War is always a tragedy. It sometimes seems inevitable. But is it ever justified?
Philosophers, theologians, politicians and military leaders have wrestled with this question for millennia. And to a large degree, they’ve come to some basic agreements about what makes a war morally defensible: a set of ideas known as the “just war tradition.”
That’s not to say that they always agree on how to apply just war principles to an actual conflict. Given the Kremlin’s attempts to justify its invasion of Ukraine, including its groundless accusations of genocide, it’s worth analyzing Russia’s position through the lens of the just war tradition – the focus of my work as a political scientist who studies the ethics of conflict.
