Every now and then, the word “victory” appears in the testimonies in Svetlana Alexievich’s powerful oral history of women in World War II (The Unwomanly Face of War, originally published in Minsk in 1985; new English translation, 2017). Its appearance is always somewhat foreign to the kind of history that Alexievich narrates: a history made “through the story told by an unnoticed witness and participant” (p. xxi) and focused on the everyday and intimate human experience of war, rather than on its grand strategies, battles, politics, and justifications. And yet for many of the female witnesses in Alexievich’s book, the pursuit of victory gave meaning to the absolute horror they experienced in war, however abstract this pursuit may have been. Victory is the thin thread that connects the grand politics and moral justifications of world war to its everyday experience by female soldiers.

Cian O’Driscoll’s book is an examination of the concept of victory in ethical discourse. It starts from the accurate observation that, despite the centrality of victory to the human experience of war, which Alexievich’s witnesses so eloquently convey, the concept has been largely neglected in contemporary war ethics. This neglect, O’Driscoll argues, not only distorts the actual experience of war but is also a lost opportunity to identify and confront fundamental problems, dilemmas, and tensions in the theory of just war. By reconstructing the ways in which victory has appeared in a wide range of normative writings on war, O’Driscoll invites us to gain a clearer sense of the tragic dimensions and “agonistic logic” of just war theory (p. 8). His book, O’Driscoll tells us, can be approached as “a critical history of the just war tradition read through the lens of victory” (p. 18), in the sense of being more interested in problematizing just war discourse than in applying it to solve practical problems.

Although O’Driscoll self-identifies as a just war theorist, his contribution to the field is highly unusual and thoroughly refreshing. Far from the typical doctrinal piece, O’Driscoll wants to read the tradition in ways that unsettle any sense of moral comfort we could gain in the process of deriving neat answers to hard questions from first principles. His objective is to foster circumspection, grief, and regret among war ethicists, rather than to celebrate or contribute to the “triumph of just war theory” in the present.

Each of the book’s seven substantive chapters deals with a specific problem that the idea of victory poses for just war theorists. Drawing from a wide range of writings, including the Ancient Greeks and contemporary just war theorists, Spanish scholasticism and contemporary realism, each chapter brings sources deemed particularly illustrative to the problem at stake. Many of the sources are historical, but their selection and articulation are driven not by history but theory.

I will not spoil the reader’s discovery of each problem, but common to several of them is the proposition that victory belongs first and foremost to the realm of power, not of right, and yet it appears to be an integral element of the practice of war. This is a big part of the reason why victory cannot be altogether excluded from just war discourse, even though it does not have a natural place in it. For example, by conveying the notion of a crushing defeat, victory would signal the brutality of all war, whether just or not. O’Driscoll draws on the writings of Augustine to highlight the dangers of moral complacency and immoderate passion that are unleashed when one’s existential goal is to subject one’s enemy to defeat. A victor’s peace will always be problematic for this reason, even if the just side wins.

Similarly, by becoming aware of the centrality of the “kinetic” dimension of victory (p. 54)—its necessary reference to the realm of power and control—we can see how unavoidable the question is of whether and how to recognize the outcome of war as having normative effects. What normative implications can we derive from “facts on the ground” at the end of war? Can conquest ever be a source of right? O’Driscoll discusses the writings of Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius to shed light on these questions and contrasts their sophisticated approaches to the dearth of consideration in contemporary war ethics. Surely at some point one must pragmatically (and morally?) concede that the victor has won and life must go on or that the outcome of bargaining in peace negotiations can resettle a state of right.

O’Driscoll’s method of juxtaposing and contrasting texts from widely different sources is revealing in many ways but not exempt from problems. Different intellectual traditions can use the term “just war” very differently, but juxtaposition can deceivingly make them appear as sharing a common language. In the cases of Gentili and Grotius, O’Driscoll treats them as “progenitors of modern just war thought” who did not “shy away” from interrogating the legitimacy of conquest (p. 107). But although they did use the term bellum iustum, with regard to their take on conquest they are better described as progenitors of the neo-Roman concept of “regular” or lawful war, which they introduced explicitly as an alternative to scholastic conceptions of just war. Their willingness to consider victory as a source of right involved a radical break with the theological just war tradition, with implications far beyond conquest. Gentili and Grotius reveal not a lost awareness in the just war tradition but are further proof of the difficulty that many ethical approaches have in incorporating and making sense of war politics.

Beyond Gentili and Grotius, it is sometimes difficult to identify the specific ethical vocabulary and discourse to which O’Driscoll wants to bring self-awareness and circumspection. Contemporary just war theorists could well say that their enterprise is fundamentally different from that of Cicero defending Roman wars, Bernard de Clairvaux defending Crusade wars, or Christine of Pizan’s conception of victory as divine judgment. Placing them together as part of a single tradition can be not only misleading but also dangerous, as the identification of just war with Crusades has long served as a powerful critique of just war theory. The book displays many different ways of speaking normatively about war, some of which may appear too remote to illuminate contemporary war practices and what is usually considered to be the contemporary just war tradition.

On the other hand, skeptics and critics of just war theory will be sympathetic to many of the book’s arguments and conclusions, but they may well wonder why its author stops short of giving up on just war theory altogether. On the contrary, O’Driscoll claims, one of the main purposes of his critique is to invite just war theorists to think “more deeply and carefully than they have hitherto” about war ethics (p. 149). Unless we want to give up on the project of assessing war ethically, we should cultivate a better sense of the limitations of just war language. As the book shows and documents so well, however, there are many other ways of evaluating war that avoid the problematic language of justice.

These reactions to Cian O’Driscoll’s original and provocative book can give a sense of its theoretical richness and value. Anyone interested in thinking hard about the very project of evaluating war ethically will benefit from reading Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Just War.