Cosmopolitan War

Author: Cécile Fabre
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199567164
Published In: September 2012
Format: Hardback , 328 pages
Jurisdiction: International ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Ambitious and innovative work by a leading moral and political philosopher
Controversial conclusions on familiar topics
Draws on a wide range of historical cases
Will be of interest to researchers and students in politics, international relations, and international law, as well as philosophy

War is about individuals maiming and killing each other, and yet, it seems that it is also irreducibly collective, as it is fought by groups of people and more often than not for the sake of communal values such as territorial integrity and national self-determination. Cécile Fabre articulates and defends an ethical account of war in which the individual, as a moral and rational agent, is the fundamental focus for concern and respect--both as a combatant whose acts of killing need justifying and as a non-combatant whose suffering also needs justifying. She takes as her starting point a political morality to which the individual, rather than the nation-state, is central, namely cosmopolitanism. According to cosmopolitanism, individuals all matter equally, irrespective of their membership in this or that political community. Traditional war ethics already accepts this principle, since it holds that unarmed civilians are illegitimate targets even though they belong to the enemy community. However, although the traditional account of whom we may kill in wars is broadly faithful to that principle, the traditional account of why we may kill and of who may kill is not. Cosmopolitan theorists, for their part, do not address the ethical issues raised by war in any depth. Fabre's Cosmopolitan War seeks to fill this gap, and defends its account of just and unjust wars by addressing the ethics of different kinds of war: wars of national defence, wars over scarce resources, civil wars, humanitarian intervention, wars involving private military forces, and asymmetrical wars.

Readership: Scholars and advanced students in political philosophy, ethics, political theory, and international law and relations.

Introduction
1: Cosmopolitanism
2: Collective Self-Defence
3: Subsistence Wars
4: Civil Wars
5: Humanitarian Intervention
6: Commodified wars
7: Asymmetrical Wars
Conclusion
Works cited
Index

Cécile Fabre, Lincoln College, Oxford

Cécile Fabre is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Lincoln College. She has written extensively on distributive justice, rights, and the ethics of killing. She has previously published two monographs with Oxford University Press: Social Rights under the Constitution (2000) and Whose Body is it Anyway? (2006). She is a Fellow of the British Academy.