Climate change is deeply unsettling—both ecologically, as reflected in the rise of climate disasters and biodiversity loss, and materially, as seen in the widespread disruptions and displacements it causes. The impacts of climate change are increasingly experienced as constant and material impact on bodies, and the disruption and displacement of connections to place and entangled environments. This continuous turbulence is creating an experience of being unmoored, disconnected from attachments, both human and environmental. This essay will address both the reality of climate turbulence and the growing intersection of such turbulence and conceptions of environmental, ecological, and climate justice. How and why can the changed, disrupted, turbulent life of climate change, specifically, be understood as a unique form of climate injustice? A variety of conceptions of climate justice are addressed, with a particular focus on the way that climate turbulence unsettles individual and community capabilities and functioning in multiple ways. The essay addresses how a more just response to climate turbulence means more inclusive and capabilities-based approaches to climate justice.

What would it mean to put the ethics of war in dialogue with the experience of war? The special section that follows explores this question. Featuring contributions from scholars across a range of disciplinary and academic backgrounds, it asks what we, as scholars of ethics and international affairs, stand to learn about the ethics of war by engaging with the experience of war. What can those who have direct personal experience of armed conflict—combatants and noncombatants alike—teach ethics of war scholars about the moral issues raised by war that we might otherwise miss or fail to appreciate? And to what degree does what they have to teach us comport with, depart from, or perhaps even challenge the standard just war framework scholars employ to talk about the ethics of war? This short introductory essay frames this special section by introducing the questions it tackles and the essays that comprise it.

Contemporary just war theory is increasingly remote from the grounded realities of warfare. This is problematic because it diminishes the utility of just war theory as an action-guiding framework. This article asks how just war theorists can better incorporate the lived experience of war into their analysis. The argument it develops places war writing front and center. Drawing inspiration from Martha Nussbaum’s argument that moral philosophers should use the literary works of writers such as Henry James to fill out and work through their own positions, it proposes that just war theorists should engage war memoirs in a similar manner. This argument is substantiated via a close reading of Frank Richards’s World War I memoir, Old Soldiers Never Die. By incorporating experience into their ethical frame, this article concludes, just war theorists will be better able to account for the ambiguity and messiness of combat—ambiguity and messiness that simply fall out of the frame when the ethical questions that war generates are examined from a detached perspective.

The article examines efforts by the Combined Joint Task Force—Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) to enumerate the harm its forces inflicted on Syrian and Iraqi civilians between 2014 and 2018. Drawing on more than 1,300 declassified civilian harm assessments, this article examines the rationale behind the decision to count civilian casualties, the policies that governed how civilian casualties were counted, and what CJTF-OIR officials did with the data collected. Although accurate counts are critical to ethical debates, we show that, on their own, these counts are insufficient when it comes to recognizing the harm inflicted upon civilians and holding militaries accountable. We trace coalition metrics back to concerns about consequence management, showing how martial considerations about optimizing violence—rather than moral concerns about constraining violence—governed the enumerative enterprise. We argue that the way the coalition previously counted civilian casualties erased certain harms from view, including the indirect, cumulative, and reverberating violence that civilians suffered during this conflict. Furthermore, we contend that these numerical indicators tell us little about how civilians experience these harms, a lack of which can become an impediment to ethical consideration. Finally, we contrast the coalition count with Airwars figures to reveal both the numerical discrepancies between the different counts and differences in how these figures have been used. We contend that counting casualties is critical, but also complicated, contestable, and—at times—too constrictive.

The prioritization of belligerent perspectives at the expense of civilian protection and welfare has a long history in just war theory and practice, from the works of early just war theorists to the legal and scholarly defenses of colonial conquest to the contemporary moral injury discourse. In this article, I show how this history has contributed to the ongoing infliction of devastating harms on civilians, as evidenced in the case studies of drone warfare and the war in Gaza, and I argue for the inclusion and prioritization of noncombatant civilian perspectives in academic, policy, and legal analyses of war. Doing so, as I demonstrate, radically disrupts traditional just war thinking and has important implications for broader social, legal, and policy approaches to armed conflict and its aftermath.

In this article I am concerned with interrogating the intersection between the Newtonian and Cartesian intellectual inheritances of AI and machine learning, and ideas about the ethics of war. As militaries turn to new and emerging technologies to maintain or achieve a technological edge over their perceived adversaries, they create new imaginaries of future war—alongside the technologists, academics, and defense scientists crafting new terms, ideologies, and frameworks for making sense of these technologies. In this article I will argue that the intellectual inheritances of machine learning strengthen certain pre-existing tendencies of thinking about ethics and war that function to push the experience of war, particularly for those subjected to it, to one side. The first of these is ethics as code, which in its most extreme form seeks to quantify ethics. The second is ethics as identity, in which we see the reduction of complex ethical debates to a simple belief that “we” are the ethical actors and the “other” is not. To combat the expansion of militarism that these narratives enable we must foreground the experience of war, both of those subject to it and of those creating the conditions for war.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) seeks to restrain violence in war, yet its influence depends not primarily on codification or formal commitment, but on how legal judgment becomes embedded within military institutions. This article examines how IHL became operationally consequential in the United States military through a process of institutional translation. Drawing on new institutionalist perspectives, it traces how Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps officers secured sustained access to command decision-making by rendering humanitarian norms operationally intelligible and strategically relevant. Across four historical episodes—from the postwar creation of an independent JAG Corps, through Vietnam and Grenada, to the consolidation of Operational Law in the Gulf War and its subsequent strain in counterterrorism operations—the article shows how legal expertise became embedded within planning cycles, targeting processes, and rules of engagement. This institutionalization produced a structural paradox: IHL gained unprecedented influence by becoming useful to military strategy, yet that very usefulness reshaped the meaning of restraint within strategic decision-making. The article argues that law’s influence in war is conditional and institutionally mediated: the pathway that makes legal norms consequential also exposes their humanitarian content to strategic redirection.