There are no more prominent theologians left in our history of Just War thinking. From here on out the leaders of government and military will steer the Just War tradition to the present. Beginning with Giulio Douhet. Italian Brigadier General Douhet (1869-1930) presented his revisions to Just War doctrine in… Read More
Hugo Grotius is considered a transitional figure in Just War history – transitioning Just War doctrine away from religion. That transition is complete by the time Emmerich de Vattel puts pen to paper. Born in Switzerland (1714), Emmerich de Vattel served as a diplomat for the king of Saxony. In… Read More
By the time Hugo Grotius was born in 1583, Catholicism had lost it’s monopoly on faith in Europe. Martin Luther nailed his theses up in Wittenberg, the Reformation spread, giving birth to Protestantism – and then Protestantism split into factions of its own. Grotius was Holland’s attorney general and a… Read More
As the sun set on the middle ages a new generation of Just War thinkers rose to prominence, seeing the world through a new lens their predecessors never accounted for: colonialism. It was the sixteenth century and Columbus sailed the ocean blue, bringing Mother Spain’s armed conquistadors with him and… Read More
Once these major contributions to Just War thinking by warriors (knights) and the Church (Augustine and Aquinas) were made and largely accepted among Catholics of the Middle Ages, the tradition of Just War was taught as having two components: the right to go to war and the right conduct of… Read More
Picking up where we left off with Augustine and Aquinas, the next major development in the evolution of Just War doctrine was chivalry – the code of conduct followed by the knights of the Middle Ages. Chivalry imposed upon warriors a set of regulations for the conduct of war(1). Since… Read More
Shaun Groves