A Just and Lasting Peace After War

Abstract

While a ‘just and lasting peace’ is the axiomatic goal of a just war, it is not clear what that means exactly. The central question of this chapter is: How should a just war theorist understand peace, insofar that peace is the goal of just war theory, taking into account the theory’s middle position between political realism and moral idealism? In the first part of this chapter, the contemporary debate is mapped and various positions on peace are made explicit. This reveals a shift towards a more positive concept of peace. How far should this shift go? The second part of this chapter places the peace continuum in a lively debate in political philosophy on the role of feasibility constraints in normative theory. This chapter argues that a ‘just and lasting peace’ must be understood as a decent peace that is ‘just enough’.