Description
There is a varied history of discussion over the ethics of conflict and political violence, often centred around just war thinking. With the increasingly explicit non-state nature of conflict and the ethical complexity that this creates, the just war discussion has moved towards the more cosmopolitan grounded ‘revisionist’ school.
This paper consists of an exploration first of Jeff McMahan’s, Killing In War (2009)and a critical examination of its applicability to transnational fighters. It then moves to examine more precisely how this manifests under the applied cosmopolitan just war ethics which are derived from McMahan’s analytical philosophy approach to just war thinking. This first section comes to the general conclusion that the application of this revisionist just war theory to the case of transnational fighters is reasonably complete within its own framing.
The second section counters this, drawing first upon Michael Neu’s critique of these approaches which is grounded in the idea of tragedy. This component draws from a number of critical accounts, however the focus is on Michael Neu’s understanding of tragedy as an entry point into the core of the critique which revolves around a re-imagining of the revisionist approach as an ethically sanitising process. The revisionist approach to just war thinking relies upon a cleanliness and that enforced cleanliness, sanitising as it were, introduces a dangerousness to an ostensibly sensible and morally grounded approach.
The paper then concludes that the revisionist sanitising of the ethical discussion surrounding war strips the just war discourse of a critical aspect in its judgments of liability, rendering it unable to fully encompass complex cases of political violence with a multitude of state and non-state actors. This sanitising process also represents a distancing and abstraction of the ethical subject of war. This paper shows this through utilising the transnational fighter as an ethical subject of war, sanitised by the revisionist process. Whilst a step forward for just war thinking when looking at non-state actors in conflict, this revisionist approach creates a slew of ethical dilemmas which require a critical and self-aware approach beyond the confines of analytical philosophy.
