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In this book, some distinctive approaches to the ethics of armed conflict are interwoven: (1) A revisionist approach that involves generalising traditional just war principles, so that they are applicable by all sorts of responsible agents to all forms of armed conflict. Such principles should be applicable not only to large-scale military operations (e.g., the 2003 invasion of Iraq) but also to small-scale military actions (e.g., the use of air power to enforce no-fly zones). (2) A cosmopolitan approach that features the Security Council. (3) A preventive approach that emphasises alternatives to armed force, including negotiation and mediation, nonviolent action, and peacekeeping missions. (4) A temporalist approach that prioritises the application of just war principles prospectively to present and future armed conflicts. (5) A coherentist approach that interrelates just war principles, general moral principles (e.g., distributive justice) and real-world cases (e.g., the Rwandan genocide). (6) A human rights approach that encompasses not only armed humanitarian intervention but also armed invasion, armed revolution, and all other forms of armed conflict. The book includes extensive discussions of generalised principles of just cause, last resort, proportionality, and noncombatant immunity. An assortment of other topics are considered, including moral dilemmas of armed conflict, standards of evidence for moral judgements, legitimate authority, the goal of peace, deterrence, escalation, intelligence, terrorism and counterterrorism, targeted airstrikes, and peace agreements. Recent real-world cases are utilised as illustrations, for example, the cases of Afghanistan, Darfur, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, Libya, and South Sudan.

This book explores the United Nations' track record of military action, from Cold War ‘brushfire’ peacekeeping to the fractured globalisation of the contemporary world. The book assesses armed humanitarian intervention on a region-by-region basis, from the Balkans to Africa, the Middle East to Southeast Asia. Using empirical evidence, it compiles a ‘balance sheet’ of the UN's successes and failures, and asks hard questions about humanitarian intervention's short- and long-term value.

Terrorism, the use of military force in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and the fatal police shootings of unarmed persons have all contributed to renewed interest in the ethics of police and military use of lethal force. In this book the various moral justifications and responsibilities involved in the use of lethal force by police and military combatants are analyzed, relying on a distinctive normative teleological account of institutional roles. The resulting conception provides a novel theoretical alternative to prevailing reductive individualist and collectivist accounts. Police and military uses of lethal force are morally justified in part by recourse to fundamental natural moral rights and obligations, especially the right to personal self-defense and the moral obligation to defend the lives of innocent others. Yet the moral justification for police and military use of lethal force is to some extent role-specific. Police have an institutionally based moral duty to use lethal force to uphold the law, and military combatants have an institutionally based moral duty to use lethal force to win just wars. Two key notions in play are joint action and the natural right to self-defense. A relational individualist theory of joint actions is used to construct the notion of multilayered structures of joint action in order to explicate organizational action. A novel theory of justifiable killing in self-defense is also provided. Specific topics covered include: police shootings of armed offenders and suicide bombers; military necessity; targeted killing, autonomous weapons, humanitarian armed intervention, and civilian immunity.