On the Justice and Justification of Just War

This book addresses the concepts of sovereignty, justice and justification in relation to western warfare. It argues that ontological assumptions about human life underpin these concepts. This book focuses on these assumptions and shifts our attention away from the question of our right to kill and towards the question of the construction of life.

This book sets out to explore the questions how democracies decide which lives should be protected, how these lives are defended, and how they are distinguished from the lives that can be lost without mourning. The author analyzes through a range of political and philosophical issues the contemporary just war literature. She emphasizes the problem of human rights, the biopolitics of democratic welfare regimes, and the relationship between the aesthetic value of the visual world and the discursive value of democratic politics. In doing so, the book questions standard conventions about the right to kill in warfare, and challenges some of our basic assumptions about the justice of democratic welfare regimes.

Auteur

Maren Lytje is Assistant Professor at the University College of Northern Jutland, and external lecturer at Aalborg University. She holds a Ph.D. in History, and specializes in theory of history, twentieth century European history of ideas and political philosophy.

Contenu

Just war - The War on Terror - Justification - Biopolitics - Sovereignty - Justice - Foucault - Agamben - Political myth - Democracy - Ethics - Authority - Plato - Hobbes - Cassirer - Theory of history - Political philosophy - Memory - Trauma -Psychoanalysis - Freud - Deconstruction - Ideology