Reading Contemporary American Warfare with Just War Theory

Abstract

In late 2021, we published a coauthored book with Palgrave Macmillan’s American Literature Readings in the Twenty-first Century series called, Just War Theory and Literary Studies: An Invitation to Dialogue. This text is the culmination of years of thinking on our parts, both individually and jointly, about the relationship between warfare, ethics, aesthetics, cultural memory, and American national identity. Myriad concerns—or more to the point, frustrations—animate our work on this project. Both of us, but Hawkins in particular, believe that much of today’s worthy scholarly reflection about the human experience, and the human costs, of modern and contemporary conflict occurs under the auspices of humanities disciplines wherein scholars actively work through representations of warfare to arrive at ethical claims about warfare. At the same time, many of these scholars, lacking systematic education in ethics proper, appear confused about the first principles on which their axiological claims rest, to say nothing about the habits of thought and action the effectuation of said principles might demand. As a result, we believe that much of today’s humanistic research on war would benefit greatly from direct conversation with scholarship from those disciplines in which the ethics of warring are engaged systematically—namely, philosophy and theology. At the same time, as Kim proves keen to note, conversations about warfare and ethics from within philosophy and theology frequently play out in manners so far removed from what we term the “acting person” in our book as to seem “academic” in the worst sense (3). In fact, much of the work currently being published in philosophy and theology on Just War Theory (JWT), as well as work which engages alternative approaches to questions of warfare and ethics, is virtually unreadable not only from outside those disciplines but even from outside certain of their niche sub-disciplines. Thus, it is our further belief that philosophical and theological reflections on justice and warfare would benefit from direct engagement with scholars whose work on war and ethics principally engages texts that center lived human experience. Given these twinned contestations, we wrote Just War Theory and Literary Studies to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students, in hopes of achieving