ethic, so he rejects calls for the development of separate post bellum criteria to guide moral judgments about postwar reconciliation (11). In his view, the ethic itself provides the framework for making such judgments, and one should not overlook the ways that the conduct of war will shape any emerging just peace. Still, as Capizzi acknowledges, war cannot produce this peace by itself. While it can “clear the space for a greater ordering in justice” (43), it “will enable but not guarantee post bellum political reconciliation” (43). This suggests that the constructive work of peacemaking will involve a host of nonmilitary measures, such as negotiation, demobilization, reintegration, tribunals, truth commissions, reparations, memorialization, and more. Apart from a few passing references to such measures, however, Capizzi does not discuss them in any great detail. More engagement with the emerging post bellum literature would help expand the argument to include the range of nonmilitary measures that are necessary to make just war's claim to the mantle of peacemaking credible.
Politics, Justice, and War takes its place alongside O'Donovan's The Just War Revisited and Nigel Biggar's In Defence of War as the most significant contemporary expressions of the Augustinian strand of the just war tradition. It presents the clearest discussion of the centrality of right intention in the just war ethic to date, and promises to prompt much discussion on the place of the just war in the elusive quest for peace.
