Expanding Responsibility for the Just War: A Feminist Critique

by Rosemary Kellison

As demonstrated in any armed conflict, war is violent and causes grave harms to innocent persons, even when fought in compliance with just war criteria. In this book, Rosemary Kellison presents a feminist critique of just war reasoning, with particular focus on the issue of responsibility for harm to noncombatants. Contemporary just war reasoning denies the violence of war by suggesting that many of the harms caused by war are necessary, though regrettable, injuries for which inflicting agents bear no responsibility. She challenges this narrow understanding of responsibility through a feminist ethical approach that emphasizes the relationality of humans and the resulting asymmetries in their relative power and vulnerability. According to this approach, the powerful individual and collective agents who inflict harm during war are responsible for recognizing and responding to the vulnerable persons they harm, and thereby reducing the likelihood of future violence. Kellison's volume goes beyond abstract theoretical work to consider the real implications of an important ethical problem.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published November 29, 2018

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rosemary Kellison uses feminist ethics to examine the just war tradition and expand the notion of responsibility for injuries and deaths to noncombatants, in hopes of both narrowing when a war might be considered just and establishing a more robust system of accountability that would lead to more healing when a war is over. She does so in a readable and compelling way that is a credit to her scholarship and her writing.

If I have any quibble, it's that Kellison at the last moment pulls away from the pacifism to which her arguments seem to lead most naturally. It almost feels like she's an all-but-Hitler pacifist, but does not want to stake her claim quite so strongly on that ground.