The irony of just war?

By claiming that “just war is just war,” critics suggest that just war theory both distracts from and sanitizes the horror of modern warfare by dressing it up in the language of moral principles. However, the phrase can also be taken as a reminder of why we need just war theory in the first place. It is precisely because just war is just war, with all that this implies, that we must think so carefully and so judiciously about it. Of course, one could argue that the rump of just war scholarship over the past decade has been characterized by disinterest regarding the material realities of warfare. But is this still the case? This essay examines a series of benchmark books on the ethics of war published over the past year. All three exemplify an effort to grapple with the hard facts of modern violent conflict, and they all skillfully bring diverse traditions of just war thinking into conversation with one another

Knowing and forgetting the Easter 1916 Rising

The centenary of the Easter 1916 Rising was a source of both celebration and no little anxiety in Ireland. On the one hand, the centenary provided a welcome opportunity for Irish people to take stock of the violent past that optimists hope it has recently left behind. On the other hand, it signalled an occasion for a form of legitimacy contest as various groups, the Irish government among them, jostled to present themselves as the true heirs of the Rising. Sparked by these controversies, this paper asks what meaning the Rising holds for contemporary Ireland. Is it a sacrifice to be redeemed, a patrimony to be claimed, or a past to be shucked off? The answer to this question, it argues, will have a significant bearing on how Ireland faces an uncertain future in an increasingly dangerous world

How I learned to start worrying and love the just war tradition

This article engages with the critique of just war that lies at the heart of Maja Zehfuss’s War & the Politics of Ethics. It argues that while Zehfuss’s critique misses the mark in several important respects, it nevertheless does us a tremendous service by laying bare the irony of just war. In doing so, it reminds us not only of the limits and dangers of just war thinking, but also of why it deserves our grudging respect

Introduction:Moral victories- The ethics of winning wars

What is victory in war? If one is fighting for a just cause, is it a dereliction of duty to settle for anything less than victory? Can victory ever be worthy of the sacrifices made in its pursuit? What is its relation to the peace that everyone hopes will come once fighting has ended? This introduction discusses how the book will tackle these questions. It briefly traces the ubiquity and import of ‘victory’ in the theoretical and practical discourses of war from ancient times to the present day. It then juxtaposes three prominent examples of victory’s importance: the classical use of trophies and triumphs, the emergence of ‘degrade and destroy’ as a rubric for interpreting the ‘War on Terror’, and finally the centrality of victory to any efforts to conceive of war in strategic, political, or ethical terms. We close by providing an overview of the chapters to follow

Design procedure for reduced filter size in a buck converter using a 4th-order resonance filter

This article presents a novel design procedure for 4th order and 4th order resonance (4thRes) output filters, for given buck converter specifications, making components selection a straightforward process. An accurate filter analysis is provided to predict the filter component currents and voltages in both frequency and time domains. Application of the analysis in a design study of a 20 MHz, 5.4 W buck converter shows that the 4thRes filter has the potential to reduce the output passive components for a wide duty cycle range. As compared with a 2nd order filter at V IN = 6.6 V to V OUT = 1.8 V, total inductance, inductor energy, capacitance, and capacitor energy are 58%, 35%, 45%, and 31% lower, respectively. Air-core PCB integrated solenoid inductors are considered for implementation and testing within a prototype converter to show the impact of these filters on the converter performance. The 4thRes filter achieved 3.7% and 3.6% higher full-load efficiency than the 2nd and 4th order filters, respectively, and a better load transient performance

Comprehensive design procedure for racetrack microinductors

Present needs in efficiency and integration are driving research towards the miniaturization of power converters. Among the latest components to achieve the desired degree of integration are cored micro-inductors and they are still one of the hardest devices to optimize, due to the high number of freedom degrees in their fabrication. In this paper, a comprehensive design procedure for these micro-inductors is presented. The proposed method makes it possible to design the optimal device in a single iteration. It also allows the designer to easily ascertain the limits of the inductor in terms of handled current and losses and provides valuable physical insight on the output of the process

Rewriting the just war tradition: just war in classical Greek political thought and practice

The just war tradition is the predominant western framework for thinking about the ethics of contemporary war. Political and military leaders frequently invoke its venerable lineage to lend ballast to their arguments for or against particular wars. How we understand the history of just war matters, then, for it subtends how that discourse is deployed today. Conventional accounts of the just war trace its origins to the writings of Saint Augustine in the 4th century CE. This discounts the possibility that just war ideas were in circulation prior to this, in the classical world. This article contests this omission. It contends that ideas homologous to a range of core jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum principles were evident in classical Greek political thought and practice. This finding challenges scholars to re-consider not only the common view that the just war is, at root, a Christian tradition, but also the relation between victory and just war, the nature of the ties binding just war and Islamic jihad, and an innovative approach to the comparative ethics of war

Tough reading: Nigel Biggar on callousness and the just war

No abstract available

Nobody wins: the victory taboo in just war theory

This article examines how scholars of the just war tradition think about the ethical dilemmas that arise in the endgame phase of modern warfare. In particular, it focuses upon their reticence to engage the idiom of ‘victory’. Why, it asks, have scholars been so reluctant to talk about what it means to ‘win’ a just war? It contends that, while just war scholars may have good reason to be sceptical about ‘victory’, engaging it would grant them a more direct view of the critical potentialities, but also the limitations, of just war reasoning