Description
How do agents in war speak to the ethics of war in the absence of the formal just war framework? Is it possible, in other words, to trace a vernacular just war? This question builds upon but pushes against Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars. Walzer’s work was radical because it started with memoirs of participants in war as opposed to the just war canon. Ultimately Just and Unjust Wars is unsatisfactory, though. It imposes a just war political theory from above rather than letting the reflections of agents in war speak for themselves. This paper takes the latter as its point of departure. It explores how notions of masculinity appear in war memoirs and whether this substitutes for the absence of the formal just war framework. Through an analysis of different generations of war fighting memoirs, the paper reflects on how masculinity is reconstituted and what relationship this has to the ethics of war in the vernacular.
