CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

which such political decisions are at the same time moral ones, or at least to some extent
informed or guided by ethical considerations, is very much an issue for this chapter.
This chapter will seek, then, to place just war doctrine in a conceptual framework that
acknowledges alternative views of the role of ethics in the calculus of international
relations, and war as their most intense form. Various models have been offered by
theorists and it has become commonplace to contrast just war with realism on the one
hand, which in its starkest form sees war as amoral – beyond the scope of ethical
considerations; and with pacifism on the other, which sees warfare as immoral. 4 This
study will break somewhat from this and consider just war in relation to the three broad
schools of International Relations thought that can most readily be argued to still have
influence over Western nations. It will stick to the script in considering realism but
then, rather than contrasting with pacifism, will instead use as a foil liberalism/liberal
internationalism. This approach will contrast a school of thought that, certainly at one
end of its broad spectrum of thinking, regards war as lying outside the realm of ethics,
with one that stands fundamentally in opposition to realism in its view of mankind and
of international relations. It can be seen to encompass pacifism but arguments will also
be advanced that liberal internationalists are more rather than less prone than realists to
resort to armed conflict. The third stream considered will be the so-called English
School or International Society. In broad terms these three may be equated to what
Martin Wight characterises as Realism, Revolutionism * and Rationalism. 5
1.1.1 Realism
Realism, at least in its starkest manifestation rejects entirely the application of morality
to warfare, as indeed it does to international relations in general. The archetypical
realist, explains Coates 6 , holds not only the ‘conviction that the reality in question is
morally intractable,’ but that ‘the very attempt to impose a moral solution has tragic
* Where Wight’s taxonomy is quite useful is in bringing together such widely diverse traditions as Kant’s
concept of Enlightenment and the ‘Perpetual Peace’, Communism, and the liberal internationalism of
Woodrow Wilson. What links them is a passionate belief in the moral unity of mankind.
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