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Existential : A New Start for Just War Theory? Cian O’Driscoll [email protected]

Introduction There is no shortage of issues for the coming generation of just war theorists to fret about. From the spectre of killer robots to the profusion of drones and the weaponization of cyber-space, not to mention the appearance of cyborg warriors on the battlefields of the near future, sci-fi nightmares abound.1 These developments certainly demand attention. I want to submit here, however, that there is another—arguably more profound, if also more mundane—challenge on the horizon for just war theorists. The challenge I am referring to bears on the purpose of just war theory as a form of practical ethics. Contemporary just war theory risks losing contact with the very practice it ostensibly regulates, warfare. Where once it was inter-twined with the martial codes of the fighting classes, there is little sign of this affinity today. Contemporary just war theory appears to be drifting toward an esoteric scholarly discourse propagated by , lawyers, and ethicists, with little regard for the boots-on-the-ground actualities of warfare. Absent is any concern for what John Keegan famously called ‘the face of battle’; in its place, intramural debates between so-called revisionists, Walzerians, and traditionalists.2 The worry therefore arises that just war theory is becoming a disconnected activity, one set apart from the experience of the very people whose lives it wagers. If this drift is not arrested, it will become all too easy for just war theorists to lose sight of what war actually entails, most notably, the violence it involves and the suffering it wreaks.3 More consequentially, it will make it even more difficult than it already is to persuade soldiers to engage in any serious way with the claims of just war theory. This, then, is the challenge I want to address in this essay. I will argue that it is disclosive of the need for a new starting-point for just war theorising—one that, informed by existentialist , is rooted, not in abstract universalisms, but in concrete human .

1 For an excellent survey of these issues: Caron E. Gentry and Amy E. Eckert (eds.), The Future of Just War: New Critical Essays (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2014). 2 John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme (London: Pimlico, 2004). 3 Michael Walzer is alert to this danger. Today’s just war scholarship, he has complained, is too often more focused on the ‘theory’ rather than the ‘war’ in ‘just war theory.’ Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations—5th Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 335-46. What I mean by this will hopefully become clearer as the discussion proceeds. It will be divided into three main parts. Section One will examine how contemporary just war theory has become divorced from the practice it is designed to govern, warfare. Reflecting on the three modes of just war theorising that dominate the field today—the historical approach associated with James Turner Johnson; Michael Walzer’s efforts to re- capture the just war for political theory; and the revisionist school of thought advanced by Jeff McMahan and Cecile Fabre, among others—it will contend that just war theory can be characterised as a discourse detached from the lived experience of violent armed conflict. Building on the insight that there is much to be gained by relating how we about the ethics of war to what we know about the experience of war, Section Two will survey the resources at our disposal to ground just war theory in the muddy, bloody realities of war. It will focus in particular on three bodies of thought that emphasise the situated character of knowledge: recent Critical Security Studies scholarship on vernacular discourses, feminist standpoint theory, and . This will open up a series of possible starting-points for thinking about what a more grounded just war theory might look like. Section Three will consider the third of these possibilities, existentialism, in more detail. It will do so by envisioning what a just war theory that starts, not with Saint Augustine, but with his fellow-Algerian, , would look like.4 Such an approach, I will argue, would bring to the fore the subjective, inward dimension of just war theorising that mainline accounts have foreclosed. This has the potential, the concluding remarks will suggest, to re-centre just war thinking as a ‘lived’ theory, and to thereby re-connect it to the experience of war.5 Recent reportage from war-zones indicates that this is badly needed.6

4 Albert Camus’ relationship with existentialism is vexed. Many people, including Camus himself, have argued that he should not be classified as an existentialist thinker. I will have more to say about this later. It will suffice for now, I hope, to indicate that I intend to treat him as part of what we might call the broad cultural movement of existentialism. 5 On the idea of ‘lived’ theory: Walter Kaufmann, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Kaufman (ed.), Existentialism: From Sartre to Dostoevsky (London: Plume, 1975), p. 51. On the idea of ‘connecting’ just war theory: Cian O’Driscoll et al, ‘How and Why to do Just War Theory’, Contemporary Political Theory XX: X (Firstview): XX-XXXX. 6 Foremost in my is the recently published Brereton Report on the conduct of the Australian Defence Forces in Afghanistan from 2005-2013. The Report exposes a litany of wrongdoing by Australian personnel, including 23 incidents in which non-combatants or persons hors-de-combat were unlawfully killed by or at the direction of Australian service personnel. Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, Report of Inquiry: Questions of Unlawful Conduct concerning the Special Operations Task Group in Afghanistan (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2020). Available at: https://afghanistaninquiry.defence.gov.au. Accessed: 21 December, 2020.

2 1. Just War Theory Today ‘The rules of engagement harked back to my college classes on Saint Augustine and “just war” theory. I couldn’t control the justice of the declaration of war, but I could control the justice of its conduct within my tiny sphere of influence.’7 So wrote Nathaniel Fick, an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, in his memoir account of the 2003 Iraq war. Fick’s readiness to engage just war theory may be attributed to the privilege of his Ivy League education and officer status. A more representative example, perhaps, is Tim O’Brien, whose memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, interrogates the idea of just war from the perspective of an infantry conscript in the Vietnam War.8 A key moment in the text arises when O’Brien’s closest friend in the military, Erik, confides his misgivings about the justness of the war to their company drill sergeant—who duly laughs at him and disparages him as a ‘pansy’ and a ‘coward’.9 Thereafter, O’Brien writes, he and Erik kept their own counsel. Just war theory was evidently not a suitable topic of discussion for young soldiers. These vignettes are noteworthy because they are two of the very few first- hand accounts of war by soldiers to directly reference just war theory.10 While most war memoirs are likely to include a general endorsement of restraint in war, as well as plenty of discussion about what it means to be a good soldier, they seldom acknowledge, let alone engage, just war theory. Simply put, it is not a part of their standard repertoire. This disinterest is mutual. Just as soldiers rarely talk about just war theory in their memoirs, so just war theorists seldom engage soldiers in any systematic fashion in their writings. A few honourable exceptions notwithstanding, just war theorists have paid remarkably little attention to what military personnel have written about the experience of war.11 This oversight is not unique to one or other rival school of just war theorising, but instead is common across them.

7 Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (London: Phoenix, 2007), p. 182. 8 Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone (London: Fourth Estate, 2015), p. 53, 97-8. 9 O’Brien, If I Die, p. 43-4. 10 This claim is based on a survey reading of approximately sixty war memoirs from a variety of conflicts. 11 This observation has also been made by: Annika Bergman Rosamond and Annica Kronsell, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Individual Ethical Reflection—The Embodied Experiences of Swedish Veterans’, Critical Military Studies (Firstview). Exceptions include: Marcus Schulzke, Pursuing Moral Warfare: Ethics in American, British, and Israeli Counterinsurgency (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019); Shannon French, The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Behind the Military (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Pauline Shanks Kaurin, On Obedience (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2020); and Peter Lee, Reaper Force: Inside Britain’s Drone Wars (London: John Blake, 2018). Also: Valerie Morkevicius, ‘Looking Inward Together: Just War Thinking and Our Shared Moral Emotions’, Ethics & International Affairs 31:4 (2017): 441-51.

3

Discovery I have already alluded in the introduction to the internecine debates in which today’s just war theorists are embroiled. These debates hinge on the relative merits of the three rival approaches to just war theorising that dominate the field today. The first approach, usually labelled the historical approach, supposes that thinking ethically about war necessarily involves thinking historically about ethics. There are many exponents of this approach—among them, John Kelsay, Gregory Reichberg, and Valerie Morkevicius—but most scholars would agree that James Turner Johnson has done more than anyone else to flesh it out.12 As he frames it, just war theorising is not usefully approached as an exercise in theory-building from first principles, a la , but as an engagement with the deeper historical tradition from which this theorising derives and in which it partakes. This tradition, the roots of which can be traced all the way back to the Roman republic, reflects ‘a fund of practical wisdom, based not on abstract speculation or theorisation, but in reflection on actual problems encountered in war as these have presented themselves in different historical circumstances.’13 Engaging with tradition, then, entails familiarising oneself with its origins and evolution, entering into a continuing dialogue with the writings of the thinkers who shaped it, extrapolating action-guiding principles from it, and extending its insights to address contemporary challenges. In other words, it involves, a form of ‘discovery’, whereby the theorist is expected to dig into the history of the just war tradition in order to retrieve and pass on to future generations the lessons it encapsulates.14 Work that adheres to this template has been known to dismay the uninitiated, who naturally want to know what the dusty texts of dead white males, such as Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius, have to do with the task of just war theorising today. For Johnson and those who follow him, it is vital. An awareness of past just war theorising, they posit, is a prerequisite to just war theorising in the present.

12 See: Eric D. Patterson and Marc LiVecche (eds.), Responsibility and Restraint: James Turner Johnson and the Just War Tradition (Middletown, RI: Stonetower Press, 2020). 13 James Turner Johnson, Can Modern War Be Just? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 15 14 Michael Walzer uses the term the ‘path of discovery’ to denote one of three ways of doing moral philosophy. Evoking the image of Moses ascending the heights of Mount Sinai to receive from God the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, he associates it with religious contemplation and revelation. I am adapting the term to mean something slightly different. I use it to denote that way of doing moral philosophy that seeks to discover deep truths through historical excavation. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 3.

4 What I want to draw attention to here, however, is a particular omission from this literature. Scholars associated with the historical approach to just war theory have devoted scant attention to the experience of soldiers, emphasising instead the work of medieval canonists, Dominican theologians, and early modern lawyers over the lived realities of men and women on the frontlines. Frederick Russell’s classic Just War in the Middle Ages is an exemplar of this style, but it is far from atypical.15 Johnson attempts to correct for this in his own scholarship, but his efforts arguably fall short. He seeks to incorporate chivalric codes into his historical overview of the just war tradition, presenting them as tributary streams that coalesce with reasoning and canon law to produce just war doctrine.16 This has the effect of linking the development of just war theory directly, not only to military practice, but also to the customs and beliefs of the fighting classes. This is a salutary development. It is, however, limited by the fact that Johnson’s usage of the term ‘chivalric code’ is tightly bounded: following M. H. Keen, he employs it to cover a range of practices and ideals connecting to knighthood in the period from 1100-1500.17 This means that the experience of soldiers drops out of Johnson’s account of the development of the just war tradition from the 16th century onward.18 While scholars have sought in the intervening years to build upon Johnson’s work on the medieval period, there has been little effort to examine the relation between just war theory and the experience of combat outside the years 1100-1600. Save, then, for the period running roughly from the Battle of Hastings to the Battle of Agincourt, it is fair to say that the historical approach to just war theory has had very little to say about the lived experience of combat and how it informs our ethical thinking about war. It has instead carried on in its habitual style, poring over what canonists, legal theorists, theologians, and political philosophers have written about war, while paying no mind to the people who wage it.19

15 Frederick H. Russell, Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 16 James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 5-8. 17 Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War, p. 64-5. M. H. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 1-2. 18 Johnson explains this move in his work: James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 292-97. 19 For example: Gregory M. Reichberg, Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Pablo Kalmanovitz, The Laws of War in International Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). I cite these books, which I consider to be among the very best in their field, to note rather than query or criticise their focus.

5 Interpretation Wary of the problems inherent in the historical approach, most obviously its proclivity to antiquarianism, Michael Walzer preferred to develop a different way of doing just war theorising, which he set out in his classic 1977 work, Just and Unjust Wars. Where the historical approach can be associated with a form of ‘discovery,’ Walzer’s mode of working is best described in relation to the ‘path of interpretation’.20 Interpretation involves a commitment to working with and through the justifications, laws, norms, values, and ideals that we encounter, not in the deep past or in some or other venerable text, but in the world around us today. This means that the starting point for ethical is the moral world as we find it, here and now, not the study of its historical or philosophical foundations. ‘There is no other starting point for moral speculation,’ Walzer writes, ‘we have to start from where we are.’21 Where just war theory is concerned, this involves locating the salient principles embedded in the normative infrastructure of contemporary international society, so that we might elucidate and refine them, and thereby contribute to their progressive realisation.22 Thus framed, Just and Unjust Wars equates the vocation of the just war theorist with the task of identifying, distilling, grappling with, and extending the ethical principles that underpin contemporary efforts to regulate war.23 Walzer is forthright that this way of approaching just war theory is designed to, among other things, ensure that it remains aligned with the real-world experience of warfare, especially as it bears on the men and women who (one way or other) get caught up in the fighting. His interest, he tells us, lies in how people who are not what a present- day populist might call detached elite experts think about war. In his own words: ‘The lawyers have constructed a paper world which fails at crucial times to correspond to the world the rest of us still live in. … I want to account for the ways in which men and women

20 Once again, these terms derive from Walzer’s own typology. See fn.14. 21 Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism, p. 20. Walzer also writes in the preface to the first edition of Just and Unjust Wars: ‘I am not going to expound morality from the ground up. Were I to begin with the foundations, I would probably never get beyond them; in any case, I am by no means sure what the foundations are. … This is a book of practical morality. The study of judgements and justifications in the real world moves us closer, perhaps, to the most profound questions of moral philosophy, but it does not require a direct engagement with those questions.’ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xxvii. For a critical response to this approach: Hedley Bull, ‘Recapturing the Just War for Political Theory’, World Politics 31:4 (1979): 588-99. 22 Cian O’Driscoll, The Renegotiation of the Just War Tradition and the Right to War in the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 96. 23 See: Chris Brown, ‘Michael Walzer’, in Daniel R. Brunstetter and Cian O’Driscoll (eds.), Just War Thinkers: From Cicero to the 21st Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018): 205-15.

6 who are not lawyers but simple citizens (and sometimes soldiers) argue about war.’24 And elsewhere: ‘I treat words like aggression, neutrality, surrender, civilian, reprisal, and so on, as if they were terms in a moral vocabulary—which they are, and always have been, though most recently their analysis and refinement have almost entirely been the work of lawyers.’25 Political philosophers and theorists also take a hit: ‘War especially imposes an urgency that is probably incompatible with philosophy as a serious enterprise. The philosophy is like Wordsworth’s poet who reflects in tranquillity upon past experience (or other people’s experience), thinking about political and moral choices already made.’26 This apparent negativity toward lawyers and philosophers is explained by Walzer’s commitment to connecting theory to ‘the immediacies of political and moral controversy’ and to furnishing ‘help to men and women faced with hard choices.’27 It is not clear to me, however, that Walzer ever fully realises these commitments in practice. While Just and Unjust Wars is laden with ‘historical illustrations’ which are intended to transport the reader beyond the detached perspective of lawyers and philosophers and into the thick of the action, Walzer’s choice of sources is actually quite conventional. With a couple of notable exceptions clustered around Walzer’s discussion of ‘non-combatant immunity and military necessity,’ he draws sparingly on vignettes culled from rank and file military personnel and civilian victims of warfare. The bulk of Walzer’s historical illustrations instead involve historians (Thucydides, Josephus), playwrights (Shakespeare), philosophers (Sidgwick, Mill, Hume, Sartre), generals (Eisenhower, Sherman, Rommel), poets (Sackville, Jarrell, Owen), novelists (Graves, Orwell), leaders (Churchill, Mao, Napoleon), and even legal theorists (Vattel).28 The point to take from this is that Walzer’s efforts to account for the lived experience of war are too far from the ground to ever fully succeed. This is, perhaps, indicative of a more general tension in Walzer’s work between his wish to ground just war theory in practice and his stated intention to ‘capture’ it ‘for political and moral theory’.29

24 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xxv. 25 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xxvi. 26 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xxiii. 27 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xxvii. 28 It must be acknowledged that many of these figures also had direct personal exposure to warfare—but whether their experience was in any way standard or representative remains an open question. Even among the poets and writers referenced by Walzer, very few are from an ‘everyman’ background. See: Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 31-74. 29 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xxvi.

7 Invention A post-9/11 phenomenon, revisionist approaches to just war theory have gone in the course of two decades from being a philosophical obscurity to the largest growth area in the ethics of war. The work of Jeff McMahan has been pivotal to its success, but other scholars, including Cecile Fabre, David Rodin, Seth Lazar, and Helen Frowe, have also made significant contributions.30 While they disagree among themselves on a range of issues, they are bound together by a common repudiation of the core tenets of Walzer’s orthodoxy. Specifically, they contest the relation Walzer assumes between just cause for war and collective liability to armed attack, the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants that goes with it, and the principle of non-combatant immunity that he champions.31 The details of these particular disagreements need not detain us here, however. What is of interest is how these revisionists go about their business. Scholars associated with the revisionist camp approach the task of just war theorising via the path of invention, the third way of doing moral philosophy elaborated by Walzer. Where discovery presumes that ethical analysis is best addressed via tradition, and interpretation starts from a commitment to studying the world as we find it, invention is a more rationalist endeavour. Dismissive of the view that sound ethical principles can be derived from either the sacred texts of the just war tradition or the normative architecture of international society, those who tread the path of invention suppose that theories which grant us insight into the ‘deep morality of war’ can be constructed from first principles in a Kantian or Rawlsian style.32 The aspiration is clear: ‘The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge.’33 Detachment, abstraction, universalism, the presumption of sub specie aeternitas, and the liberal use of (occasionally ludicrous) thought experiments are the main techniques involved, analytical rigour and argumentative precision the watchwords. In a nutshell, this is just war theory in the mode of Anglo-American analytical moral philosophy.

30 For a primer: Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 31 This synopsis is a loose tracking of: Jeff McMahan, ‘Just War’, in Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2017), Chapter 37. 32 On the deep morality of war: Jeff McMahan, ‘The Ethics of Killing in War’, Ethics 114:4 (2004: 693-733. 33 Bertrand Russell quoted in: Antony Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 28.

8 A source of vibrant debate, revisionist just war theory has also been the subject of fierce critique. The charges laid against it are that it is excessively theoretical and, consequently, has little contact with the rough and tumble of warfare that it ostensibly addresses.34 Soren Kierkegaard’s assault on the ‘illusions of ’ provides a helpful reference-point for unpacking this critique.35 Kierkegaard rejected the idea that the path of detachment and abstraction is the right way to generate meaningful knowledge of the world. He feared, instead, that these processes reduce everything to bland generalities and bloodless universals, while absolving human agents of the responsibility to think for themselves.36 The illusions of objectivity manifest, then, in, on the one hand, a standpoint that overlooks the particular needs, concerns, beliefs, and desires that situate flesh-and- blood human beings and make them who they are, and, on the other, an invitation to view every challenge, not as concrete commitments to be realised, but as generalisable hypotheticals.37 People are thus dissuaded from taking charge of the hard decisions that they confront in their lives and are instead encouraged to submit them to a ‘depersonalised realm of reified ideas and doctrines.’38 For Kierkegaard, then, the illusions of objectivity stand for a myopic failure to understand that knowledge only occurs in the context of personal existence.39 This, then, is the general background against which the critique of revisionist just war theory as disconnected should be received. The fact that the revisionist approach has risen to a position of dominance in the field indicates that there is a trend toward the illusions of objectivity in just war theory more generally. Not that revisionists are alone in this. As we have already seen, just war theorists of all stripes—historical, Walzerian, and revisionist—have struggled to connect their theorising to the lived experience of war (or, put differently, to incorporate some account of the latter into the former). The question that arises is whether it is possible to do better on this front? It is to this question that we now turn.

34 See: Kimberly Hutchings, ‘War and Moral Stupidity’, Review of International Studies 44:1 (2017), p. 99; Chris Brown, ‘Revisionist Just War Theory and the Impossibility of a Moral Victory’, in Andrew R. Hom, Cian O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills (eds.), Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 85-100; Pablo Kalmanovitz, The Laws of War in International Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 8. 35 Patrick Gardiner, Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 2. 36 Gardiner, Kierkegaard, p. 40-1. Also: Kaufmann, Existentialism, p. 17. 37 Kevin Aho, Existentialism: An Introduction—2nd Edition (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), p. 36. 38 Gardiner, Kierkegaard, p. 40. For an application of this line of critique (albeit indexed to Derrida rather than Kierkegaard): Maja Zehfuss, War and the Politics of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 192-3. 39 John Macquarrie, Existentialism (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 105.

9 2. Gaining Experience Having established that the literature on the ethics of war does not pay enough attention to the experience of war, I want to address the flip-side of this equation, i.e., how the literature on the experience of war accounts for the ethical dimension of war. The purpose of this is to source ideas for how just war theorists might do better in the future. The first thing we find when we look into this is that there is a burgeoning literature on the experience of war. Drawing upon the so-called cultural turn in military history40 and feminist and postcolonial41 insights, as well as work in human geography42, the central claim advanced in this work is that ‘war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people’ in a way that places the lived realities of combat at the heart of our analysis.43 (This is the opposite of the ‘high altitude’ theorising that characterises so much contemporary just war thought.44) Curiously, however, the ethical dimension of the experience of war has been neglected in this literature.45 In the same way that the ethics of war literature ignores the experience of war, so too the experience of war literature pays scant attention to the ethics of war. There are, it follows, no easy answers to be gleaned here. That said, the literature on the experience of war reflects several promising lines of thought that, if further developed and/or appropriately adapted, could meet our needs. The aim of this section is to introduce three of the most likely contenders, with a view, ultimately, to discerning whether they might be employed as a useful resource for re-connecting just war theory to the lived realities of war.

40 Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behaviour of Men in Battle (London: Cassel, 2004); Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Paul Fussell, The Great War and the Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Also: Martin Evans, ‘Opening up the Battlefield: War and the Cultural Turn’, Journal of War and Cultural Studies 1:1 (2007): 47-51. 41 Shane Brighton, ‘Three Propositions on the Phenomenology of War’, International Political Sociology 5:1 (2011): 101-05; Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Swati Parashar, ‘What Wars and “War Bodies” Know about International Relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26:4 (2013): 615-30; Synne L. Dyvik, ‘Valhalla Rising: , Embodiment, and Experience in Military Memoirs’, Security Dialogue 5:1 (2016): 133-50; Meghan Mackenzie, ‘Why Do Soldiers Swap Illicit Pictures? How a Visual Discourse Analysis Illuminates Military Band of Brothers Culture’, Security Dialogue 51:4 (2020): 340-57; Annick Wibben, ‘Why We Need to Study (US) Militarism: A Critical Feminist Lens’, Security Dialogue 49:1 (2018): 136-48. 42 Derek Gregory, ‘The Natures of War’, Antipode 48:1 (2016): 3-56. 43 Christine Sylvester, ‘War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40:3 (2012), p. 484. 44 Aho, Existentialism, p. 19. 45 Exceptions include: Rosamond and Kronsell, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Individual Ethical Reflection’; and Laura Sjoberg, ‘Why Just War Needs Now More Than Ever’, International Politics 45:1 (2008): 1-18.

10 The Vernacular Turn The recent turn toward the study of vernaculars in Security Studies is my first port of call.46 Inspired by feminist accounts of situated knowledge (which I will have more to say about momentarily) and scholarly accounts of the everyday47, the study of vernaculars— defined as the patterns of informal speech used by particular unofficial, non-elite social groups—enjoins scholars to consider the various ways that dominant discourses are narrated, reproduced, and contested in sites of everyday practice.48 This involves a shift in focus from top-down frameworks to ‘bottom-up’ ways of seeing and talking about the world.49 As such, it is a good way of getting at the experiential dimension of security- politics in general, but also, more specifically, of war. What would extending a vernacular approach to just war theory entail? Primarily, it would involve teasing out the ‘common cultural repertoires, frames, and discursive patterns’ that situated flesh-and-blood actors routinely employ to describe and justify the practices that they are implicated in.50 Where the ethics of war is concerned, this would mean identifying and analysing the 'thick ethical concepts’ that soldiers commonly invoke to account for their experiences in war.51 These are the local short-hand concepts that soldiers routinely and, for the most part, non-reflectively reach for when providing evaluative descriptions of combat. Although they might appear unremarkable at first sight, these concepts bear considerable normative weight. They reflect (and thereby also disclose) the concerns, values, and precepts, but also hopes and fears, that are baked into and thereby prime soldiers’ ethical deliberations. These concepts operate, then, as focal points around which soldiers order their moral reflections. As such, they are constitutive of the ‘grunt vernacular’ and a rich source of insight into the experience of war.52

46 On the promise of vernacular turn: Stuart Croft and Nick Vaughan-Williams, ‘Fit for Purpose? Fitting Ontological Security Studies “into” the Discipline of International Relations: Towards a Vernacular Turn’, Cooperation and Conflict 52:1 (2017): 12-30. 47 Xavier Guillaume and Jef Huysmans, ‘The Concept of “The Everyday”: Ephemeral Politics and the Abundance of Life’, Cooperation and Conflict 54:2 (2019): 278-96. For commentary on the relation between vernaculars and the everyday: Nick Vaughan-Williams and Daniel Stevens, ‘Vernacular Theories of Everyday (In)security: The Disruptive Potential of Non-Elite Knowledge’, Security Dialogue 47:1 (2016), p. 44. 48 Liam Stanley and Richard Jackson, ‘Introduction: Everyday Narratives in World Politics’, Politics 36:3 (2016), p. 229. 49 Lee Jarvis, ‘Toward a Vernacular Security Studies: Origins, Interlocutors, Contributions, and Challenges’, International Studies Review 21 (2019), p. 109. 50 Richard Jackson and Gareth Hall, ‘Talking About Terrorism: A Study of Vernacular Discourse’, Politics 36:3 (2016), p. 295. T 51 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge 2006), p. 129-30, 140-41. My usage of this term deviates from how Williams defines it. 52 Samuel Hynes, On War and Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 68.

11 Just war theorists would benefit from engaging with these ideas. By engaging the vernacular, they can acquire the tools to unpack how salient everyday actors (including soldiers and civilians who have experience of combat-zones) talk about the ethics of war in their own terms, and, by extension, to consider what light their ways of expressing themselves cast on conventional understandings of just war.53 This seems a worthwhile endeavour. It does, however, raise certain methodological issues. A focus on vocabularies and ways of talking bids the question of how—or, better put, from where—one undertakes this work. As Charles Taylor writes, ‘it is plainly impossible to learn a language as a detached observer. To understand a language, you need to understand the social life and outlook of those who speak it.’54 The remainder of this section is dedicated to examining two distinct but overlapping ways of approaching this task: feminist standpoint theory and existentialism.

Feminist Standpoint Theory Feminist standpoint theory is not entirely new terrain for International Relations (IR) scholars. It was already a subject of debate among IR theorists—including, for example, Robert Keohane, Christine Sylvester, and J. Ann Tickner—in the 1980’s and 1980’s, while the work of Sara Ruddick and Carol Cohn is frequently discussed in IR journals.55 Courtesy of Laura Sjoberg, it has even in recent years been extended to the domain of just war theory.56 There is, then, already a foundation upon which to build. But what actually is feminist standpoint theory? And what can it bring to just war theory? I intend to address these two questions by reference to the work of two leading exponents of standpoint analysis, Nancy Hartsock and .

53 I am currently in the process of developing a project along these lines. This paper is clearing the theoretical ground for that work. 54 Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 281. 55 Robert O. Keohane, ‘International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 18:2 (1989): 245-53; Christine Sylvester, ‘Empathetic Cooperation: A for IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23:2 (1994): 315-34;and J. Ann Tickner, ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists’, International Studies Quarterly 41:4 (1997): 611-32. See, for example, the symposium on the significance of Ruddick’s concept of maternal thinking for IR in the Journal of International Political Theory. Fiona Robertson and Catia C. Confortini (eds.), ‘Symposium: Maternal Thinking for International Relations? Papers in Honour of Sara Ruddick’, Journal of International Political Theory 10:1 (2014): 38-124. On Cohn, see the symposium on feminist contributions to Security Studies: Laura Sjoberg, ‘Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist Contributions’, Security Studies 18:2 (2009): 183-213. 56 Sjoberg, ‘Why Just War Needs Feminism’, p. 6.

12 Nancy Hartsock’s 1983 essay, ‘The Feminist Standpoint,’ has been described as the ‘locus classicus’ of feminist standpoint theory.57 Written in response to Iris Marion Yong’s call for the development of a feminist historic , it examines the ‘epistemological consequences’ of the claim that ‘the position of women is structurally different from that of men, and that the lived realities of women’s lives are profoundly different from those of men.’58 Drawing upon the Marxist reading of Hegel’s account of the master-slave relationship, Hartsock proposes that women, by virtue of their historical position in society, have a ready insight into and understanding of the exploitative patriarchal structures that underpin it.59 In Hartsock’s own words: ‘Women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy.’60 What exactly Hartsock means by the notion of a particular and privileged vantage point has subsequently become a source of much deliberation for feminist theorists. On the one hand, the idea of a particular vantage point is indicative of the view that ‘knowledge is situated and perspectival’.61 On the other hand, the claim of a privileged perspective presupposes that some knowledges are more authoritative than others.62 The conjunction of these two positions, some critics have claimed, is fraught with tension.63 Is the feminist standpoint simply one situated knowledge, i.e., one perspective, among many, or does it get closer to actual truth than its counterparts? Critics have also perceived in Hartsock’s essay a form of essentialism which, negating difference, represents all women as sharing a single, monolithic standpoint.64 There are, it appears, some loose ends that need to be tidied up here, but Hartsock’s central insight, that knowledge is always located and experiential, remains powerful. Sandra Harding’s contribution to feminist standpoint theory picks up where Hartsock’s analysis leaves off. Knowledge, Harding contends, is never ‘impartial,

57 Catherine Hundleby, ‘Where Standpoint Stands Now’, Women & Politics 18:3 (1998), p. 25. 58 Nancy C. M. Hartsock, ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historic Materialism’, in Sandra Harding and Merril B. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983): 283-310. 59 On the origins of Hartsock’s standpoint theory: Annica Kronsell, ‘Gendered Practices in Institutions of Hegemonic Masculinity’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 7:2 (2005), p. 287. 60 Hartsock, ‘The Feminist Standpoint’, p. 284. Italics added. 61 Susan Hekman, ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’, Signs 22:2 (1997), p. 342. 62 Hekman, ‘Truth and Method’, p. 342. 63 Hekman, ‘Truth and Method’, p. 349. Also: Mary E. Hawkesworth, ‘Knowers, Knowing, Known: and Claims of Truth’, Signs 14:3 (1989): 533-57. 64 For example: Nancy J, Hirschmann, ‘Feminist Standpoint as Postmodern Strategy’, Women & Politics 18:3 (1998), p. 74.

13 disinterested, value-neutral, Archimedean.’65 Instead, it is always and necessarily ‘socially situated’.66 To pretend otherwise, she claims, is to indulge in what Donna Haraway calls the ‘God trick’, by which is meant the pretence that knowledge is the product of a transcendent movement from the here and now to a universalistic truth.67 Harding rejects the God trick, and the vision of objectivity that it entails, not on the basis that it is too rigorous, but for the reason that it is not rigorous enough.68 By bracketing the background views and interests that are part and parcel of the process of knowledge generation, she charges, it disguises the fact that biases and prejudices are always baked into the truths we arrive at about the world. Aa a counter to (in her terms) this ‘weak objectivity’, she proposes ‘strong objectivity’.69 Strong objectivity requires ‘that the subject of knowledge be placed on the same critical, causal plane as the objects of knowledge.’70 Affirming that the grounds for knowledge are always ‘saturated with history and social life rather than abstracted from them’, it demands that we approach them reflexively, acknowledging both their provenance and contingencies.71 Harding’s conclusion is that the concrete realities of women’s lives provide the perfect site for this mode of inquiry as it offers a set of disclosive perspectives on the practices that sustain exclusionary social orders. Pulling this together, the key insight advanced by Hartsock and Harding is that what is typically passed off as ‘objectivity’ is not actually so objective (i.e., value-free, universal) after all. What is usually presented as ‘objectivity’ is neither a pre-reflective starting point for knowledge claims, nor a transcendental view from nowhere, but the product of a set of practices (e.g., detachment, abstraction) that are rooted in and reflect particular interests and identities. Taking this realisation as their point of departure, standpoint theorists deploy the perspective of marginalised groups (e.g., women) to interrogate and ultimately expose the tendentiousness of these claims to objectivity and thus clear the way for more inclusive forms of knowledge.

65 Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 11. 66 Sandra Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint : What is Strong Objectivity?’, The Centennial Review 36:3 (1992), p. 444. 67 Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology’, p. 445. Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives’, Feminist Studies 14:3 (1988), p. 582. 68 Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology’, p. 438. 69 Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, p. 142. 70 Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology’, p. 459. 71 Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology’, p. 446.

14 The question arising from this for present purposes is whether a standpoint approach can be usefully applied to contemporary just war theory? More to the point, what would it accomplish? It would offer both a critique of the formal, top-down form of just war theorising that currently predominates and a grounded, bottom-up alternative to it. In these respects, it is exactly what just war theory needs. Yet it also has drawbacks. For instance, it is reasonable to suppose that very few proponents of feminist standpoint theory would be pleased to see it yoked to what, for them, is the highly problematic discourse of just war theory.72 The issue here is that most feminist standpoint theorising rejects war and opposes the idea that it can ever be justified. The appropriation of feminist standpoint approaches by just war theorists would, it follows, more closely resemble a hostile takeover than a happy union. On balance, then, but with a certain degree of wistfulness, it may be best for just war theorists to look beyond feminist standpoint theory. As it happens, there is another body of thought out there that might be a better fit: existentialism.

Existentialism Existentialism evades easy definition.73 Coined by Gabriel Marcel to describe the ideas of Jean Paul Sartre and , the term ‘existentialism’ does not designate a bounded system of philosophical thought.74 Rather, it reflects a style of philosophical activity that flourished in post-war Europe.75 What is typically understood by existentialism can be represented by a set of loosely overlapping commitments:

o Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete, human existence. o They consider human existence difference from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make myself at every moment. I am free— o and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes o an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself.

72 For more on feminist views of just war theory: Lucinda J. Peach, ‘An Alternative to Pacifism? Feminism and Just-War Theory’, 9:2 (1994), p. 153. 73 Mary Warnock, Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 1. 74 David E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction—2nd Edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), p. 1. 75 Warnock, Existentialism, p. 1.

15 o On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical, and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown. o Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. o Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating. o An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. o By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.76

The aspect of existentialism that I want to focus upon here is its emphasis on the concrete and inward dimensions of personal experience. For it is this emphasis which speaks most directly to the needs of just war theory, as set out above. This is best pursued via William Barrett’s classic study of existentialism, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy.77 Barrett anchors his account of existentialism, which he hails as a ‘philosophy that was able to cross the frontier from the academy into the world at large,’ in the 19th century writings of Soren Kierkegaard.78 We have already touched upon Kierkegaard’s assault on the illusions of objectivity in this essay. The source of this attack was Kierkegaard’s dissatisfaction with the complacency of the Christian faith in the Christendom of his day. The church at this time operated, in his view, in such a way as to absolve individuals from ever fully committing themselves to the tough decisions that Christianity necessitates. Against this backdrop, Kierkegaard set himself the task of recovering what it truly means to be a Christian. In this respect, he was seeking ‘not a truth which could be contemplated disinterestedly and as an external, achieved result,’79 but rather a truth which, in his own words, ‘was true for me,’ a truth

76 This nine-point list is lifted verbatim from: Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, & Apricot Cocktails (London: Vintage, 2017), p. 34. 77 William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1961). 78 Barrett, Irrational Man, p. 8. 79 James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), p. 26.

16 for which ‘I am willing to live and die’.80 The insight Kierkegaard was seeking was, it seems, not a truth of the intellect, but a truth of the whole man.81 What we are talking about here is ‘subjective truth’, which, as Barrett glosses, ‘is not a truth that I have, but a truth that I am.’82 In Kierkegaard’s own words: ‘When the question of truth is raised subjectively, reflection is directed subjectively to the nature of the individual’s relationship; if only the mode of this relationship is in the truth, the individual is in the truth, even if he should be thus related to what is not true.’83 Subjective truth, it follows, will not generate knowledge about external realities, but it will lead us as individuals to a better awareness of the passions and beliefs that guide our ethical choices and make us who we are.84 Drawing this together, Barrett presents existentialism as a meditation upon the realisation that, just as a concern with objectivity blinds people to the ‘wholeness’ of their own existence, so it is only by attending to our own inner, subjective truths that we can leady a fully authentic and meaningful life.85 The proposal arising from existentialist thought, thus construed, is not that objective accounts of truth should be replaced by subjective ones. Nor is it that subjective accounts of truth should be the . Rather, it merely posits subjective truths as a ‘corrective’ for the prevailing dominance of objective accounts of truth.86 Put differently, the intention behind the existentialist case for subjective truth is not to disavow objective ways of knowing, but to supplement them and thereby disturb the lazy assumption that they are the only valid ways of knowing.87 What this leaves us with is a commitment to the view that philosophy should, on the one hand, begin in and with the concrete reality of human lives, and, on the other, speak to the truth in and by which they are lived. This is a very different orientation from what underpins a lot of contemporary just war theory. How, then, might it be adopted? It is to this challenge that we now turn.

80 Kierkegaard’s diary entry for 1st August 1835, quoted in: Bernard Murchland, The Arrow that Flies by Day: Existential Images of the Human Condition from Socrates to (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), p. 49. 81 Barrett, Irrational Man, p. 152. 82 Barrett, Irrational Man, p. 153. 83 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 178. 84 This vision of truth connects to the Delphic injunction to know thyself. Aho, Existentialism, p. 25. It also evokes Augustine’s claim that ‘truth dwells in the inner man’. Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard, p. 141. 85 Barrett, Irrational Man, p. 68. 86 Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard, p. 68. 87 Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard, p. 139.

17 3. Starting Anew The proposition before us is to re-imagine just war theory in light of the ideas we have just canvassed from the vernacular turn in Security Studies, feminist standpoint theory, and, in particular, existentialist thought. What form, we must ask, would a just war theory that incorporates the insights from these theoretical positions assume? The aim of this final section is to pursue this inquiry. To this end, it will sketch a speculative response to the question: What would a just war theory look like that starts, not with Augustine, but with his fellow Algerian, Albert Camus?88 The argument, as we shall see, is that it would re-cast just war theory as a form of existential ethics.

A New Augustine Albert Camus (1913-65) is one of the most revered French writers of the 20th century and a giant of the existentialist world.89 Hailed as the great moraliste of the post-war era, he was widely celebrated, not least by the awarding committee for the Nobel Peace Prize, for his public commitment and private passion.90 Yet he had a tense relationship with existentialism. He refuted the label, feuded bitterly with Sartre and de Beauvoir, and has subsequently been written out of the history of existentialism by commentators such as David Cooper.91 Even so, Camus had a lot in common with the wider existentialist movement: he shared with Sartre et al both ‘the conviction that philosophical ideas must be approached from a concrete, human, existential standpoint’ and a commitment to ‘face a world in which transcendent absolutes could no longer be appealed to or relied upon.’92 It is reasonable, then, to treat him, if not as an existentialist , at least as part of the wider movement of existentialist thought. This is congruent with how his books

88 The task set out here is one I first explored with Liane Hartnett: Liane Hartnett and Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Sad and Strange and Laughable: At War with Just War’, Global Society (Firstview 2020). I hope the reader will forgive the loose usage of ‘Algerian’ here. It is an anachronistic label when applied to Augustine, and a controversial one when applied to Camus. I mean only to draw attention to the fact that both figures hail from the same part of the world. 89 Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the 20th Century (London: Peter Halban, 1989), pp. 136-38. 90 Stephen Eric Bronner, Camus: Portrait of a Moralist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), ix. Also: Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus: Of Europe and Africa (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 28. 91 ‘I am not an existentialist,’ declared Camus. Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. by Benjamin Ivry (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997), p. 379. The same source records his disputes with his erstwhile friends, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Cooper dismisses Camus’s credentials as an existentialist philosopher on the grounds that he ‘neither a philosopher nor systematic’. Cooper, Existentialism, p. 9. 92 John Cruickshank, ‘Introduction’, in Albert Camus, and Other Plays, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 20; David Sprintzen, Camus: A Critical Examination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 44.

18 and writings, several of which have achieved great commercial and critical success, have been received down the years. Interestingly, while Camus did not much care for the existentialist scene, he closely identified with the aforementioned St Augustine.93 He wrote his thesis on Augustine, identified with his belief that tragedy and joy co-exist in life, and even confided to an audience of Dominican priests in December 1946 that ‘I am your Augustine before his conversion. I am debating the problem but not getting past it.’94 Like Augustine, Camus was not a philosopher in any strict sense of the term, but a thinker and writer with wide- ranging interests, one of which was political violence. As Colin Davis has observed, ‘the question of violence is at the heart of Camus’s writings and his ethical deliberations. He was constantly perplexed by the question of whether or not violence could be justified and what ends it could legitimately serve.’95 Camus stated this concern directly in Neither Victims Nor Executioners: ‘Before we can build anything, we need to ask two questions: “Yes or no, directly or indirectly, do you want to be killed or assaulted? Yes or no, directly or indirectly, do you want to kill or assault?”’96 He returned to it in : ‘We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed.’97 This fascination with the question of what people are willing to die and kill for was enlivened by personal experience. In addition to experiencing the horror of violent political struggle in Algeria, Camus suffered through the German occupation of France in World War II and even served in the resistance movement—though not, it should be noted, in a combat role.98 This experience, and the massive breakdown of meaning that it represented for Camus, informed his writing, and is explored (albeit indirectly) in works such as The Outsider, , Caligula, The Rebel, Letters to a German Friend, and .99

93 Patrick McCarthy, Camus: A Critical Study of His Life and Work (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), p. 73. 94 Todd, Albert Camus, p. 43-4, 230. 95 Colin Davis, ‘Violence and Ethics in Camus’, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 108. 96 Albert Camus, ‘Neither Victims Nor Executioners’, in Jacqueline Levi-Valensi (ed.), Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-47 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 259. And on p. 274: ‘We must decide to reflect on murder and choose. If we can do this we will divide ourselves into two groups: those who if need be would be willing to commit murder or be accomplices to murder, and those who would refuse to do so.’ 97 Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. by Anthony Bower (London: Penguin, 1953), p. 12. 98 Todd, Albert Camus, p. 171. 99 Colin Davis, ‘Camus’ War: L’Etranger and Lettres a un Ami Allemand’, in Colin Davis (ed.), Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in 20th Century French Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), p. 70, 78.

19 Sisyphus at War Camus’s deliberations on the ethics of political violence begin with the recognition of what he calls the ‘absurd’. The absurd, for Camus, represents the evacuation of meaning from human affairs. It signifies the death of God, the pointlessness of all human projects, the impossibility of making sense of this reality, the refusal of the world to yield to rational explanation, and the arbitrariness of our existence. Camus describes it as the silence of the universe in response to the human yearning for meaning. It is, in this sense, ‘lucid reason noting its limits.’100 The absurd is not, it follows, something that can be escaped, transcended, or even circumvented.101 Rather, it is the fundamental condition of our existence, and, as such, must be both admitted and confronted:

The sole datum is the absurd. The first and, after all, the only condition of my inquiry is to preserve the very thing that crushes me, consequently to respect what I consider essential in it. … And carrying this absurd to its conclusion, I must admit that the struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which should not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest). Everything that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements … ruins the absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd has meaning only insofar as it is not agreed to. … War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognising its lessons and recovering their flesh.102

That we must live with the absurd is exactly the lesson that Camus seeks to impart with his re-telling of the myth of Sisyphus.103 Yet he refrains from any assertion that the absurd is all-encompassing.104 ‘To observe that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning,’ he wrote. ‘What interests me is not [the absurd itself] but the consequences and rules of action we must draw from it.’105 The challenge arising from this is to find a way of living with the absurd that is not a surrender to everything-goes .106

100 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage, 2018), p. 49. Also see: Albert Camus, The Outsider, trans. by Joseph Laredo (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 117. 101 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, p. 32-3, 35-39. 102 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, p. 31, 93. 103 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, pp. 119-22. 104 ‘Everything is not summed up in negation and absurdity.’ Albert Camus, ‘Pessimism and Courage’, in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 59. 105 Camus quoted in: Robert Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 17. 106 John Foley, Albert Camus: From the Revolt to the Absurd (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 56-7.

20 It is very important for Camus that the absurd is not seen as a licence to do whatsoever one pleases. The absurd, on Camus’s account, is something to contend with, not succumb to. Viewed in this way, it does not create a situation wherein nothing is forbidden. ‘It does not authorise all actions.’107 It binds, rather than liberates. What this might look like in practice, Camus illustrates in an essay styled as an open letter of reproof to an erstwhile friend who had taken the wrong side in World War II:

You never believed the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be denied according to one’s wishes. … You readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. … You saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against eternal injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness.108

The fact of absurdity does not, then, prescind the possibility of making ethical choices and living what might be characterised as a decent life.109 Rather, it underscores the importance of so doing. Thus, we arrive at the crux of the matter: what code of conduct should guide us in this endeavour? Camus proposes the doctrine of revolt as a ‘rule of action’ for living a decent life in shadow of the absurd.110 Revolt reflects the struggle to achieve meaning in the thrall of meaninglessness.111 Marrying defiance and humility, it rejects the idea that the meaningless of the world exempts us from seeking meaning in our own lives, while insisting that any such meaning can only ever be provisional, partial, imperfect. A philosophy of limits, the doctrine of revolt stands, on the one hand, against the totalising character of the ends that humans are naturally disposed to pursue via force, and, on the other, for the imposition of absolute restraints upon the means employed in their pursuit. The effect of this is to frame the use of force as ‘at one and the same time unavoidable and unjustifiable’, and to thereby ‘quarantine’ it and render it exceptional.112

107 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, p. 67. 108 Camus, ‘Letters to a German Friend’, in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 28. Also: Albert Camus, ‘Caligula’, in Caligula and Other Plays, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1984). 109 Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. by Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 195-97. 110 Camus, The Rebel, p. 17. 111 Sprintzen, Camus, p. 271. 112 Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living, p. 156.

21 A Morality Play The doctrine of the revolt is a perfect derivation of Camus’s belief that what matters ‘is not to follow things back to their origins, but, the world being what it is, to know how to live in it.’113 It remains, however, to examine how Camus envisaged it playing out in practice. We may do so now by reference to his 1949 play, The Just Assassins.114 Before he was a novelist, Camus was an actor. He took from this experience a belief that theatre is a perfect medium for the examination political and ethical questions. The Just Assassins was his attempt to bring to life the question that had animated his literary writings: Is it right to kill in pursuit of a political ideal?115 The play addresses this question by situating it in the context of an actual historical that took place in Moscow in 1905: the assassination of the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovitch by a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a young man by the name of Ivan Kaliayev, in what later came to be labelled history’s first act of terrorism. The action, such as it is, takes the form of a wide-ranging dialogue between Kaliayev and his associates as they plan the attack on the Grand Duke. What were their motivations? What were they hoping to achieve by killing this particular man? Were they justified in taking his life? What laws would they be breaking in the course of so doing? What laws still bound them? What cost would they pay, personally, for this action? And would they be able to make their peace with it? The drama that ensues is both thought-provoking and richly layered. The title of the play sets the action up. We have already had something to say about both the ‘war’ and the ‘theory’ in ‘just war theory’; what Camus meant by the ‘just’ in The Just Assassins will help us complete the triptych. Les Juste is usually translated into English as The Just Assassins, but it is also sometimes rendered as The Scrupulous Assassins. This slippage is revealing. As Robert Zaretsky points out, the word ‘scrupulous’ derives from the Latin term, scrupulus, which denoted a small and sharp stone that, when lodged in one’s sandal, made the act of walking—something usually taken for granted—a constant irritation.116 When, then, Camus writes in a laudatory tone about the scrupulousness displayed by Kaliayev and his comrades, he is taking a stand against the idea that violence should ever be easy. The decision to take up arms, he wants to say, should never be taken

113 Camus, The Rebel, p. 12. 114 Albert Camus, ‘The Just Assassins’, in Caligula and Other Plays, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1984). 115 Cruickshank, ‘Introduction’, p. 25. 116 Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living, p. 175.

22 lightly. It should be a source of angst, regret, worry, and misgiving.117 Where these doubts are absent, we must be worried that the persons who have armed themselves have surrendered themselves body and soul to their cause and made violence a way of life.118 Where these doubts are present, however, they embody the doctrine of revolt. They reflect a desire to do the right thing in the face of everything being wrong—even in the full knowledge that there can be no vindication. The plot reinforces this message. It depicts Kaliayev as a revolutionary beset by doubt. He states his willingness to kill if that is what is necessary to ‘build a world where there will be no killing’, but is, at the same time, cognisant that what he is preparing for is murder.119 Yet there are lines he will not cross. He rejects the proposition that anything that serves his cause—such as, for example, killing children—can be justified.120 Affirming the view that ‘even destruction has a right way and a wrong way, and there are limits’, he refuses, as he puts it, ‘to add to the living injustice around me for the sake of a dead justice.’121 In the end, Kaliayev kills the Grand Duke and consequently sentenced to death for his crime. In Kaliayev, Camus sees the incarnation of the doctrine of revolt: in a world devoid of happy endings, he gave his life in protest against injustice, while never losing sight of his own ineradicable guilt.122 What vision of just war theory do we arrive at, then, if, seeking to incorporate an element of subjective experience—personified by Kaliayev—in our ethical thinking about war, we start with Camus rather than Augustine? It invites us, I think, to view just war theory as an instantiation of the doctrine of revolt. A feature of, and response to, the absurd, it reflects man’s valiant albeit futile effort ‘to be stronger than his condition.’123 Just war theory, on this account, is purely existential. It is best understood, not (only) as a theory of the deep morality of war, but (also) as a ‘half-truth’ to live by.124

117 See: Albert Camus, ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’, in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 175-6. 118 Also see: Albert Camus, ‘Defence of Intelligence’, in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 62. 119 Camus, ‘The Just Assassins’, p. 174. 120 Camus, ‘The Just Assassins’, p. 186. 121 Camus, ‘The Just Assassins’, p. 187. 122 Camus, The Rebel, p. 139. 123 Albert Camus, ‘The Night of Truth’, in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 39. 124 Albert Camus, ‘The Wager of Our Generation’, in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 248.

23 Conclusion ‘The Churchmen are shaving us too closely.’ These were among the last words of William Marshal, the most renowned knight of his time.125 They were in response to an inquiry (from a courtier with a questionable bedside manner) about whether he worried that the gates of heaven would be closed to men like himself who had occasionally strayed from the laws of war. Marshal’s point was that the rules promulgated by the canon lawyers and theologians of his day were too stringent to be practicable, and therefore he was justified in disregarding them. This story, though 12th century in origin, speaks to a very contemporary concern, namely that just war theory has become disconnected from the practice it ostensibly regulates, warfare. Where this is the case, it must be tempting for soldiers to discount just war theory it as irrelevant to the realities of the battlefield. How, then, can scholars do better when it comes to conveying the salience of just war theory to sceptical combat personnel? Recent revelations regarding the grave misconduct of coalition soldiers in Afghanistan indicates both the urgency and importance of this question. This essay represents a first attempt to tackle it. Its key points are easily summarised. Drawing on a broad overview of the literature, this essay has argued that contemporary just war theory is not adequately configured to address just war practice. Section One demonstrated that this problem is both reflected in and exacerbated by the trend toward top-down, abstract modes of just war theorising. Section Two then surveyed a range of conceptual resources geared to charting the experiential dimension of human affairs that just war theorists might tap into in order to counter this development. Casting a wide net, it canvased vernacular security studies, feminist standpoint theory, and existentialism. Singling out existentialism, and in particular the writings of Albert Camus, for further attention, Section Three explored what might be achieved by highlighting the subjective dimension of just war theory. The argument arising from this is that just war theory is best understood, not only as a theory of the deep morality of war, but also as a half-truth to live by. Finally—and here we arrive at our conclusion—the hope must be that by thus connecting just war theory to existentialist ethics, we might lay the groundwork for re- connecting it to the lived experience of warfare.

125 David Crouch, William Marshal: Knighthood, War, and Chivalry, 1147-1219 (London: Longman, 2002), p. 207.

24 * I am very grateful to Lee-Ann Chae for the kind invitation to present an early draft of this paper at Temple University and for the helpful feedback I received at that session. This essay develops an argument intimated in earlier work. See: Cian O’Driscoll et al, ‘How and Why to do Just War Theory’, Contemporary Political Theory (Firstview 2020):; and Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Just War Theory: Past, Present, and Future’, in Howard Williams, David Boucher, Peter Sutch, David Reidy, and Alexandros Koutsoukis (eds), Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory (London: Palgrave, forthcoming). It also builds on ideas first set out in: Liane Hartnett and Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Sad and Laughable and Strange: At War with Just War’, Global Society (Firstview 2020). Liane’s work on Camus prompted my interest in existentialism and its relation to just war theory. Chats with Daniel Brunstetter nurtured this interest. Maria Tanyag opened my mind by challenging me think about the connection between where my scholarship is coming from and where I want to take it. Andy Hom, Luke Glanville, and Nico Lemay have chatted with me about the ideas in this paper, while Val Morkevicius supplied me with characteristically generous feedback along the way. All errors are my own. This paper is part of a larger project on vernacular accounts of the ethics of war.

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