war is never right essay

Is war ever morally justified?

A new book revives the debate over just war theory

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Anyone who cares about questions of war and peace — and who wishes to think deeply about how to assess those questions morally — should buy and promptly read Nigel Biggar's In Defense of War . Over the past few decades, many authors have written articles and books attempting to construct an apparatus for judging the morality of war. I know of none that approaches Biggar's book in lucidity and thoroughness. Readers who absorb and apply Biggar's criteria for assessing wars will have a clear and cogent way of judging whether past or future wars deserve to be considered just or unjust — by which Biggar means morally justified or unjustified. That's one reason why Biggar's book deserves a wide and responsive readership.

Here is another: Precisely by doing his job so thoroughly and elegantly, Biggar inadvertently demonstrates more fully than any previous author that just war thinking, even at its very best, is an intellectual, moral, and theological fraud.

Okay, it's not completely fraudulent. The attempt to establish criteria for judging conduct within a war that's already been declared ( ius in bello ) has had a morally salutary influence on how the U.S. military, for example, conducts itself in battle. The Pentagon now works very hard to ensure that, in any given mission, our military uses no more force than is necessary to vindicate the cause and that it refrains from intentionally killing civilians. That we now expect our armed forces to abide by these rules of war — and judge other states severely when their soldiers fail to do the same — is unquestioningly a good thing. And it's a development to which we owe a debt of gratitude to those who have worked to revive just war thinking, adapting its premodern moral calculus for the age of total war.

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But that's not where most of the intellectual action is found among those seeking to rehabilitate just war thinking today. That action is focused on the criteria for determining when it's just to go to war in the first place ( ius ad bellum ). This is certainly what Biggar, a professor of moral and pastoral theology at Christ Church, Oxford, cares about. And it is what makes just war thinking so very appealing to foreign policy hawks of various stripes — neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, and realists who define American national interests very broadly.

This is also what makes just war thinking a scam. To see why, consider the six criteria just war theorists, including Biggar, use to determine when a war is morally justified. The war must be undertaken with the intention of establishing a just peace. It must be defensive. It must be aimed at protecting the innocent against unjust aggression. It must have a reasonable chance of success. It must be declared and waged by a competent governing authority. And it must be undertaken as a last resort. If the war meets these six criteria, it can be considered morally justified.

Let's leave aside the question of whether such a judgment should be considered Christian. (I will examine that in a subsequent column.) Here I'm mainly interested in a narrower issue: Is there any realistic scenario in which, judged by these criteria, the 21st-century United States would start and wage a war that it didn't consider just?

I submit that the answer is an unequivocal no. We always have a moral rationale for undertaking military action. We always consider our actions defensive (even if the aggression hasn't happened yet) and aimed at protecting the innocent. We always think we have a reasonable chance of success. We always consider ourselves to be a competent authority. And we always claim to have waited as long as possible to act.

If Americans were the rapacious marauders Noam Chomsky claims we are — if, for example, we were contemplating an invasion of Canada to annex the tar sands oil fields for our own use — then ad bellum criteria might be a useful means of rendering judgment of our actions, reining them in, and directing them toward more moral ends. (Maybe Biggar's publisher should send a gratis copy of his book to Vladimir Putin.) But of course the United States doesn't behave that way. We're inclined to start or join wars ( lots and lots of them) for the loftiest of reasons. Given this fact, ad bellum considerations primarily provide an additional moral and theological imprimatur for actions we would be inclined to do anyway .

The U.S.'s default setting is to careen toward conflict, but Biggar believes it's necessary to step harder on the gas because he fears that a "presumption against war" has taken hold in the Western world. (Reading his book, you'd think that the foreign policy establishments of the U.S. and U.K. were dominated by pacifists.) In Biggar's view, this presumption focuses too single-mindedly on the "terrible evils" wrought by war while downplaying the fact that not going to war permits evils of its own.

True enough: evil arises from both acts of commission and acts of omission.

There are just two problems.

First, as I've argued before , states have different moral obligations than individuals. When an individual refuses to come to the aid of a victim of injustice, we rightly judge him harshly for failing to fulfill his moral duty. But the primary and overriding duty of a government is to uphold the nation's common good and defend its citizens against external harm or attack. If that sounds selfish, that's because it is. Our government's highest duty is to us . It can have no duty to the citizens of another nation.

Second, to insist that policymakers base the decision about whether to go to war on the supposition that a failure to act will result in worse moral atrocities than if they do act is to place a black box of uncertainty at the core of deliberation. And that can lead to massive blunders, as we saw very vividly in the arguments leading up to the start of the Iraq War in 2003 — arguments that Biggar exhaustively reconstructs in an unfortunate 69-page chapter that ends with him pronouncing that, all things considered, the war was morally justified.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and simply declare that any moral calculus that gives such a result is effectively worthless. One would think that at this late date it would be unnecessary to list the reasons why. But apparently not. Here, then, are merely a few, using Biggar's own just war criteria as a method of evaluation.

1. There was no atrocity underway in Iraq during the spring of 2003, and so there were no innocents to protect from unjust aggression. (Unless, of course, we expand the term "atrocity" to include the injustices endured by everyone living under a tyrant, in which case the list of just wars would be very long indeed.)

2. As Saddam Hussein's actions during the 1991 Gulf War made clear, he was deterrable . (The fact that after the 2003 invasion he was found to possess no weapons of mass destruction provides further, retrospective justification of this view.) This means that war was not undertaken as a last resort.

3. The fact that he was deterrable and possessed no weapons of mass destruction means that he posed no significant threat to us or our allies. This means that the war was not defensive.

4. Estimates of violent deaths in Iraq as a direct or indirect result of the invasion and occupation of the country range from just over 100,000 to more than 1 million. Those deaths continue , by the way, right down to the present . Even if we side with the lower estimates and assume roughly 100,000 civilian deaths, there is no plausible scenario in which anywhere close to that number of people would have been killed if we had left Saddam Hussein in power. So much for evils of omission.

A final consideration. Americans sometimes worry about the risks and costs involved in the United States acting as the world's policeman. But what advocates of just war reasoning have in mind is far more sweeping. They would empower the U.S. (along with the U.K. and any other nation willing to pitch in — remember the "coalition of the willing"?) to serve as nothing less than the world's moral judge, jury, and executioner, meting out punishment for transgressions of justice. (Read Biggar on how war can and should have a "punitive" dimension.)

This is an extremely bad idea. Americans are already too inclined to believe in their own righteousness. Their tendency toward what Alexis de Tocqueville called "the perpetual utterance of self-applause" often leads them to make foolish mistakes. They certainly don't need theologians telling them that their good intentions entitle them, over the inevitable objections of billions of their would-be subjects, to appoint themselves the world's benevolent despot.

Nothing good can come of that.

In a future column, I will examine the religious sources of just war thinking and ask whether it deserves to be considered Christian at all.

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Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com . He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test .

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Just War Theory and the Ethics of Armed Conflict

Humans have waged wars for millennia, but is war ever justified? Theorists provide some answers.

September 1, 1939. Hitler launches a blitzkrieg against Poland. From sea and air, Germany bombs everything, including strategic targets like forts, munition dumps, and railroad lines, to civilians in passenger trains, buildings, and on the streets. So begins World War II.

Hitler claimed Germany’s action was justified. Regaining territory lost in the armistice agreement ending World War I and responding to Poland’s alleged persecution of Volksdeutschen – ethnic Germans – were the ostensible reasons for Germany’s unprovoked attack. (If this sounds rather like Vladimir Putin’s rationalization for invading Ukraine, well, it does. More on that later.) Even if true, would those reasons warrant attacking another country, with or without an official declaration of war?

German planes fly over Poland. (Source: U.S. Department of Defense)

August 6, 1945. U.S. President Harry Truman orders a single bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Dubbed “Little Boy,” the more than 9,000-pound atom bomb immediately annihilates approximately 80,000 people. Tens of thousands more die in the aftermath, and the long-term effects are still imprecisely understood. 

Some claim that Truman’s decision saved countless more lives than were wiped out in Hiroshima (and, three days later, in Nagasaki). The actions, they conclude, were justified. But were they?

To think about this question, let’s look at just war theory and the criteria that thinkers use to assess the justifications for military conflict.

For more on the human cost of war, watch on  The Blitz: Britain on Fire  MagellanTV.

Moral Use of Force Depends on Whom You Ask

Whether on the playground or in the global arena, bullies are roundly condemned. Part of the reason may be our general sense that might just doesn’t make right. If you want the power to do what you want when you want, without having to answer to anyone or anything, you think rules don’t apply to you – except the rule that says doing whatever it takes to get power is acceptable. Getting what you want is the first and last rule of conduct. Scaled to countries, this attitude is the basis of the delusion of grandeur in which people like Hitler lived.

Responding to an unprovoked attack – self-defense – is arguably the most justifiable reason to go to war. 

Of course, you might genuinely believe that what you think is good for you is also good for others – you may not be entirely self-serving. Even so, it’s not a sufficient justification to encroach on another’s autonomy or sovereignty.

Nevertheless, it’s thinking like this that led to the expansion of numerous empires from ancient times through the 20th century. For example, when the early Christian church spread across the Roman Empire, and later throughout Europe, no one was worried about whether or not subduing and colonizing pagans was a massive overreach. No, these worshippers of the Lamb of God were convinced of the righteousness of their cause.

But are there more persuasive arguments to be made in a rational consideration of the decision to go to war? People who have thought long and hard about the subject have a framework for such a grave decision: They call it just war theory.

Is War Ever Justified?

Just war theory lays out the criteria for declaring, waging, and dealing with the aftermath of war. Such theories generally focus on four main classifications:

•   Jus ad bellum , the Latin for “justice of war”; 
• Jus in bello , which translates to “justice in war”;
• Jus ex bello , or jus terminatio , for “justice in termination”; and
• Jus post bellum , or “justice after war.” 

Let’s focus our attention on the first two. Is war always, sometimes, or never wrong? Most of us would say that war is sometimes wrong or, contrarily, that war is sometimes right. You might be a pacifist, however, and declare that war is always wrong. Alternatively, you might take the view that wars are never wrong, at least insofar as you believe war is an inevitable feature of survival.

February 24, 2022. Russian president Vladimir Putin launches an all-out invasion of Ukraine. The justifications for the so-called “special military operation” include the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine’s government, and the “liberation” of Ukraine’s Donbas region . Moreover, in Putin’s view, Ukraine and Russia are, historically, “one people.” On this view, consequently, Ukraine does not have a legitimate claim to sovereignty.

Putin also insisted that the West – specifically, the United States and other member countries in NATO – threatened Russia’s very existence. In order to ensure its security, Putin asserted, Ukraine must be neutral. Neutrality, in turn, had to be enforced by violence. 

More than 100 million people were killed in wars in the 20 th century alone.

The international response was swift and decisive. NATO, for example, condemned the invasion. It declared Ukraine “an independent, peaceful and democratic country” that had done nothing to provoke Russia’s attack, calling it “unjustified.” And, backing up its words, the alliance opened up a pipeline of lethal weapons to Ukraine. So, who’s right – or are both wrong?

The Justifications for War

Theorists generally agree on six principles for justifying war: 

• The cause must be just: Going to war aims to avoid (greater) harm.
• The intention must be right: The cause of war is the goal, rather than a pretext for some other goal.
• The authority must be legitimate: The war is fought by the entity that has the proper authority to declare and wage war.
• There is a reasonable prospect of success: The war is likely to achieve its aim.
• There is proportionality of goods and bads: The moral goods of the war outweigh the moral bads.
• War is a last resort: The war is necessary; there are no other options for achieving the just cause.

Presumably, all six criteria ought to be met before waging war. That said, working out the details may quickly lead one into the moral weeds. Recall, for example, the discussion of people who genuinely believe they must fight the good fight. Let’s suppose that Vladimir Putin truly believes that Russia would eventually be annihilated if he hadn’t ordered the pre-emptive attack on Ukraine. Going down the list above, it’s not hard to see that he would also believe that Russia would be successful, therefore that the ultimate benefit to Russia outweighs the costs to the Ukrainians. 

U.S. soldiers arrive in Germany in support of NATO allies, 2022. (Source: U.S. Department of Defense)

Notice also that Putin could claim the other criteria are satisfied. If we disagree, however, Putin simply ticking off each item in the list isn’t sufficient for war. There are judgments to be made about what counts as a good reason in the matter at hand. 

For all its sincerity, a belief may be wrong. In other words, thinking doesn’t make it so, anymore than might makes right. Even a biased but rational observer could see that Hitler and Putin did not do everything in their power to prevent war. Then again, when they rise to power, megalomaniacs cut the bonds of justification, thereby untethering action from reason.

Does Self-Defense Always Justify War?

Megalomaniacs or not, leaders make errors. It is now generally agreed that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake, not adequately justified by at least half – let alone all – of the principles that justify war. For example, what began as self-defense – a search for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan – morphed into the U.S. argument, presented at the United Nations in 2003, that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons.

Even if not the exclusive reason for invading Iraq, that argument was a significant justification. A protracted war nevertheless followed after and, along with it, grossly unacceptable conduct, such as the torture and abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

On the other hand, self-defense, as when one nation assaults another’s territory, is arguably the most obvious just cause. Assisting another country against an oppressive regime or invasion may also be just causes of war. If that’s the case, however, we might wonder why there isn’t a moral imperative to act every time a violation occurs. 

For example, the United States and other countries did not directly intervene when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad violently crushed pro-democratic demonstrations, killing thousands of his fellow citizens. Why not? Why didn’t the United States and other countries intervene in the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in 1994, during the civil war in Rwanda? Why didn’t the United States enter World War II before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, more than two years after Hitler invaded Poland, and long after it was clear that Hitler was planning mass genocide?

These questions reveal the distinction among perceived or actual national self-interest, morality, and the activity of war. While morality may demand intervention, for example, and while using military might to aid others may be justified, political interests may discourage action , as happened in the U.S. during the first years of World War II. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, substantial numbers of citizens and their Congressional representatives were dead-set against involvement in the war; it took that disaster to overcome their opposition.

The Conduct of a Just War

Let’s grant that war is at least sometimes justified. What can be said about the conduct of war? In other words, once a war breaks out, are there specific moral rules governing its conduct? 

Just war theorists recognize six basic rules of conduct, broken out from three principles found in international law:

• A justly conducted war obeys international laws on prohibited weapons (e.g., biological and chemical).
• Soldiers in a justly conducted war use their sanctioned weapons against legitimate targets (those involved in the rights-violating harm), which means they must never target civilians.
• Soldiers in a justly conducted war use only proportionate force, i.e., the force required to achieve specified military ends.
• POWs must be treated humanely in a just war. The Geneva Conventions articulate “benevolent” quarantine.
• Soldiers in a just war must never use methods or weapons that are mala in se (evil in themselves). Mass rape and ethnic cleansing are examples of prohibited methods, and biological weapons are an example of prohibited weapons. 
• States involved in a just war must not seek reprisals that violate any requirement of conduct in a just war. When one state violates one or more requirements, and another state seeks reprisals in kind, both sides violate just war conduct.

By its very nature, war is violent, destructive, and deadly. Informal and formal rules of war existed, nevertheless, as far back as civilizations like the ancient Greeks, Babylonians, Israelites, and Chinese. But why? Why respect boundaries if physical violence is the means to the stated end? It sounds vaguely reminiscent of the inconsistency in the expression, “honor amongst thieves.” American revolutionaries used guerilla tactics against the British to notably effective ends, hardly concerned about whether or not the British would say such conduct was “not on.” 

F4F-4 Wildcat fighter taking off from the USS Yorktown, Battle of Midway, June 4, 1942. (Source: U.S. Department of Defense)

You might object that we agree to rules in order to protect people not directly involved in war. The point of war is to quash the enemy. If the titular head of the enemy is the government, it would seem that military decapitation is the means to vanquish that enemy, not annihilate non-combatants. But does doing so merely push the question back? Out-and-out chaos, “scorched earth,” or “shock and awe” – the sort of overwhelming violence that obviates any response – would seem to be the most effective approach. And that would necessitate civilian casualties. 

In war, don’t we revert to a sort of pre-societal state of nature, such as the one described in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan ? In his thought experiment, Hobbes claimed that the state of nature is a ‘war of all against all,’ a condition in which individuals are totally free and equal, but also without laws. Peace is achieved by entering into a social contract that gives power to a sovereign, such as a king or a duly constituted democratic government.

Individuals want security and peace. So do nations. Hence, the sorts of international agreements that are codified into law or that form alliances. Some agreements detail justifications for going to, and conducting war. Which brings us back to where we began when we asked why anyone would agree to rules guiding the conduct of war. And while we’re at it, we should revisit the rule against civilian targets. If nothing else, Hitler’s decision to bomb civilian targets in Poland, Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, and Putin’s decision to bomb schools, apartments, and maternity wards should be sufficient evidence that some wartime activity is not so very distinct from ordinary criminal conduct.

The Future of Just Wars

Wars will doubtless plague us as long as we humans run the show on planet Earth. For all our advancements in the sciences, for all our beautiful works of art, and for all our lofty ideals, many of our fellow human beings remain violent and predatory creatures. There will likely always be a version of the dictator, just as there will likely always be a version of the serial killer, the domestic abuser, and the mass murderer. Nations will continue to come to other countries’ aid – or plead for help themselves – just as they will often ignore injustices elsewhere and at other times. Would the U.S. and NATO have helped Ukraine if it weren’t in Europe and populated by folks who “look like us”? 

NATO’s geographical proximity to Russia raises the specter of danger for member countries, and Europeans generally, in a way that a distant conflict on another continent would not. So, we can’t fault the response where that is the motivation. On the other hand, if we believe unprovoked attacks are unjustified and unacceptable wherever they occur, then something has gone morally awry when countries or alliances like NATO are silent.

Mia Wood is a professor of philosophy at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California, and an adjunct instructor at various institutions in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She is also a freelance writer interested in the intersection of philosophy and everything else. She lives in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

Title image: Residential building in Borodianka settlement (Kyiv Oblast of Ukraine) on Tsentralna Street, 359, after Russian bombing in the morning of March 2nd, 2022 via  Wikimedia .

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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The Ethics of War: Essays

Saba Bazargan-Forward and Samuel C. Rickless (eds.), The Ethics of War: Essays , Oxford University Press, 2017, 304pp., $78.00, ISBN 9780199376148.

Reviewed by Uwe Steinhoff, University of Hong Kong

On the back cover the book is advertised as "The authoritative anthology on the ethics and law of war." This might be an overstatement. While the best-edited volumes on just war theory focus on a particular issue (for instance, preventive war, humanitarian intervention, or legitimate authority), this volume does not really form a coherent whole.

In fact, Nancy Sherman's "Moral Recovery After War" has very little to do with either the laws or the ethics of war, dealing instead, as she herself acknowledges, with "philosophical moral psychology" (244). Moreover, the contributions by Adil Ahmad Haque on the principle of discrimination, of Kai Draper on the doctrine of double effect, and of Larry May on the rights of soldiers have appeared in very similar if not almost identical versions in other publications by these authors (as chapters of their books in the first two cases, and as a contribution to another edited volume in the latter case.) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these three chapters (on the contrary, all are intelligent contributions). But in my view, such extensive recycling would only be justified if the three chapters had either established themselves as classics, which is certainly not the case given that these publications are very recent, or would clearly contribute to an "authoritative" or at least representative picture of the ethics of war. However, I see no indication for this. In any case, given that these chapters have appeared in similar form elsewhere, I will not discuss them further here. Furthermore, I only mention in passing Andrew Altman's very good chapter on the law and morality of targeted killing via drones (which together with Draper's and Haque's contributions is grouped in the laws of war section of the book.) Instead, I focus on the remaining philosophical contributions.

These contributions, according to the editors, belong to a new, allegedly "revisionist" school of just war theory: "Since the writing of the scholastics and jurists of the late Renaissance and Early Modern periods . . . two precepts have underwritten accounts of the morality of war," namely, that war is a "relation not between individuals but between states" and that "the rules governing conduct in war should proceed independently of whether the war fought is just or unjust" (xi). Bazargan-Forward and Rickless provide no textual evidence in support of these claims. This is not surprising as these claims -- although they have for some time now been the basis of self-proclaimed "revisionism -- are simply wrong. [1] Accordingly, the term "revisionism" in this context is a misnomer and should be rejected as misleading. [2] More importantly for present purposes, if the editorial foreword already makes sweeping but mistaken assertions about the just war tradition, then this undermines the volume's claim to be an "authoritative" contribution to this tradition.

Be that as it may, let us have a closer look at some of the individual contributions. Jeff McMahan believes in "liability justifications" for the infliction of harm. That is, he thinks that a person's being liable to the infliction of a certain harm (which means that she has forfeited the right that the harm not be inflicted) provides a defeasible justification for inflicting this harm on her. [3] Given that he also believes that mere moral responsibility -- which need not amount to culpability -- for a threat of unjust harm is the basis of liability to defensive harm, he faces the problem that a defender would, on his account, be justified in killing an infinite number of responsible but morally entirely innocent threats (like drivers who foresaw that driving would impose a tiny risk of harm on pedestrians, and then, through no fault of their own, lose control over their cars and pose a substantial threat to a pedestrian). McMahan's solution to this problem is to suggest a third kind of proportionality. In the past, he has already distinguished between "wide proportionality" and "narrow proportionality," where the former refers to harms inflicted on threats or aggressors, and the latter to harms inflicted on bystanders. Yet these conceptual innovations are unnecessary. The actual distinction, at least in law, is not between different kinds of proportionality, but between different justifications: the self-defense justification on the one hand, and the necessity or choice of evil justification on the other hand. In any case, McMahan now suggests solving the problem by an appeal to " proportionality in the aggregate " (25, emphasis in the original). However, this solution seems to be entirely ad hoc and to rely solely on McMahan's intuitions, without any theoretical foundation or further explanation.

This is precisely David Rodin's charge against McMahan's approach (45). Rodin's own solution to the problem involves what he calls a "lesser evil obligation" (28). Bear in mind that, as already mentioned, a liability justification is supposed to be defeasible . It is, for example, defeasible if acting on the liability justification would have consequences that are bad enough to override the justification. Regarding such consequences, Rodin states that "harm inflicted on a liable person is still an evil from an impersonal view" (36). Accordingly, if the number of liable persons is large enough, the overall evil that would be produced by acting on the liberty to kill all these persons can override this liberty -- thus producing an all-things-considered lesser evil obligation not to do what one has a Hohfeldian liberty to do. Unfortunately, the quite correct idea that harming a person constitutes an evil is incompatible with the very idea of a liability justification: if persons have intrinsic value, then the mere fact that they have forfeited a right not to be harmed does not yet provide a justification to harm them. [4] Your lacking a Hohfeldian right that I not kill you provides me with a Hohfeldian liberty to kill you, but it does not yet provide me with a justification to kill you (and to thereby destroy something of value). [5]

As an aside, while Rodin, to his credit, does not claim that the concept of a lesser evil obligation is a novelty, the editors make this claim in his stead (xiii). Yet, the idea that a "right bearer is all things considered obligated to behave in a certain way toward a person despite the fact that they have the right with respect to that party to behave otherwise" (33) is most definitely not novel at all; it has been known in the German legal literature for at least 200 years. [6] Anglo-Saxon legal scholars are acquainted with this idea too.

Richard Arneson sets out to resolve what Seth Lazar has called "the responsibility dilemma." Yet he apparently misunderstands what solving the dilemma means. Lazar rejects outright McMahan's responsibility account of liability (that is Lazar's external criticism) but makes it very clear that his "critique of McMahan's argument" in terms of the responsibility dilemma "is internal" to that account. [7] The challenge is basically that McMahan's account makes either too many civilians or too few combatants liable to attack. Accordingly, a solution would require a demonstration that McMahan's responsibility account is able to escape the dilemma. [8] Offering a completely different account of liability, in contrast, does not so much solve the dilemma as change the subject. This, however, is precisely what Arneson does. In fact, he offers two different accounts of liability (which are supposed to interact with each other.) . First, he "proposes abandoning" the idea that a right can be overridden although it is still present; that is, he seems to reject the idea that non-liable persons can be permissibly harmed. Instead, he states: "For any moral right not to be treated in certain ways, the right gives way if the ratio of the badness to nonrightholders if the right is not acted against to the badness to rightholders if the right is acted against is sufficiently favorable" (70). In other words, the availability of a lesser evil justification would not give one a justification to override existing rights. Instead, it would show that the harm inflicted on the basis of the lesser-evil justification does not infringe any rights in the first place -- the rights have "given way." This would mean that a war waged in accordance with a lesser-evil justification violates no one's rights, not even the rights of all the innocent people, including children, who have been killed, burned, and mutilated. While this might indeed be a way to avoid contingent pacifism, as Arneson is determined to do, it also leads to not taking rights seriously. Arneson's second account of liability is "fault forfeits first" (85). Since I demonstrate elsewhere that this account has entirely counter-intuitive implications and justifies all kinds of acts that Western jurisdictions quite reasonably qualify as murder, [9] I will not go into it further here. [10]

Victor Tadros's aim is "to show that there are circumstances in which duress can justify killing a person where that killing would otherwise be wrong" (115). He claims: "Duress justifies [an act v ] where X's [the threatener's] threat is sufficiently credible and grave to render it permissible for D to v ." (96) However, it should be quite obvious that it is not duress that is providing a justification here, but the threat's being sufficiently credible and grave to render the act permissible. That is, the actual justification is a lesser-evil justification. So all that Tadros shows is that acts committed under duress can sometimes be justified with a lesser-evil justification. However, first, that is nothing new, and second, the same can be said about acts committed against payment. In short, there is no such thing as a separate and independent "duress justification," just as there is no separate and independent "monetary-reward justification."

Mattias Iser tries to refute Richard Norman's and David Rodin's claim that it is always disproportionate to kill in defense of civil and political rights. (208) He does this in the context of revolutionary violence. However, it would appear that a refutation of the claim would be applicable to both national self-defense (which is the context in which the claim is usually discussed) and revolution. In other words, it is unclear what difference the reference to revolution is supposed to make. In any case, Iser puts heavy emphasis on "respect" and its "expression," and he claims that although individual attacks may "express utter disrespect, they can never humiliate as deeply as an unjust, for example racist, basic structure" (216). Thus, it seems that Iser's strategy is to accept -- at least for the sake of argument -- Norman's and Rodin's claims about individual self-defense, [11] but then to argue that much more is at stake in the case of revolution against an unjust regime. However, it seems to me that Iser is confusing things here. If according to the state's basic structure I have no right to vote, then the state will constantly keep me from voting. It is not so much that the state thereby "expresses" more "disrespect" than an individual who keeps me from voting on a single occasion; rather, the difference lies in constantly being kept from voting on the one hand and occasionally being kept from voting on the other. Moreover, if the state denies everyone the right to vote, it denies them democracy . In contrast, an individual who falsely imprisons me on election day does not deny me democracy. [12] Thus, the material harms are very different, and it is quite reasonable to suppose that this difference, not the expression of disrespect, is doing most of the work. To show that Iser might severely overestimate the evil that is the expression of disrespect, note that merely attempted murder expresses as much disrespect as successful murder, while accidental (non-negligent and non-reckless) killing expresses no disrespect at all. It is safe to assume that people would vastly prefer the former to the latter, and thus are far more concerned with material harm than with expressions of disrespect. After all, people can quite literally live with attempted murder. They cannot live with accidental death.

François Tanguay-Renaud examines the question whether there could be something like corporate state liability to attack. He thinks that the idea is intelligible but that such liability might be "of very limited relevance to the morality of war" (137). I am even more skeptical the Tanguay-Renaud, but his exploration of the question is thoughtful, cautious, and interesting.

Finally, Seth Lazar suggests new ways of structuring just war theory. He suggests that what he calls "Command Ethics" serves to "govern the morality of war as a whole," while "Combatant Ethics governs the morality of specific actions" (231). He rejects the suggestion that this distinction corresponds to the familiar distinction of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, between "analysis of the war as a whole and of individual actions and operations that compose it," as "confused" (231-232). His reasons for this assessment are, first, that "each individual combatant must also consider whether his resort to war is justified," and second, that "we should not confine Command Ethics to focusing only on the resort to war" (323). However, both reasons are unconvincing. The first is unconvincing because an individual combatant's jus in bello consideration of whether his acts of participation in the war are justified is clearly different from an individual combatant's jus ad bellum consideration of whether the collective war effort as a whole is justified. The second is unconvincing because the view that jus ad bellum concerns only the resort to war but not the question as to whether war should be continued is mistaken. [13] Lazar also proposes distinguishing "between the positive justifying reasons that count in favor of fighting, and the constraints that must either be satisfied or overridden for fighting to be permissible" (242). There is nothing wrong with this distinction, but it is unclear why it should affect the structure of just war theory. In any case, once one gives up the obsessive focus on liability common among self-proclaimed "revisionists" and avoids the misleading talk of "liability justifications," one might come to realize that any actual moral or legal justification necessarily comprises both elements.

This volume is not all bad, and some of the contributions are good, but on the whole it leaves much to be desired. It certainly is not "authoritative."

[1] As regards the (mistaken) claim that traditional just war theory saw war as a relation between states, see Gregory M. Reichberg, " Historiography of Just War Theory, " in Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (Oxford University Press, 2015), Oxford Handbooks Online: DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943418.013.18, section 1; Daniel Schwartz, " Late Scholastic Just War Theory, " in Lazar and Frowe, op. cit. , DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943418.013.13, section 2.3; Uwe Steinhoff, " Doing Away with ‘Legitimate Authority,’ " Journal of Military Ethics , forthcoming. As regards the alleged independence of jus ad bellum and jus in bello in the tradition and the related claim that it endorses a " moral equality of combatants " – it should by now be clear that these charges against the tradition are flatly wrong (the claim to be " revisionist " seems to stem from a complete misunderstanding of the tradition). For proof, see, for instance, Cheyney Ryan, " Democratic Duty and the Moral Dilemmas of Soldiers, " Ethics 122 (2011), pp. 10-42, at 13-18; Uwe Steinhoff, " Rights, Liability, and the Moral Equality of Combatants, " Journal of Ethics 13 (2012), pp. 339-366, section 2; Gregory M. Reichberg, " The Moral Equality of Combatants – A Doctrine in Classical Just War Theory? A Response to Graham Parsons, " Journal of Military Ethics 12(2) (2013), pp. 181-194. All the texts just referenced do provide ample textual evidence for their claims.

[2] Seth Lazar suggests that the " revisionists" at least revise Walzer, and that one becomes revisionist by revising something. See http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2015/05/ethics-discussions-at-pea-soup-cecile-fabres-war-exit-with-critical-precis-by-helen-frowe.html . By the same logic, Walzer would also be a revisionist (he revised a lot), and virtually all present-day just war theorists deviate from Walzer in one way or the other (so who would be a non-revisionist?). Also, again by the same logic, all just war theorists would also be conservative at the same time – because they conserve something .

[3] In my view, liability is one thing and justification another. Liability provides no justification at all, neither defeasible nor otherwise. See Uwe Steinhoff, "Self-Defense as Claim Right, Liberty, and Act-Specific Agent-Relative Prerogative," Law and Philosophy 35(2) (2016), pp. 193-209.

[4] See ibid.

[5] To be sure, this problem could be "solved" by redefining liability in such a way that one can only be liable to harm that is inflicted on one for a certain reason. McMahan indeed often talks in this way: "people can be liable to harm only in relation to a goal …" See Killing in War (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9. However, first, stipulative definitions do not solve substantive moral questions. Second, it is unclear how such a reason-dependent account of liability squares with McMahan's (and Rodin's, for that matter) simultaneously "objectivist," "fact-relative" account of liability. McMahan says that "justification provides exemption from liability only when it is objective ," and something is "objectively … justifiable when what explains its … justifiability are facts that are independent of the agent's beliefs" (ibid., p. 43). Since when, however, are an agent’s goals "facts that are independent of the agent’s beliefs"? McMahan’s account of liability seems to be incoherent: there is no objective and reason-dependent “liability justification” for harming someone – you simply cannot have it both ways.

[6] The now common term Rechtsmißbrauch (rights abuse) was introduced into the German legal literature more than 80 years ago, but the concept is at least 200 years old; in fact, some even trace it back to Roman Law. See Elke Widmann, "Der Rechtsmissbrauch im Markenrecht," dissertation, available at http://kops.unikonstanz.de/handle/123456789/3384;jsessionid=E5CC60B87151CA8B1C77FD3777EC6D24 . Incidentally, I mentioned this idea in a footnote in "Rights, Liability, and the Moral Equality of Combatants", p. 457, n. 15. Elsewhere I talk of a "necessity prohibition," see Uwe Steinhoff, "Shortcomings of and Alternatives to the Rights-Forfeiture Theory of Justified Self-Defense and Punishment," available at https://philpapers.org/rec/STESOA-5 . I took myself to be stating the obvious there, not to be "add[ing] an important resource to the reductive individualist's conceptual arsenal," as Bazargan-Forward and Rickless would have it (xiii).

[7] Seth Lazar, "The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War: A Review Essay," Philosophy and Public Affairs 38(2) (2010), pp. 180-213, at 189.

[8] McMahan tried on several occasions to show this – unsuccessfully, in my view. Seth Lazar's most recent reply to such attempts looks to me like a coup de grâce. See Lazar's "Liability and the Ethics of War: A Response to Strawser and McMahan," in Christian Coons and Michael Weber, The Ethics of Self-Defense (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 292-304.

[9] See Uwe Steinhoff, "Replies," San Diego Law Review, forthcoming (see the part on Arneson).

[10] Incidentally, Arneson's account is very similar to Gerhard Øverland's in "Moral Taint: On the Transfer of the Implications of Moral Culpability," Journal of Applied Philosophy 28(2) (2011), pp. 122-136 (but Øverland is somewhat more cautious than Arneson). Arneson does not mention Øverland.

[11] There is actually no reason to do so. See Uwe Steinhoff, "Rodin on Self-Defense and the 'Myth' of National Self-Defense: A Refutation", Philosophia (2013), pp. 1017-1036; "Proportionality in Self-Defense," Journal of Ethics 21(3) (2017), pp. 263-289. Accordingly, there are more straightforward ways of refuting Norman's and Rodin's "bloodless invasion" (or a corresponding "bloodless tyranny") argument than Iser's appeal to the "expression of disrespect."

[12] Compare Helen Frowe, Defensive Killing (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 143-145.

[13] See Uwe Steinhoff, "Just Cause and the Continuous Application of Jus ad Bellum ," in Larry May, Shannon Elizabeth Fyfe, and Eric Joseph Ritter (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook on Just War Theory (Cambridge, forthcoming).

Beyond Just War pp 173–186 Cite as

Is War Ever Justified?

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I have now presented the philosophy of co-existence as an alternative to just war theory, and I have also applied the philosophy of co-existence to some recent ethical challenges to the morality of war. In concluding this book, I will try again to explain where the new ethics of war that I have laid out stands in comparison with pacifism and just war theory. For I recognize that there are pacifists who see my arguments in this book as support for their view that war is never justified. And there are just war theorists who will see me as justifying war, but with more restrictive conditions. In responding to such interpretations, I will also be able to show the reader how the philosophy of co-existence combines the good points of both pacifism and just war theory, while avoiding their problems.

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Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 254.

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Walzer, “Emergency Ethics” in Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 40.

Brian Orend, “Is There a Supreme Emergency Exemption?” in Just War Theory: A Reappraisal , ed. Mark Evans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 148.

Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth: The Moral Illusions of War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).

Martin L. Cook, “Michael Walzer’s Concept of ‘Supreme Emergency’,” Journal of Military Ethics 6 (2007), p. 142, makes similar points about the problem of “contrary-to-fact speculation about how the world might have evolved without area bombing of German cities.” Orend, “Is There a Supreme Emergency Exemption?” p. 141, mentions that Britain “had the advantage of geography.”

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Tragic heroes in Greek tragedy illustrate the appropriateness of paying for doing evils, even when the lesser evil is chosen. For instance, Agamemnon paid a price for choosing to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia so that the Greek fleet could sail off to fight the Trojans, as commanded by Zeus. Thus, I disagree with Daniel Statman, “Moral Tragedies, Supreme Emergencies and National-Defense,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (2006), p. 314, who criticizes Orend by saying: “The fact that all available options are morally wrong does not mean that they are equally wrong, and when they are not, then the agent is culpable for failing to choose the one that is less wrong” (emphasis in original). He fails to appreciate that in a tragic choice, one is wrong and culpable even when one chooses the lesser evil.

Aristotle’s methodology for doing virtue ethics is to use the appearances ( phainomena ), including what is commonly believed ( endoxa ), as the starting points and the basis for moral knowledge. See Martha C. Nussbaum, “Saving Aristotle’s Appearances” in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), who contrasts Aristotle with Plato who attempts to find a God’s eye viewpoint for deciding on the truth.

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The Ethics of War: Essays

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Some of the most basic assumptions of Just War theory have been dismantled in a barrage of criticism and analysis in the first dozen years of the twenty-first century. The Ethics of War continues and pushes past this trend. This anthology is an authoritative treatment of the ethics and law of war by eminent scholars who first challenged the orthodoxy of Just War theory, as well as by “second-wave” revisionists. The twelve original essays span both foundational and topical issues in the ethics of war, including an investigation of whether there is a “greater-good” obligation that parallels the canonical lesser evil justification in war, the conditions under which citizens can wage war against their own government, whether there is a limit to the number of combatants on the unjust side who can be permissibly killed, whether the justice of the cause for which combatants fight affects the moral permissibility of fighting, whether duress ever justifies killing in war, the role that collective liability plays in the ethics of war, whether targeted killing is morally and legally permissible, the morality of legal prohibitions on the use of indiscriminate weapons, the justification for the legal distinction between directly and indirectly harming civilians, whether human rights of unjust combatants are more prohibitive than have been thought, the moral categories and criteria needed to understand the proper justification for ending war, and the role of hope in the moral repair of combatants suffering from PTSD.

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All sections, when war must be the answer.

The case for force

It has been the fault of both pacifism and liberalism in the past that they have ignored the immense burden of inherited evil under which society and civilization labour and have planned an imaginary world for an impossible humanity. We must recognize that we are living in an imperfect world in which human and superhuman forces of evil are at work and so long as those forces affect the political behaviour of mankind there can be no hope of abiding peace. — Christopher Dawson, “The Catholic Attitude to War,” 1937 1  

While the effects of sin abound — greed, dishonesty and corruption, broken relationships and exploitation of persons, pornography and violence — the recognition of individual sinfulness has waned. In its place a disturbing culture of blame and litigiousness has arisen which speaks more of revenge than justice and fails to acknowledge that in every man and woman there is a wound which, in the light of faith, we call original sin. — John Paul II, Address to American Bishops, May 14, 2004

A   calm and reasonable  case can and should be made for the possession and effective use of force in today’s world. It is irresponsible not to plan for the necessity of force in the face of real turmoils and enemies actually present in the world. No talk of peace, justice, truth, or virtue is complete without a clear understanding that certain individuals, movements, and nations must be met with measured force, however much we might prefer to deal with them peacefully or pleasantly. Without force, many will not talk seriously at all, and some not even then. Human, moral, and economic problems are greater today for the lack of adequate military force or, more often, for the failure to use it when necessary.

It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past — a world founded upon faith and understanding — a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish, for freedom, tolerance, and justice. . . . We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem is basically theological, and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, and literature, and all material and cultural developments in the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

W e thought that we had founded a system to prevent wars, especially small ones, in addressing theological and spiritual problems. MacArthur seemed to assume that such a perfect system could be established. But in this he was something of a utopian, not a realist. Since he spoke these words some 60  years ago, we have seen thousands of wars of varying degrees. The spirit and means whereby we believed many small wars could be stopped — the work of converting the whole world to a better “system”— actually resulted in little being done when needed on a scale that would be effective, often a small scale.

I n late spring,  in Baltimore, I walked to the end of Chestnut Street where it meets Joppa Road. On one corner was a large official-looking residence called “Mission Helpers Center.” On both sides of its entrance gate were large blue and white signs that said, “War Is Not the Answer.” These placards recalled many too-simple slogans I have seen in recent years about war, often, like this one apparently, from religious sources: “War is obsolete.” “War is never justified.” “The answer to violence is not more violence.” “War does no good.” “No one wins a war.” “Love, not war.” “Diplomacy, not war.” “Dialogue, not war.” “Stop violence.” “Justice, not war.” “No war is legitimate.” “Everyone loses in war.” “War, Never Again.”

T he most lethal weapons are today turning out to be car bombs and ordinary passenger planes. The problem with nuclear weapons was never the weapons themselves but rather the will and purpose for which they might be used. In the retrospective light of the bombing of the World Trade Center, the series of antiwar documents produced during the 1980 s by American Catholic bishops decrying nuclear war seem almost irrelevant. Such earlier considerations of “absolute weapons” were wholly out of touch with what was to be the problem of defense in the twenty-first century. The fact is, deterrence did work, however reluctant we may be, for ideological reasons, to admit it.

Q: Is there a clash of civilizations . . . ?   A: The Church has defeated communism but is just starting to understand its next challenge — Islamism, which is much worse. The Holy Father has not been able to take up this challenge due to his old age. But the next pope will find himself having to face it . . . .   Q: Some bishops in Italy have allowed chapels to be used as mosques.   A: It will be the Muslims who convert us, not the other way around. Wherever they settle down, sooner or later they end up becoming a leading political force . . . .   Q: Does it make sense to export our democracy to agricultural and sheep-herding societies that make no distinction between religion and politics?   A: No. This is idiotic. Islamic people base their decisions only and exclusively on the umma . They don’t even know what individual rights are.

M y topic here,  however, is not Islam but war. Islam is not the only civilizational problem, and it is not necessarily unified with itself. Western secularist ideology is as absolutist in its own way as Islam. Theorizing that the “terrorists” are merely a side-show, a tiny minority which will naturally pass out of existence, is an easy way out of considering the more basic problem of the civilizational movement and what to do about it. This consideration is based upon the notion that Islam is a confident civilizational movement, suddenly aware, thanks to the judgment of its more radical leaders, of the possibility of continuing its historic mission: spreading the religion by force or other means throughout the world.

The dynamic character of man’s communal life finds its image within the very structure of every act of justice. If the basic act of commutative justice is called “re-stitution,” the very word implies that it is never possible for men to realize an ideal and definitive condition. What it means is, rather, that the fundamental condition of man and his world is provisory, temporary, non-definitive, tentative, as is proved by the patchwork character of all historical activity, and that, consequently, any claim to erect a definitive and unalterable order in this world must of necessity lead to something inhuman. 3

It is arguable that a criminal can always be satisfactorily dealt with without the death penalty. It is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil. The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, of even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil . . . . The question is whether war is the greatest evil in the world, so that any state of affairs, which might result from submission, is certainly preferable. And I do not see any really cogent argument for this view. 6

1 Christopher Dawson, “The Catholic Attitude to War,” Tablet 169 (March 13, 1937).

2 See James V. Schall, “Justice, Brains, and Strength: Machiavelli and Modernity in Political Philosophy,” Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 1-20.

3 Josef Pieper, An Anthology (Ignatius Press, 1989), 63.

4 Herbert Deane, Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (Columbia University Press, 1956), 155.

5 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror (Basic Books, 2003), 168

6 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Macmillan, 1965), 43

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The Five Reasons Wars Happen

Christopher Blattman | 10.14.22

Whether it is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats of nuclear strikes or Chinese belligerence in the Taiwan Strait , the United States seems closer to a great power war than at any time in recent decades. But while the risks are real and the United States must prepare for each of these conflicts, by focusing on the times states fight—and ignoring the times they resolve their conflicts peacefully and prevent escalation—analysts and policymakers risk misjudging our rivals and pursuing the wrong paths to peace.

The fact is that fighting—at all levels from irregular warfare to large-scale combat operations—is ruinous and so nations do their best to avoid open conflict. The costs of war also mean that when they do fight countries have powerful incentives not to escalate and expand those wars—to keep the fighting contained, especially when it could go nuclear. This is one of the most powerful insights from both history and game theory: war is a last resort, and the costlier that war, the harder both sides will work to avoid it.

When analysts forget this fact, not only do they exaggerate the chances of war, they do something much worse: they get the causes all wrong and take the wrong steps to avert the violence.

Imagine intensive care doctors who, deluged with critically ill patients, forgot that humanity’s natural state is good health. That would be demoralizing. But it would also make them terrible at diagnosis and treatment. How could you know what was awry without comparing the healthy to the sick?

And yet, when it comes to war, most of us fall victim to this selection bias, giving most of our attention to the times peace failed. Few write books or news articles about the wars that didn’t happen. Instead, we spend countless hours tracing the threads of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or the two world wars. When we do, it distorts our diagnosis and our treatments. For if we follow these calamitous events back to their root causes and preceding events, we often find a familiar list: bumbling leaders, ancient hatreds, intransigent ideologies, dire poverty, historic injustices, and a huge supply of weapons and impressionable young men. War seems to be their inevitable result.

Unfortunately, this ignores all the instances conflict was avoided. When social scientists look at these peaceful cases, they see a lot of the same preceding conditions—bumblers, hatreds, injustices, poverty, and armaments. All these so-called causes of war are commonplace. Prolonged violence is not. So these are probably not the chief causes of war.

Take World War I. Historians like to explain how Europe’s shortsighted, warmongering, nationalist leaders naively walked their societies into war. It was all a grand miscalculation, this story goes. The foibles of European leaders surely played a role, but to stop the explanation here is to forget all the world wars avoided up to that point. For decades, the exact same leaders had managed great crises without fighting. In the fifteen years before 1914 alone, innumerable continental wars almost—but never—happened: a British-French standoff in a ruined Egyptian outpost in Sudan in 1898; Russia’s capture of Britain’s far eastern ports in 1900; Austria’s seizure of Bosnia in 1908; two wars between the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. A continent-consuming war could have been ignited in any one of these corners of the world. But it was not.

Likewise, it’s common to blame the war in Ukraine overwhelmingly on Putin’s obsessions and delusions. These surely played a role, but to stop here is to stop too soon. We must also pay attention to the conflicts that didn’t happen. For years, Russia cowed other neighbors with varying degrees of persuasion and force, from the subjugation of Belarus to “ peacekeeping ” missions in Kazakhstan. Few of these power contests came to blows. To find the real roots of fighting, analysts need to pay attention to these struggles that stay peaceful.

Enemies Prefer to Loathe One Another in Peace

Fighting is simply bargaining through violence. This is what Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung meant in 1938 when he said , “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.” Mao was echoing the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz who, a century before, reminded us that war is the continuation of politics by other means.

Of course, one of these means is far, far costlier than the other. Two adversaries have a simple choice: split the contested territory or stake in proportion to their relative strength, or go to war and gamble for the shrunken and damaged remains. It’s almost always better to look for compromise. For every war that ever was, a thousand others have been averted through discussion and concession.

Compromise is the rule because, for the most part, groups behave strategically: like players of poker or chess, they’re trying hard to think ahead, discern their opponents’ strength and plans, and choose their actions based on what they expect their opponents to do. They are not perfect. They make mistakes or lack information. But they have huge incentives to do their best.

This is the essential way to think about warfare: not as some base impulse or inevitability, but as the unusual and errant breakdown of incredibly powerful incentives for peace. Something had to interrupt the normal incentives for compromise, pushing opponents from normal politics, polarized and contentious, to bargaining through bloodshed.

This gives us a fresh perspective on war. If fighting is rare because it is ruinous, then every answer to why we fight is simple: a society or its leaders ignored the costs (or were willing to pay them). And while there is a reason for every war and a war for every reason, there are only so many logical ways societies overlook the costs of war—five, to be exact. From gang wars to ethnic violence, and from civil conflicts to world wars, the same five reasons underlie conflict at every level: war happens when a society or its leader is unaccountable, ideological, uncertain, biased, or unreliable.

Five Reasons for War

Consider Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What do these five tell us about why peace broke down?

1. Unaccountable. A personalized autocrat , Putin doesn’t have to weigh the interests of his soldiers and citizens. He can pursue whatever course helps him preserve his regime’s control. When leaders go unchecked and are unaccountable to their people, they can ignore the costs of fighting that ordinary people bear. Instead, rulers can pursue their own agendas. That is why dictators are more prone to war .

2. Ideological. Consider Putin again. Most accounts of the current war dwell on his nationalist obsessions and desires for a glorious legacy. What costs and risks he does bear, Putin is willing to pay in pursuit of glory and ideology. This is just one example of intangible and ideological incentives for war that so many leaders possess—God’s glory, freedom, or some nationalist vision.

Societies have ideological incentives too. Unlike the people of Belarus or Kazakhstan, the Ukrainians refused to accept serious restrictions on their sovereignty despite what (at first) seemed to be relative military weakness. Like liberation movements throughout history—including the American revolutionaries—they have been willing to undertake the ruin and risks of fighting partly in pursuit of an ideal.

3. Biased. Most accounts of Russia’s invasion stress Putin’s isolation and insulation from the truth. He and his advisors grossly underestimated the difficulty of war. This is a story of institutional bias—a system that is unwilling to tell its leader bad news. Autocrats are especially prone to this problem, but intelligence failures plague democracies too . Leaders can be psychologically biased as well. Humans have an amazing ability to cling to mistaken beliefs. We can be overconfident, underestimating the ruin of war and overestimating our chances of victory. And we demonize and misjudge our opponents. These misperceptions can carry us to war.

4. Uncertain. Too much focus on bias and misperception obscures the subtler role of uncertainty. In the murky run-up to war, policymakers don’t know their enemy’s strength or resolve. How unified would the West be? How capably would Ukrainians resist? How competent was the Russian military? All these things were fundamentally uncertain, and many experts were genuinely surprised that Russia got a bad draw on all three—most of all, presumably, Putin himself.

But uncertainty doesn’t just mean the costs of war are uncertain, and invasion a gamble. There are genuine strategic impediments to getting good information . You can’t trust your enemy’s demonstrations of resolve, because they have reasons to bluff, hoping to extract a better deal without fighting. Any poker player knows that, amid the uncertainty, the optimal strategy is never to fold all the time. It’s never to call all the time, either. The best strategy is to approach it probabilistically—to occasionally gamble and invade.

5. Unreliable. When a declining power faces a rising one, how can it trust the rising power to commit to peace ? Better to pay the brutal costs of war now, to lock in one’s current advantage. Some scholars argue that such shifts in power, and the commitment problems they create, are at the root of every long war in history —from World War I to the US invasion of Iraq. This is not why Russia invaded Ukraine, of course. Still, it may help to understand the timing. In 2022, Russia had arguably reached peak leverage versus Ukraine. Ukraine was acquiring drones and defensive missiles. And the country was growing more democratic and closer to Europe—to Putin, a dangerous example of freedom nearby. How could Ukraine commit to stop either move? We don’t know what Putin and his commanders debated behind closed doors, but these trends may have presented a now-or-never argument for invasion.

Putting the five together, as with World War I and so many other wars, fallible, biased leaders with nationalist ambitions ignored the costs of war and drove their societies to violent ruin. But the explanation doesn’t end there. There are strategic roots as well. In the case of Russia, as elsewhere, unchecked power, uncertainty, and commitment problems arising from shifting power narrowed the range of viable compromises to the point where Putin’s psychological and institutional failures—his misperceptions and ideology—could lead him to pursue politics by violent means.

The Paths to Peace

If war happens when societies or their leaders overlook its costs, peace is preserved when our institutions make those costs difficult to ignore. Successful, peaceful societies have built themselves some insulation from all five kinds of failure. They have checked the power of autocrats. They have built institutions that reduce uncertainty, promote dialogue, and minimize misperceptions. They have written constitutions and bodies of law that make shifts in power less deadly. They have developed interventions—from sanctions to peacekeeping forces to mediators—that minimize our strategic and human incentives to fight rather than compromise.

It is difficult, however, to expect peace in a world where power in so many countries remains unchecked . Highly centralized power is one of the most dangerous things in the world, because it accentuates all five reasons for war. With unchecked leaders , states are more prone to their idiosyncratic ideologies and biases. In the pursuit of power, autocrats also tend to insulate themselves from critical information. The placing of so much influence in one person’s hands adds to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the situation. Almost by definition, unchecked rulers have trouble making credible commitments.

That is why the real root cause of this current war is surely Putin’s twenty-year concentration of power in himself. And it is why the world’s most worrisome trend may be in China, where a once checked and institutionalized leader has gathered more and more power in his person. There is, admittedly, little a nation can do to alter the concentration of power within its rivals’ political systems. But no solution can be found without a proper diagnosis of the problem.

Christopher Blattman is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. This article draws from his new book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace , published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Oles_Navrotskyi , via depositphotos.com

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War, in the end, is about Armed Robbery writ large; whether Committing it, Preventing it, or Redressing it. It is all about somebody trying to take somebody else's stuff.

Peace is the time of waiting for war. A time of preparation, or a time of willful ignorance, blind, blinkered and prattling behind secure walls. – Steven Erikson

That is the right reason, I do not know about the others, but I will give you a+ on this one

its beeches thy want Resorces

Wars often come when a group of nations (for example the USSR in the Old Cold War of yesterday and the U.S./the West in New/Reverse Cold War of today) move out smartly to "transform"/to "modernize" both their own states and societies (often leads to civil wars) and other states and societies throughout the world also (often leads to wars between countries).

The enemy of those groups of nations — thus pursuing such "transformative"/such "modernizing" efforts — are, quite understandably, those individuals and groups, and those states and societies who (a) would lose current power, influence, control, safety, privilege, security, etc.; this, (b) if these such "transformative"/these such "modernizing" efforts were to be realized.

From this such perspective, and now discussing only the U.S./the West post-Cold War efforts — to "transform"/to "modernize" the states and societies of the world (to include our own states and societies here in the U.S./the West) — this, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such things as capitalism, globalization and the global economy;

Considering this such U.S./Western post-Cold War "transformative"/"modernizing" effort, note the common factor of "resistance to change" coming from:

a. (Conservative?) Individual and groups — here in the U.S./the West — who want to retain currently threatened (and/or regain recently lost) power, influence, control, etc. And:

b. (Conservative?) states and societies — elsewhere throughout the world — who have this/these exact same ambition(s).

From this such perspective, to note the nexus/the connection/the "common cause" noted here:

"Liberal democratic societies have, in the past few decades, undergone a series of revolutionary changes in their social and political life, which are not to the taste of all their citizens. For many of those, who might be called social conservatives, Russia has become a more agreeable society, at least in principle, than those they live in. Communist Westerners used to speak of the Soviet Union as the pioneer society of a brighter future for all. Now, the rightwing nationalists of Europe and North America admire Russia and its leader for cleaving to the past."

(See "The American Interest" article "The Reality of Russian Soft Power" by John Lloyd and Daria Litinova.)

“Compounding it all, Russia’s dictator has achieved all of this while creating sympathy in elements of the Right that mirrors the sympathy the Soviet Union achieved in elements of the Left. In other words, Putin is expanding Russian power and influence while mounting a cultural critique that resonates with some American audiences, casting himself as a defender of Christian civilization against Islam and the godless, decadent West.”

(See the “National Review” item entitled: “How Russia Wins” by David French.)

Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:

In the final paragraph of our article above, the author states: "That is why the real root cause of this current war is surely Putin’s twenty-year concentration of power in himself."

Based on the information that I provide above — which addresses the "resistance" efforts of entities both here at home and there abroad — might we beg to differ?

From the perspective of wars between nations relating to attempts as "transformation" by one party (and thus not as relates to civil wars which occur with "transformative" attempts in this case) here is my argument above possibly stated another way:

1. In the Old Cold War of yesterday, when the Soviets/the communists sought to "transform the world" — in their case, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such this as socialism and communism:

a. The "root cause" of the conflicts that the U.S. was engaged in back then — for example in places such as Central America —

b. This such "root cause" was OUR determination to stand hard against these such "transformative" efforts and activities — which were taking place, back then, in OUR backyard/in OUR sphere of influence/in OUR neck of the woods.

2. In the New/Reverse Cold War of today, however, when now it is the U.S./the West that seeks to "transform the world" — in our case, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such things as market-democracy:

“The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies,’ Mr. Lake said in a speech at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.”

(See the September 22, 1993 New York Times article “U.S. Vision of Foreign Policy Reversed” by Thomas L. Friedman.)

a. Now the "root cause" of the conflicts that Russia is engaged in today — for example in places such as Ukraine —

b. This such "root cause" is now RUSSIA'S determination to stand hard against these such "transformative" efforts and activities — which are taking place now in RUSSIA'S backyard/in RUSSIA'S sphere of influence/in RUSSIA's neck of the woods.

(From this such perspective, of course, [a] the current war in Ukraine, this would seem to [b] have little — or indeed nothing — to do with "Putin's twenty-year concentration of power in himself?")

It’s easy to put the whole blame on Putin himself with his unchecked power . But this is a gross simplification of the reality in case of the Ukraine war. NATO expansion everywhere and especially into the very birthplace of Russia was a huge irritator , perceived as unacceptable, threatening, arrogant with no regard to Russia’s interests. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a clear warning, that was completely ignored. Without NATO’s ambitions there would be no war in Ukraine. Or Georgia .

When the Soviet Union installed missles in Cuba , the democratic and presumably the country with all checks and balances in place almost started a nuclear war with the Soviets. It was a reckless gamble that could end the world Why expect anything less from the modern Russia that feels threatened by NATO encroachment?

In the end, whether it's about committing, preventing, or rectifying, war is all about armed robbery. The main plot is around a thief trying to steal from another person.

One of the main causes of war is nationalist garbage. This nationalist site conveniently omits this as they push their preferred chosen nationalist enemy(cold war leftovers in this case) on the reader. What do you expect from OVRA/NKVD reruns?

In addition to the reasons explored to further explain the cause of war, there are also self-defeating schema in thought structures that deteriorate over time. They become compromised by the wear-and-tear grind of life of individuals seeking natural causes and solutions collectively and apart. This is particularly relevant to the matter of war dynamics. When energies used to pursue peace are perceived as exhausted, unspent warfare resources appear more attractive. Particularly in the instances of deteriorating leaders who are compromised by psychopathy, war can quickly become nearly inevitable. Add a number of subordinated population that are unable to resist, and the world can quickly find itself following in the footsteps of leaders marching to their own demise. On the broader sociopolitical battlefield, with democracy trending down and the deterioration in global leadership increasing, the probability of both war and peaceful rewards increase. The questions that arise in my mind point to developing leaps forward to the structures of global leadership, particularly for self-governing populations, leveraging resources that mitigate the frailties of societal and individual human exhaustion, and capping warfare resources at weakened choke points to avoid spillovers of minor conflicts into broader destruction. Technology certainly can be used to mitigate much more than has been realized.

Wow, I could say all those things about the U.S. and its rulers.

We don't have a dictator.

War happens because humans are predatory animals and preditors kill other preditors every chance they get. The 3 big cats of africa are a prime example. We forget that we are animals that have animal insticts. There will always be war.

The cause of war is fear, Russia feared a anti Russian Army in Ukraine would come to fruitinion in the Ukraine threatening to invade Moscow!

it takes one powerful man in power to start war and millions of innocence people to die, to stop the war . / answer!,to in prison any powerful person who starts the war , and save your family life and millions of lives, / out law war.

The biggest cause of war is the demonstration of weakness among democratic nations facing a well-armed dictator with irrational ambitions. In the case of Russia, the democratic world turned weak on Vladimir Putin at a time when both democratic institutions and peace might have been preserved. Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first-ever freely elected president, had given the newly democratic Russia a real chance to enter the community of free nations in 1991. But when Putin was elected in 2000, we saw the warning signs of trouble. Putin already was undermining democracy. In Russia’s transition from socialism, he used his old KGP connections to buy up all the political parties (except ironically the Communist Party, which now was tiny and unpopular). He also declared he yearned for the old greater Russia, with those Soviet Union borders. The U.S. and NATO didn’t take Putin’s greater-Russia statements too seriously. After all, once their economy stabilized after the transition from socialism, the Russian people were pleased with their new and free Russia, the removal of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, and the new openness to the West. There was no popular call for retaking old territory. But Putin had his own plans, and as Christopher Blattman’s article observes, when you’re dictator (and even with ‘elections’ you are dictator if you own all the political parties) you can go your bloody way. Then came America’s ‘Russian re-set.’ As Putin consolidated his power, and forced the parliament, the Duma, to give him permission to run for several unopposed ‘re-elections,’ the U.S. decided to go gentle on Putin, in hopes he’d abandon his authoritarian course. This was the fatal mistake. When the U.S. should have been publicly encouraging Putin to commit himself to international borders and to democracy in Russia, the U.S. leadership instead was asking what it could do to make Putin happy. Putin saw this as weakness, an opening for his insane territorial desires, which focused mainly on Ukraine. He let a few more years go by, prepared secretly, and then in 2014, he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, killing about 14,000 people and claiming Ukraine’s Crimea for Russia. The U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Russia, but the terrible damage had been done. Because the Free World’s leaders had let down their guard, an awful precedent had been set. A new Russian dictator had murdered to steal territory. To him, the price was low. That told him he could do it again someday. And in 2022, again sensing weakness from the West, Putin invaded Ukraine once more. Not only have tens of thousands of Ukrainians been killed in this new war, but the Russian people themselves are now locked in an even tighter, more brutal dictatorship. Peace through Strength is not just a slogan. It’s as real as War through Weakness. My father, who fought in Europe in World War II, said an American soldier’s first duty was to preserve America’s rights and freedoms, as described in the Constitution. He said an American soldier also has two jobs. A soldier’s first job, he said, is to block the tyrants. Just stand in their way, he said, and most tyrants won’t even try to pass. That’s Peace through Strength. A soldier’s second job, he said, is to fight and win wars. He said that second job won’t have to be done often if we do enough of the first job.

I hope there will be no more wars in the world

This, pandemic of wars will soon make us realize and accept the fact that the global society’s compassion towards its individuals is numbed and will eventually be completely absent as it is transformed into a human super-organism, just as one’s body is not concerned about the millions of cells dying daily in it, unless it affects the body as a whole like the cancer cells where we consider them to be terrorists and actively kill them.

Boghos L. Artinian MD

I hope there is no more war in this world

war it not good for all humans

Ultimately, be it engaging in, averting, or resolving, war can be likened to organized theft. The central theme revolves around a thief attempting to pilfer from someone else.

In the end, whether involving, preventing, or resolving, war can be compared to organized theft. The core idea centers on a thief attempting to steal from someone else.

No nation would wage a war for the independence of another. Boghos L. Artinian

And I will give you one word that sums up and supersedes your Five Reasons: Covetousness James 4:2, ESV, The Holy Bible.

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

War is generally defined as violent conflict between states or nations.

Social Studies, Civics

Tank in Iraq Invasion

A United States Army 3rd Infantry Division M1/A1 Abrahms tank during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While the use of force was authorized by Congress, like many U.S. military conflicts, war was not declared.

Photograph by Scott Nelson/Getty Images

War is generally defined as violent conflict between states or nations. Nations go to war for a variety of reasons. It has been argued that a nation will go to war if the benefits of war are deemed to outweigh the disadvantages, and if there is a sense that there is not another mutually agreeable solution. More specifically, some have argued that wars are fought primarily for economic, religious, and political reasons. Others have claimed that most wars today are fought for ideological reasons. In the United States, the legal power to declare war is vested in Congress; however, the president is the commander-in-chief of the military, so he or she holds power to conduct a war once it has been declared. In many instances, the president has used military force without declaring war . Just War Theory In Western tradition, there is a sense that the reasons for war must be just. This idea dates back to ancient times, but is most clearly traced to the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. They attempted to justify war, and reconcile it with the Christian belief that taking a human life is wrong. To Aquinas, a war must be just in both the reasons for going to war and how war is fought. Reasons for going to war— jus ad bellum —are just if (1) war is declared by an appropriate authority; (2) the war is waged for a just cause; and (3) the war is waged for just intentions. An appropriate authority is a proper, governing authority. A “just cause” may include self-defense or a response to injustice. “Just intentions” mean that it must not be fought for self-interest, but for justice or a common good. In addition, (4) there must be a reasonable chance of success; (5) the good that will be achieved must outweigh the bad; and (6) war must be a last resort. Once just reasons for going to war are satisfied, conduct in the war— jus in bello —must be just as well. Just conduct in a war means that it must be specific and proportional. That is, noncombatants and civilians must not be deliberately targeted. Further, only such force as is necessary must be used, and harms must be proportionate to the goal sought. Law of War Some of the just war theories have been adopted as parts of international agreements and incorporated into the law of war (i.e., international law) that regulates the resort to armed force, the conduct of hostilities, and the protection of war victims. The Geneva Conventions , for example, are a series of international treaties that are designed to protect noncombatants, civilians , and prisoners of war . The treaties were negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland, between 1864 and 1977. The First and Second Geneva Conventions apply to sick and wounded soldiers and sailors. They contain provisions related to protecting the wounded and sick, as well as medical personnel and transports. The Third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war , and the Fourth Geneva Convention applies to people in occupied territories. The Third Convention requires humane treatment of prisoners, including adequate food and water. The Fourth Convention includes provisions that forbid torture and the taking of hostages, as well as provisions related to medical care and hospitals.

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Related Resources

Essays About War: Top 5 Examples and 5 Prompts

War is atrocious and there is an almost universal rule that we should be prevented; if you are writing essays about war, read our helpful guide.

Throughout history, war has driven human progress. It has led to the dissolution of oppressive regimes and the founding of new democratic countries. There is no doubt that the world would not be as it is without the many wars waged in the past.

War is waged to achieve a nation or organization’s goals, but what is the actual cost of progress? War has taken, and continues to take, countless lives. It is and is very costly in terms of resources as well. From the American Revolution to World Wars I and II to the Crusades and Hundred Years’ War of antiquity, wars throughout history have been bloody, brutal, and disastrous. 

If you are writing essays about war, look at our top essay examples below.

1. War Is Not Part of Human Nature by R. Brian Ferguson

2. essay on war and peace (author unknown), 3. the impacts of war on global health by sarah moore.

• 4.  The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

5. ​​Is war a pre-requisite for peace? by Anna Cleary

5 prompts for essays about war, 1. is war justified, 2. why do countries go to war, 3. the effects of war, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning war, 5. reflecting on a historical war.

“Debate over war and human nature will not soon be resolved. The idea that intensive, high-casualty violence was ubiquitous throughout prehistory has many backers. It has cultural resonance for those who are sure that we as a species naturally tilt toward war. As my mother would say: “Just look at history!” But doves have the upper hand when all the evidence is considered. Broadly, early finds provide little if any evidence suggesting war was a fact of life.”

Ferguson disputes the popular belief that war is inherent to human nature, as evidenced by archaeological discoveries. Many archaeologists use the very same evidence to support the opposing view. Evidence reveals many instances where war was waged, but not fought. In the minds of Ferguson and many others, humanity may be predisposed to conflict and violence, but not war, as many believe. 

“It also appears that if peace were to continue for a long period, people would become sick of the monotony of life and would seek war for a changed man is a highly dynamic creature and it seems that he cannot remain contented merely with works of peace-the cultivation of arts, the development of material comforts, the extension of knowledge, the means and appliances of a happy life.”

This essay provides an interesting perspective on war; other than the typical motivations for war, such as the desire to achieve one’s goals; the author writes that war disrupts the monotony of peace and gives participants a sense of excitement and uncertainty. In addition, it instills the spirit of heroism and bravery in people. However, the author does not dispute that war is evil and should be avoided as much as possible. 

“War forces people to flee their homes in search of safety, with the latest figures from the UN estimating that around 70 million people are currently displaced due to war. This displacement can be incredibly detrimental to health, with no safe and consistent place to sleep, wash, and shelter from the elements. It also removes a regular source of food and proper nutrition. As well as impacting physical health, war adversely affects the mental health of both those actively involved in conflict and civilians.”

Moore discusses the side effects that war has on civilians. For example, it diverts resources used on poverty alleviation and infrastructure towards fighting. It also displaces civilians when their homes are destroyed, reduces access to food, water, and sanitation, and can significantly impact mental health, among many other effects. 

4.   The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

“The damage done by war-related trauma can never be undone. We can, however, help reduce its long-term impacts, which can span generations. When we reach within ourselves to discover our humanity, it allows us to reach out to the innocent children and remind them of their resilience and beauty. Trauma can make or break us as individuals, families, and communities.”

In their essay, the authors explain how war can affect children. Children living in war-torn areas expectedly witness a lot of violence, including the killings of their loved ones. This may lead to the inability to sleep properly, difficulty performing daily functions, and a speech impediment. The authors write that trauma cannot be undone and can ruin a child’s life.  

“The sociologist Charles Tilly has argued that war and the nation state are inextricably linked. War has been crucial for the formation of the nation state, and remains crucial for its continuation. Anthony Giddens similarly views a link between the internal pacification of states and their external violence. It may be that, if we want a durable peace, a peace built on something other than war, we need to consider how to construct societies based on something other than the nation state and its monopoly of violence.”

This essay discusses the irony that war is waged to achieve peace. Many justify war and believe it is inevitable, as the world seems to balance out an era of peace with another war. However, others advocate for total pacifism. Even in relatively peaceful times, organizations and countries have been carrying out “shadow wars” or engaging in conflict without necessarily going into outright war. Cleary cites arguments made that for peace to indeed exist by itself, societies must not be built on the war in the first place. 

Many believe that war is justified by providing a means to peace and prosperity. Do you agree with this statement? If so, to what extent? What would you consider “too much” for war to be unjustified? In your essay, respond to these questions and reflect on the nature and morality of war. 

Wars throughout history have been waged for various reasons, including geographical domination, and disagreement over cultural and religious beliefs. In your essay, discuss some of the reasons different countries go to war, you can look into the belief systems that cause disagreements, oppression of people, and leaders’ desire to conquer geographical land. For an interesting essay, look to history and the reasons why major wars such as WWI and WWII occurred.

In this essay, you can write about war’s effects on participating countries. You can focus on the impact of war on specific sectors, such as healthcare or the economy. In your mind, do they outweigh the benefits? Discuss the positive and negative effects of war in your essay. To create an argumentative essay, you can pick a stance if you are for or against war. Then, argue your case and show how its effects are positive, negative, or both.

Many issues arise when waging war, such as the treatment of civilians as “collateral damage,” keeping secrets from the public, and torturing prisoners. For your essay, choose an issue that may arise when fighting a war and determine whether or not it is genuinely “unforgivable” or “unacceptable.” Are there instances where it is justified? Be sure to examples where this issue has arisen before.

Humans have fought countless wars throughout history. Choose one significant war and briefly explain its causes, major events, and effects. Conduct thorough research into the period of war and the political, social, and economic effects occurred. Discuss these points for a compelling cause and effect essay.

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining “what is persuasive writing ?”If you still need help, our guide to grammar and punctuation explains more.

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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War, and What It is Good For Those who come to War as a consumer of history may come away questioning if world history ever had time for anything else besides war.

Benjamin Cooper

War: How Conflict Shaped Us

By Margaret MacMillan (2020, Profile Books) 328 pages, including index, bibliography, photos, and illustrations.

War is a not a word that communicates much. It wants to, but quickly the gruff sound deteriorates into an abstraction and nothing more. War. War. Like love, truth, or beauty, we say the word but cannot see it. The gut does not believe. To title a book War as Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished historian, has done, is to attempt to assert control over the very term itself. As a result, even before the prose begins, War: How Conflict Shaped Us promises to be a revelation: here, war will be understood at last. Such authoritativeness is a noble pursuit, and MacMillan joins others in recent years such as Sebastian Junger and Jeremy Black in a frantic effort to articulate a unified field theory of war before it is too late.¹ “We face the prospect of the end of humanity itself,” MacMillan concludes, if we fail to demystify war in our current moment. (289) That is the project, and given the book’s critical and popular praise from notable figures such as war journalist Dexter Filkins, former National Security Director H.R. McMaster, and former Secretary of State George Schultz, readers might feel it has done its work. I am not so sure, which is not a criticism of MacMillan’s book so much as it is a lament about the relentless inscrutability of war both as an object of academic study and as a lived experience that resists expression.

“We fight because we can,” a weary MacMillan concedes. And with no end in sight, that, it seems, is all there is to say.

As an academic study, War is expansive and floods the system with its historical references. Paragraphs, and sometimes sentences, dart from one century to the next and from one war to the next (mostly in the West, a bias that the conclusion acknowledges). Especially in the first half of the book, whose chapters such as “Reasons for War” and “Ways and Means” are concerned with the Big Questions of why and how, the volume of information is unconstrained and overwhelming. For those who come to War as a consumer of history, they will come away questioning if world history ever had time for anything else besides war. Maybe war is just history by another name. Cathy Caruth argued nearly thirty years ago that “history is precisely the way we are implicated in one another’s traumas,” and while I do not believe MacMillan set out specifically to theorize history (or trauma) in the book, her ambitious design echoes Caruth’s words as well as Frederic Jameson’s famous dictum that “history is what hurts.” There is no doubt that we keep hurting ourselves. There also is no doubt that we keep falling into history, learning—as if for the first time—the tremendous scale of our human record of organized violence. “We fight because we can,” a weary MacMillan concedes. (289) And with no end in sight, that, it seems, is all there is to say.

Except, of course, it is not. In any war book, there is an itch to appear wise. Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam War veteran and author who receives several nods from MacMillan in chapters such as “Fighting,” described the embarrassment in trying to infuse profundity into war. “And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh,’” he writes in The Things They Carried . Oh. Okay. “There it is,” Karl Marlantes has his Marines recite over and over in his novel Matterhorn —as if there were actually a significance lurking underneath “oh” and “it” at all. The harder we try to put war into words, the more diminished the language becomes. Similarly, War retreats from its subject at the same time it yearns to be near it. “Death in battle so often comes suddenly and randomly.” (171) “War changes and disrupts the patterns of everyday life.” (174) “Explaining what being in war is like is never easy. It is hard to find the words and images.” (177) Are these platitudes? Not exactly. They are earnest, and I do not think I could have written the sentences or the sentiments they seek out any better. Still, they are examples of how maddeningly difficult it is (for all of us) to say anything new or meaningful about the lived experience of war beyond maybe “oh.”

As a commentary on the experience of war, then, War often opts to be a distant ethnographer instead, as far removed from human beings themselves as a warden from his inmates. In discussing a World War I memoir, for example, MacMillan expresses dismay at the lack of contrition amongst those who fight. “One of the shocking things about [Ernst] Jünger’s memoir [ Storm of Steel ] is the way he lays out his feelings [about killing the enemy] without any apology or explanation.” (185) I concede that at first glance such a judgment seems reasonable. We are supposed to feel bad about killing other people (there is a platitude, to be sure). But what, exactly, does Jünger have to apologize for? What must he explain to anyone? He did not start the war. Others who claimed legal and moral authority did that. In return, he did what he was asked to do by his country, his community, and his family’s set of values and beliefs. While engaged, he killed and took pleasure in the killing. Maybe I would, too. Maybe we all would. That is not comfortable to say, but it is also not unfathomable. We are all Ernst Jünger given the right circumstances.

In any war book, there is an itch to appear wise. Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam War veteran and author who receives several nods from MacMillan in chapters such as “Fighting,” described the embarrassment in trying to infuse profundity into war.

The monstrosity inside human beings which war uncages is the third rail the book does not touch enough, preferring instead to quarantine our fears within conventional binaries. Take war and peace. Quoting Augustine, MacMillian insists that “peace, as has often been repeated, is the end of war.’” (224) I hope that is the case, but is it? Is peace the end of war, or—like history—is peace just war by other means? Forgive me a slight digression, but the text I teach in my American literature courses that tends to surprise students the most is Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno , first published in 1855. The titular character is a Spanish captain in command of a becalmed slave ship, rescued at the outset by a chummy American commander named Amasa Delano. The slaves on board, who substantially outnumber their white enslavers, appear submissive. They also ominously polish their hatchets in the sun. Strange. Babo, who is Cereno’s valet, appears docile and happy in Delano’s eyes, but he also asserts control at times, such as when he nicks Cereno’s throat while shaving him lest the captain say too much to Delano. Even stranger.

What is going on here? Turns out the slaves have always been in charge and slaughtered the Spaniards before being boarded by the Americans. On the fly, Babo and the other slaves concocted an elaborate performance of servility—of peace —in order to perpetuate their insurrection. When the hoax is revealed—that is, when it turns out this was a violent war all along—justice is swift and peace is restored. But is it? The final paragraphs of Melville’s novella are chillingly unconvinced. Along the same lines, the American Civil War is said not to have started until April 1861 with the bombing of Fort Sumter. With my compliments to Billy Joel, however, my students start to see that maybe the fire had been burning since 1855 when Melville wrote. Or maybe Civil War embers were smoldering even earlier, maybe as far back as the U.S. Constitution, which legalized and extended the Atlantic slave trade. Maybe even earlier yet. Not to worry, however, for we find ourselves today in 2022, and enough time has passed that surely the world we inhabit now is not the same as Melville’s ambivalent America. Surely.

Right now, is the United States at war or at peace? Even before the more visible symptoms of our civilization’s discontent in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and the widespread protests against institutional racism and police brutality in summer 2020, the answer has never been as clear as War presumes. Last year, Joe Biden launched his first (public) military operation as President against militias in Syria. Those bombings were short-lived, but was the United States at war with Syria? The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that has been in effect since September 18, 2001 authorizes the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those” who committed or aided the 9/11 attacks. That could include anyone, and it has. Look at Obama’s drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, or Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. In law and in practice, the United States has been at war for the past 20 years with whomever the President at the time feels like. Biden’s immediate response to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine was almost one billion dollars of lethal aid in Ukraine’s defense, so does that mean the United States is at war with Russia? Perhaps we are in that unsettling Orwellian space that Roger J. Spiller termed “not war but like war,” which is to say a collective denial of how we know without ever saying that the fingers (always) already are on the nuclear buttons.

Am I being too cheeky and cynical? Maybe, but my posture brings into greater relief the hope driving War . In the chapter “Civilians,” MacMillan insists that “as peace comes and the painful memories of war start to recede, civilians too may experience the nostalgia that combatants can feel for the intensity of comradeship in war.” (216-17) Just as the book imagines war to be separate from peace, so combatants are distinct from noncombatants. Nostalgia and solidarity color both groups, and, I would argue, every page of War , whose entire drift is nostalgic and hopeful that war might end and we can return to a prelapsarian peace of former times. If we just study war enough, write about it enough, read about it enough, eventually war can be exterminated like a cancer cell or a coronavirus. That is the belief. In the chapter “War in Our Imaginations and Our Memories,” MacMillan worries about “the terrifying mystery of how we , who are good and moral people, could get involved in such a war [World War I for Europeans and the Vietnam War for Americans] and do such dreadful things.” (256) The emphasis on we is MacMillan’s, but I would have italicized it if she had not. We are a good and moral people (right?), and implicitly there is a They who must be bad and immoral. Yet her Other is not racial or religious or geographic; it is, once again, that unknown monstrosity within ourselves that does not make rational sense.

My point is not to out MacMillan or myself as naïve but rather to isolate yet another tension in the book’s understanding of war that cannot be so easily reconciled: either war and reason are mutually exclusive and struggle for supremacy over the other, or worse, war and reason enable one another.

How could we have done such a thing as the Battle of the Somme or the Massacre at Mỹ Lai, whose costs any rational actor would never accept ? “Furthermore, we have come to believe, governments that resort to war ought to have reasonable grounds for thinking they will prevail.” (226) Agreed, but is war a reasonable activity? MacMillan wishes it would be, as when she acknowledges the more than one “billion small arms alone in the world” that do not even include larger firepower such as nuclear weapons. Can we reasonably expect to remove the world of one billion firearms? Probably not. “Yet so many of us, our leaders included, still talk of war as a reasonable and manageable tool.” (94) Is war a reasonable tool to achieve national self-interests? Depends on how you look at it. On the one hand, yes, as Carl von Clausewitz explains in On War , whose celebrated definition MacMillan underscores: “‘War is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.’” (17) Wanting to win sounds reasonable enough, except wait, violence is not supposed to be the answer to conflict. That is what rational adults tell young children, so why not politicians and generals? My point is not to out MacMillan or myself as naïve but rather to isolate yet another tension in the book’s understanding of war that cannot be so easily reconciled: either war and reason are mutually exclusive and struggle for supremacy over the other, or worse, war and reason enable one another.

For me, the true profit in the book is MacMillan’s subdued discussion of how war has disrupted ideas such as history, peace, and reason. The subtitle, however, suggests it will be something different, specifically How Conflict Shaped Us in social terms and structured civilization in imperceptible ways. There is some of that, such as how the modern census was a nineteenth-century invention after nation-states realized they had no idea how many fighting age males they had (113), or how militaries have regularized and organized sex work (146), but many pages do not address war’s specific effects on contemporary life per se. The ultimate concern here instead is the immeasurable record of war. MacMillan has spent a lifetime with war, and her questions are basic and heartbreaking because they have no satisfying answers. Look at all this, she is saying. How did we get here? How will it end?

¹ I have reviewed both Junger’s War and Black’s War: A Short History in different contexts.

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The word “stories” was used often at the annual NABIP Capitol Conference, held in the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, February 25-28, 2024. I went because I have my own stories of frustration with health care, and because I am interested when someone seems ready to try to make things better in the largely incomprehensible and vaguely menacing system we all rely on.

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Bret Stephens

Israel Has No Choice but to Fight On

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

On Saturday, President Biden warned that Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the war in Gaza was “ hurting Israel more than helping Israel .” The Israeli prime minister replied the next day that Biden was “ wrong .” The rift between the two leaders means that Israel risks losing its most important pillar of military and diplomatic support.

I’ve argued that Israel has no choice but to destroy Hamas as an effective fighting force. Here I imagine a conversation with an intelligent critic of that view.

Thousands of Gazan civilians, many of them children, have now been killed, bombed in their homes or out of them. Now they face a humanitarian catastrophe in the form of medicine and food shortages, even starvation.

How can you possibly justify it?

Like all wars, this one is horrible and heartbreaking. But I blame Hamas, not Israel, for the devastation.

Look, Hamas is a terrorist group whose leaders should face justice for the massacres of Oct. 7. But it isn’t Hamas’s bombs, missiles or artillery that have leveled Gaza. It’s Israel’s.

Right. And Hamas, which started the war, could put a halt to that rain of fire tomorrow. It rejected a six-week cease-fire that would have paused the fighting and allowed much more aid in exchange for the release of roughly 40 of the remaining 100 Israeli hostages. It could stop the fighting for good by simply surrendering.

Hamas may not want to stop the fighting, but there’s little we can do about that. Israel can stop its assault, and thus spare Palestinian lives. And because Biden has leverage on Israel, he should use it.

The best way to get Hamas to stop fighting is to beat it. If Israel were to end the war now, with several Hamas battalions intact, at least four things would happen.

First, it would be impossible to set up a political authority in Gaza that isn’t Hamas: If the Palestinian Authority or local Gazans tried to do so, they wouldn’t live for long. Second, Hamas would reconstitute its military force as Hezbollah did in Lebanon after the 2006 war with Israel — and Hamas has promised to repeat the attacks of Oct. 7 “a second, a third, a fourth” time. Third, the Israeli hostages would be stuck in their awful captivity indefinitely.

Fourth, there would never be a Palestinian state. No Israeli government is going to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if it risks resembling Gaza.

All that is speculative. The reality is that children are hungry, the sick aren’t getting medicine, innocent Palestinians are being killed, now. It’s wrong to avert theoretical harms by causing actual ones.

It might be more speculative if this weren’t the fifth major war that Hamas has provoked since it seized power in Gaza in 2007. After each war, Hamas’s capabilities have grown stronger and its ambitions bolder. At some point this had to end; for Israelis, Oct. 7 was that point.

Maybe, but why can’t Israel be much more judicious in its use of force?

Do you have any specific suggestions for how Israel can defeat Hamas while being more sparing of civilians?

I’m not a military expert.

I’ve noticed that whenever Israel’s critics lecture the country on better calibrating its use of force, they don’t have any concrete suggestions. Are Israelis smart enough to fight better, but too stupid to appreciate the diplomatic consequences of not doing so?

Maybe they’re thirsty for vengeance.

The reality of urban warfare is that it’s exceptionally costly and difficult. The United States under Barack Obama and Donald Trump spent nine months helping Iraqi forces flatten the city of Mosul to defeat ISIS, with results that looked even worse than Gaza does today. I don’t remember calls for “Cease-Fire Now” then. Hamas has made it even more difficult for Israel because, instead of sheltering civilians in its immense network of tunnels, it shelters itself.

Even so, that doesn’t relieve Israel of the obligation to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.

It’s not as if Israel is not lifting a finger. On Sunday alone, 225 truckloads of aid entered Gaza through Israel, according to the Israeli military. But you seem to think that the government of Israel’s primary responsibility is to the welfare of the people of Gaza. It isn’t. As with any government, its obligations are to its own people.

Israelis are mostly doing fine now. It’s Palestinians who are dying.

Israel has spent the last five months degrading Hamas’s military capabilities to the point that it seems to have run out of rockets to fire at Israel. And around 200,000 Israelis are living as refugees inside their own country because its borders aren’t secure. No country can tolerate that. Israel didn’t come into existence to showcase the victimization of Jews. It came into existence to end their victimization.

Well, since you’re alluding to the Holocaust, it surely can’t be in Israel’s interests to be seen perpetrating a version of it in Gaza. Just look at the worldwide explosion of antisemitism since Oct. 7.

That analogy is false and offensive on many levels. Israel is fighting a war it didn’t seek, against an enemy sworn to its destruction and holding scores of its citizens hostage. If Israel had wanted to wipe out Gazans as Germans sought to wipe out Jews, it could have done so on the first day of the war. Israel is fighting a tough war against an evil enemy that puts its own civilians in harm’s way. Maybe there should be more public pressure on Hamas to surrender than on Israel to save Hamas from the consequences of its actions.

As for antisemitism, the war hasn’t generated a torrent of antisemitism so much as it has exposed it.

Probably a mix of the two. Still, you make the mistake of imagining that Hamas can be defeated. You can’t kill an idea, particularly by generating the terrible resentments that are surely brewing in Gaza and throughout the Arab world.

By that logic, the Allies should have spared Germany because National Socialism was also an idea. You may not be able to kill an idea but you can defang it, just as you can persuade future generations that some ideas have terrible consequences for those who espouse them.

So what do you suggest the Biden administration do?

Help Israel win the war decisively so that Israelis and Palestinians can someday win the peace.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook

Why is the Islamic State group 'fixated' on Russia and what is ISIS-K?

A branch of Islamic State, the militant group that once sought control over swathes of Iraq and Syria, has claimed responsibility for a deadly terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall .

At least 133 people were killed when camouflage-clad men armed with automatic weapons opened fire on concertgoers at the Crocus City Hall, about 20 kilometres from the Kremlin.

More specifically, the attack was claimed by ISIS-K, the Islamic State's Afghan branch.

Here's what we know about ISIS-K and its motivations for attacking Russia.

What is ISIS-K?

ISIS-K stands for Islamic State Khorasan . Khorasan is an old term for a region that included parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.

The branch emerged in eastern Afghanistan in late 2014 and has a history of attacks inside and outside Afghanistan.

In September 2022, its militants claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide bombing at the Russian embassy in Kabul.

Are we sure ISIS-K is responsible?

Not entirely. Islamic State has in the past claimed attacks it had nothing to do with.

However, the group's claim it is behind the Moscow attack has been backed by US intelligence sources.

Islamic State's Amaq news agency posted a statement on Telegram following the deadly shooting, saying its fighters attacked on the outskirts of Moscow.

The statement said they killed and wounded hundreds, "causing great destruction to the place before they withdrew to their bases safely".

The US embassy in Russia had warned on March 8 that "extremists" had imminent plans for an attack in Moscow, hours after Russian security services said they had foiled an ISIS branch's planned shooting at a synagogue.

What could ISIS-K's motive for the Russian attack be?

Experts say ISIS-K has opposed Russian President Vladimir Putin for years.

"ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years, frequently criticising Putin in its propaganda," said Colin Clarke, with the Soufan Center, an independent foreign policy research centre.

Michael Kugelman of the Washington-based Wilson Center said ISIS-K "sees Russia as being complicit in activities that regularly oppress Muslims".

He added that the group also counted as members a number of Central Asian militants who had their own grievances with Moscow.

Putin changed the course of the Syrian civil war  when he intervened in 2015, supporting President Bashar al-Assad against the opposition and Islamic State.

The war began in 2011 after a pro-democracy uprising against al-Assad's authoritarian rule quickly expanded to fully fledged infighting, with Islamic State seizing large parts of Syria and Iraq by 2013.

At its height, Islamic State held about a third of Syria and 40 per cent of Iraq, but by the end of 2017 it had lost 95 per cent of its territory.

There is also a Caucasus branch of ISIS, which operates mainly in Russia's largely Muslim North Caucasus region, mainly in the Russian republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria.

Chechnya has a long history of rebelling against Moscow rule, with an Islamist insurgency leading to armed conflict between Russia and militants from 2007 to 2017.

Islamic State more broadly has long recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Not the first terror attack on Russia

If Islamic State is behind the shooting, it would make it the latest of many Islamist-linked attacks in or against Russia over the past 20 years.

The country was shaken by a series of deadly terror attacks in the early 2000s during Russia's fighting with separatists in Chechnya.

In October 2002, Chechen militants took about 800 people hostage at a Moscow theatre. Two days later, Russian special forces stormed the building. 129 hostages and 41 Chechen fighters died, most of them from the effects of narcotic gas which Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.

In September 2004, about 30 Chechen militants seized a school in Beslan in southern Russia, taking hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later. More than 330 people, about half of them children, were killed.

In October 2015, a bomb planted by Islamic State downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai in Egypt, killing all 224 people on board. Most of them were Russians returning from holidays in Egypt.

The group has also claimed responsibility for several attacks in Caucasus and other Russian regions in the past years.

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What to know about the crisis of violence, politics and hunger engulfing Haiti

A long-simmering crisis over Haiti’s ability to govern itself, particularly after a series of natural disasters and an increasingly dire humanitarian emergency, has come to a head in the Caribbean nation, as its de facto president remains stranded in Puerto Rico and its people starve and live in fear of rampant violence. 

The chaos engulfing the country has been bubbling for more than a year, only for it to spill over on the global stage on Monday night, as Haiti’s unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, agreed to resign once a transitional government is brokered by other Caribbean nations and parties, including the U.S.

But the very idea of a transitional government brokered not by Haitians but by outsiders is one of the main reasons Haiti, a nation of 11 million, is on the brink, according to humanitarian workers and residents who have called for Haitian-led solutions. 

“What we’re seeing in Haiti has been building since the 2010 earthquake,” said Greg Beckett, an associate professor of anthropology at Western University in Canada. 

What is happening in Haiti and why?

In the power vacuum that followed the assassination of democratically elected President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Henry, who was prime minister under Moïse, assumed power, with the support of several nations, including the U.S. 

When Haiti failed to hold elections multiple times — Henry said it was due to logistical problems or violence — protests rang out against him. By the time Henry announced last year that elections would be postponed again, to 2025, armed groups that were already active in Port-au-Prince, the capital, dialed up the violence.

Even before Moïse’s assassination, these militias and armed groups existed alongside politicians who used them to do their bidding, including everything from intimidating the opposition to collecting votes . With the dwindling of the country’s elected officials, though, many of these rebel forces have engaged in excessively violent acts, and have taken control of at least 80% of the capital, according to a United Nations estimate. 

Those groups, which include paramilitary and former police officers who pose as community leaders, have been responsible for the increase in killings, kidnappings and rapes since Moïse’s death, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden. According to a report from the U.N . released in January, more than 8,400 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in 2023, an increase of 122% increase from 2022.

“January and February have been the most violent months in the recent crisis, with thousands of people killed, or injured, or raped,” Beckett said.

Armed groups who had been calling for Henry’s resignation have already attacked airports, police stations, sea ports, the Central Bank and the country’s national soccer stadium. The situation reached critical mass earlier this month when the country’s two main prisons were raided , leading to the escape of about 4,000 prisoners. The beleaguered government called a 72-hour state of emergency, including a night-time curfew — but its authority had evaporated by then.

Aside from human-made catastrophes, Haiti still has not fully recovered from the devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed about 220,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, many of them living in poorly built and exposed housing. More earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have followed, exacerbating efforts to rebuild infrastructure and a sense of national unity.

Since the earthquake, “there have been groups in Haiti trying to control that reconstruction process and the funding, the billions of dollars coming into the country to rebuild it,” said Beckett, who specializes in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. 

Beckett said that control initially came from politicians and subsequently from armed groups supported by those politicians. Political “parties that controlled the government used the government for corruption to steal that money. We’re seeing the fallout from that.”

Many armed groups have formed in recent years claiming to be community groups carrying out essential work in underprivileged neighborhoods, but they have instead been accused of violence, even murder . One of the two main groups, G-9, is led by a former elite police officer, Jimmy Chérizier — also known as “Barbecue” — who has become the public face of the unrest and claimed credit for various attacks on public institutions. He has openly called for Henry to step down and called his campaign an “armed revolution.”

But caught in the crossfire are the residents of Haiti. In just one week, 15,000 people have been displaced from Port-au-Prince, according to a U.N. estimate. But people have been trying to flee the capital for well over a year, with one woman telling NBC News that she is currently hiding in a church with her three children and another family with eight children. The U.N. said about 160,000 people have left Port-au-Prince because of the swell of violence in the last several months. 

Deep poverty and famine are also a serious danger. Gangs have cut off access to the country’s largest port, Autorité Portuaire Nationale, and food could soon become scarce.

Haiti's uncertain future

A new transitional government may dismay the Haitians and their supporters who call for Haitian-led solutions to the crisis. 

But the creation of such a government would come after years of democratic disruption and the crumbling of Haiti’s political leadership. The country hasn’t held an election in eight years. 

Haitian advocates and scholars like Jemima Pierre, a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, say foreign intervention, including from the U.S., is partially to blame for Haiti’s turmoil. The U.S. has routinely sent thousands of troops to Haiti , intervened in its government and supported unpopular leaders like Henry.

“What you have over the last 20 years is the consistent dismantling of the Haitian state,” Pierre said. “What intervention means for Haiti, what it has always meant, is death and destruction.”

In fact, the country’s situation was so dire that Henry was forced to travel abroad in the hope of securing a U.N. peacekeeping deal. He went to Kenya, which agreed to send 1,000 troops to coordinate an East African and U.N.-backed alliance to help restore order in Haiti, but the plan is now on hold . Kenya agreed last October to send a U.N.-sanctioned security force to Haiti, but Kenya’s courts decided it was unconstitutional. The result has been Haiti fending for itself. 

“A force like Kenya, they don’t speak Kreyòl, they don’t speak French,” Pierre said. “The Kenyan police are known for human rights abuses . So what does it tell us as Haitians that the only thing that you see that we deserve are not schools, not reparations for the cholera the U.N. brought , but more military with the mandate to use all kinds of force on our population? That is unacceptable.”  

Henry was forced to announce his planned resignation from Puerto Rico, as threats of violence — and armed groups taking over the airports — have prevented him from returning to his country.  

Now that Henry is to stand down, it is far from clear what the armed groups will do or demand next, aside from the right to govern. 

“It’s the Haitian people who know what they’re going through. It’s the Haitian people who are going to take destiny into their own hands. Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” Chérizier said recently, according to The Associated Press .

Haitians and their supporters have put forth their own solutions over the years, holding that foreign intervention routinely ignores the voices and desires of Haitians. 

In 2021, both Haitian and non-Haitian church leaders, women’s rights groups, lawyers, humanitarian workers, the Voodoo Sector and more created the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis . The commission has proposed the “ Montana Accord ,” outlining a two-year interim government with oversight committees tasked with restoring order, eradicating corruption and establishing fair elections. 

For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter .

CORRECTION (March 15, 2024, 9:58 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated which university Jemima Pierre is affiliated with. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, not the University of California, Los Angeles, (or Columbia University, as an earlier correction misstated).

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK who writes about race.

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Essay on War - A nation or organisation may turn to war to reach its goals, but what is the actual cost of progress? Countless lives have been lost to war and continue to be lost. It costs a lot of money and resources as well. Wars have always been brutal, deadly, and tragic, from the American Revolution to World Wars I and II to the Crusades and the ancient Hundred Years' War. Here are a few sample essays on "war" .

100 Words Essay on War

The greatest destroyers of people in modern times are wars. No matter who wins a war, mankind loses in every case. Millions of people have died in battles during the past century, with World Wars I and II being the worst. Wars are typically fought to protect a nation. Whatever the motive, it is hazardous conduct that results in the loss of millions of priceless innocent lives and has dangerous impacts that even future generations will have to deal with.

The results of using nuclear bombs are catastrophic. The weapons business benefits when there is a war elsewhere in the world because it maintains its supply chain. Weapons that cause massive destruction are being made bigger and better. The only way to end wars is to raise awareness among the general public.

200 Words Essay on War

Without a doubt, war is terrible, and the most devastating thing that can happen to humans. It causes death and devastation, illness and poverty, humiliation and destruction. To evaluate the devastation caused by war, one needs to consider the havoc that was wrecked on several nations not too many years ago. A particularly frightening ability of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may absorb the entire world. The fact that some people view war as a great and heroic adventure that brings out the best in people does not change the fact that it is a horrible tragedy.

This is more true now that atomic weapons will be used to fight a war. War, according to some, is required. Looking at the past reveals that war has drastically changed throughout the nation's history. The destructive impacts of war have never been more prevalent in human history. We have experienced lengthy and brief wars of various kinds. There have been supporters of nonviolence and the brotherhood of man. Buddha, Christ, and Mahatma Gandhi have all lived. Despite this, war has always been fought, weapons are always used, military power has always been deployed, and there have always been armies in war.

500 Words Essay on War

If we take a closer look at human history, it will become evident that conflicts have existed ever since the primitive eras. Although efforts have been made to end it, this has not been successful so far. Thus, it appears that we are unable to achieve eternal peace. Many defend wars by claiming that nature's rules require them. Charles Darwin is placed in front of them to illustrate their point. He was the one who created the rule of the fittest. He claimed that everything in nature, whether alive or dead, is constantly engaged in a battle for survival. Only the strongest will survive in this fight. Therefore, it is believed that without battle, humankind won't be able to progress.

Impacts of War

People fail to see that war invariably results in severe damage. They ignored the nonviolent principles taught by Mahatma Gandhi, who used them to liberate his country from the shackles of slavery. They fail to consider that if Gandhi could push out the powerful Britishers without resorting to violence, why shouldn't others do the same? Wars are unavoidable calamities, and there are no words to adequately depict the vast quantity and scope of their tragedies. The atrocities of the two world wars must never be forgotten. There was tremendous murder and property devastation during the battles. There were thousands of widows and orphans. War spreads falsehoods and creates hatred. People start acting brutally selfishly. Humanity and morals suffer as a result.

War is an Enemy

War is the enemy of all humanity and human civilisation. Nothing positive can come of it. Consequently, it should never be celebrated in any way. In addition to impeding national progress, it undermines social cohesion. It slows down the rate of human progress. Wars are not the answer to the world's issues. Instead, they cause issues and generate hatred among nations. War can settle one issue but creates far too many other ones. The two most horrific examples of the war's after-effects are Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People are still enduring the effects of war 77 years later. Whatever the reason for war, it always ends in the widespread loss of human life and property.

Disadvantages of War

Massive human deaths and injuries, the depletion of financial resources, environmental degradation, lost productivity, and long-term harm to military personnel are all drawbacks of war. Families are split apart by war. Both towns and cities are destroyed by it. People become more sensitive, and every industry faces collapse. People’s health declines physically and they lose their sense of security. They won't have any security, and those who win the battle will treat the citizens of the defeated nation as their slaves and prohibit them from the right to work. After the war, there will be a lack of jobs and corruption issues for the nation to deal with.

Russia – Ukraine War

The world saw great turmoil beginning in February 2022 with the Russian-Ukraine War. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the most serious conventional attack on a nation, bringing a severe economic crisis to the world. India has taken a neutral stance for Russia, keeping in mind the two countries' long-standing alliance, especially in its foreign policies and positive international relationships. Russia was concerned about Ukraine's security due to its intention to join NATO and invaded Ukraine in 2014. Additionally, Russia provided help to the rebels in the eastern Ukrainian districts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The war between Russia and Ukraine has had a substantial impact on oil prices and other commodity prices, as well as increased trade uncertainty. India has economic troubles due to Western countries' supply disruptions and limited trade with Russia.

War has historically been the worst mark on humanity. Although it was made by man, it is now beyond the power of any human force. To preserve humanity, the entire human species must now reflect on this. Otherwise, neither humanity nor war will survive.

Explore Career Options (By Industry)

• Construction
• Entertainment
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• Information Technology

Bio Medical Engineer

The field of biomedical engineering opens up a universe of expert chances. An Individual in the biomedical engineering career path work in the field of engineering as well as medicine, in order to find out solutions to common problems of the two fields. The biomedical engineering job opportunities are to collaborate with doctors and researchers to develop medical systems, equipment, or devices that can solve clinical problems. Here we will be discussing jobs after biomedical engineering, how to get a job in biomedical engineering, biomedical engineering scope, and salary. 

Data Administrator

Database professionals use software to store and organise data such as financial information, and customer shipping records. Individuals who opt for a career as data administrators ensure that data is available for users and secured from unauthorised sales. DB administrators may work in various types of industries. It may involve computer systems design, service firms, insurance companies, banks and hospitals.

Ethical Hacker

A career as ethical hacker involves various challenges and provides lucrative opportunities in the digital era where every giant business and startup owns its cyberspace on the world wide web. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path try to find the vulnerabilities in the cyber system to get its authority. If he or she succeeds in it then he or she gets its illegal authority. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path then steal information or delete the file that could affect the business, functioning, or services of the organization.

Data Analyst

The invention of the database has given fresh breath to the people involved in the data analytics career path. Analysis refers to splitting up a whole into its individual components for individual analysis. Data analysis is a method through which raw data are processed and transformed into information that would be beneficial for user strategic thinking.

Data are collected and examined to respond to questions, evaluate hypotheses or contradict theories. It is a tool for analyzing, transforming, modeling, and arranging data with useful knowledge, to assist in decision-making and methods, encompassing various strategies, and is used in different fields of business, research, and social science.

Geothermal Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as geothermal engineers are the professionals involved in the processing of geothermal energy. The responsibilities of geothermal engineers may vary depending on the workplace location. Those who work in fields design facilities to process and distribute geothermal energy. They oversee the functioning of machinery used in the field.

Remote Sensing Technician

Individuals who opt for a career as a remote sensing technician possess unique personalities. Remote sensing analysts seem to be rational human beings, they are strong, independent, persistent, sincere, realistic and resourceful. Some of them are analytical as well, which means they are intelligent, introspective and inquisitive. 

Remote sensing scientists use remote sensing technology to support scientists in fields such as community planning, flight planning or the management of natural resources. Analysing data collected from aircraft, satellites or ground-based platforms using statistical analysis software, image analysis software or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a significant part of their work. Do you want to learn how to become remote sensing technician? There's no need to be concerned; we've devised a simple remote sensing technician career path for you. Scroll through the pages and read.

Geotechnical engineer

The role of geotechnical engineer starts with reviewing the projects needed to define the required material properties. The work responsibilities are followed by a site investigation of rock, soil, fault distribution and bedrock properties on and below an area of interest. The investigation is aimed to improve the ground engineering design and determine their engineering properties that include how they will interact with, on or in a proposed construction. 

The role of geotechnical engineer in mining includes designing and determining the type of foundations, earthworks, and or pavement subgrades required for the intended man-made structures to be made. Geotechnical engineering jobs are involved in earthen and concrete dam construction projects, working under a range of normal and extreme loading conditions. 

Cartographer

How fascinating it is to represent the whole world on just a piece of paper or a sphere. With the help of maps, we are able to represent the real world on a much smaller scale. Individuals who opt for a career as a cartographer are those who make maps. But, cartography is not just limited to maps, it is about a mixture of art , science , and technology. As a cartographer, not only you will create maps but use various geodetic surveys and remote sensing systems to measure, analyse, and create different maps for political, cultural or educational purposes.

Budget Analyst

Budget analysis, in a nutshell, entails thoroughly analyzing the details of a financial budget. The budget analysis aims to better understand and manage revenue. Budget analysts assist in the achievement of financial targets, the preservation of profitability, and the pursuit of long-term growth for a business. Budget analysts generally have a bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, economics, or a closely related field. Knowledge of Financial Management is of prime importance in this career.

Product Manager

A Product Manager is a professional responsible for product planning and marketing. He or she manages the product throughout the Product Life Cycle, gathering and prioritising the product. A product manager job description includes defining the product vision and working closely with team members of other departments to deliver winning products.  

Underwriter

An underwriter is a person who assesses and evaluates the risk of insurance in his or her field like mortgage, loan, health policy, investment, and so on and so forth. The underwriter career path does involve risks as analysing the risks means finding out if there is a way for the insurance underwriter jobs to recover the money from its clients. If the risk turns out to be too much for the company then in the future it is an underwriter who will be held accountable for it. Therefore, one must carry out his or her job with a lot of attention and diligence.

Finance Executive

Operations manager.

Individuals in the operations manager jobs are responsible for ensuring the efficiency of each department to acquire its optimal goal. They plan the use of resources and distribution of materials. The operations manager's job description includes managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and performing administrative tasks.

Bank Probationary Officer (PO)

Investment director.

An investment director is a person who helps corporations and individuals manage their finances. They can help them develop a strategy to achieve their goals, including paying off debts and investing in the future. In addition, he or she can help individuals make informed decisions.

Welding Engineer

Welding Engineer Job Description: A Welding Engineer work involves managing welding projects and supervising welding teams. He or she is responsible for reviewing welding procedures, processes and documentation. A career as Welding Engineer involves conducting failure analyses and causes on welding issues. 

Transportation Planner

A career as Transportation Planner requires technical application of science and technology in engineering, particularly the concepts, equipment and technologies involved in the production of products and services. In fields like land use, infrastructure review, ecological standards and street design, he or she considers issues of health, environment and performance. A Transportation Planner assigns resources for implementing and designing programmes. He or she is responsible for assessing needs, preparing plans and forecasts and compliance with regulations.

An expert in plumbing is aware of building regulations and safety standards and works to make sure these standards are upheld. Testing pipes for leakage using air pressure and other gauges, and also the ability to construct new pipe systems by cutting, fitting, measuring and threading pipes are some of the other more involved aspects of plumbing. Individuals in the plumber career path are self-employed or work for a small business employing less than ten people, though some might find working for larger entities or the government more desirable.

Construction Manager

Individuals who opt for a career as construction managers have a senior-level management role offered in construction firms. Responsibilities in the construction management career path are assigning tasks to workers, inspecting their work, and coordinating with other professionals including architects, subcontractors, and building services engineers.

Urban Planner

Urban Planning careers revolve around the idea of developing a plan to use the land optimally, without affecting the environment. Urban planning jobs are offered to those candidates who are skilled in making the right use of land to distribute the growing population, to create various communities. 

Urban planning careers come with the opportunity to make changes to the existing cities and towns. They identify various community needs and make short and long-term plans accordingly.

Highway Engineer

Highway Engineer Job Description:  A Highway Engineer is a civil engineer who specialises in planning and building thousands of miles of roads that support connectivity and allow transportation across the country. He or she ensures that traffic management schemes are effectively planned concerning economic sustainability and successful implementation.

Environmental Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as an environmental engineer are construction professionals who utilise the skills and knowledge of biology, soil science, chemistry and the concept of engineering to design and develop projects that serve as solutions to various environmental problems. 

Naval Architect

A Naval Architect is a professional who designs, produces and repairs safe and sea-worthy surfaces or underwater structures. A Naval Architect stays involved in creating and designing ships, ferries, submarines and yachts with implementation of various principles such as gravity, ideal hull form, buoyancy and stability. 

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Veterinary Doctor

Pathologist.

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Speech Therapist

Gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth. 

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

Hospital Administrator

The hospital Administrator is in charge of organising and supervising the daily operations of medical services and facilities. This organising includes managing of organisation’s staff and its members in service, budgets, service reports, departmental reporting and taking reminders of patient care and services.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs. 

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Videographer

Multimedia specialist.

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications. 

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook. 

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion. 

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article. 

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Linguistic meaning is related to language or Linguistics which is the study of languages. A career as a linguistic meaning, a profession that is based on the scientific study of language, and it's a very broad field with many specialities. Famous linguists work in academia, researching and teaching different areas of language, such as phonetics (sounds), syntax (word order) and semantics (meaning). 

Other researchers focus on specialities like computational linguistics, which seeks to better match human and computer language capacities, or applied linguistics, which is concerned with improving language education. Still, others work as language experts for the government, advertising companies, dictionary publishers and various other private enterprises. Some might work from home as freelance linguists. Philologist, phonologist, and dialectician are some of Linguist synonym. Linguists can study French , German , Italian . 

Public Relation Executive

Travel journalist.

The career of a travel journalist is full of passion, excitement and responsibility. Journalism as a career could be challenging at times, but if you're someone who has been genuinely enthusiastic about all this, then it is the best decision for you. Travel journalism jobs are all about insightful, artfully written, informative narratives designed to cover the travel industry. Travel Journalist is someone who explores, gathers and presents information as a news article.

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product. 

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

Merchandiser.

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans. 

Metallurgical Engineer

A metallurgical engineer is a professional who studies and produces materials that bring power to our world. He or she extracts metals from ores and rocks and transforms them into alloys, high-purity metals and other materials used in developing infrastructure, transportation and healthcare equipment. 

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems. 

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party. 

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

ITSM Manager

Information security manager.

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack 

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Israel’s war on Gaza updates: UN expert reports on genocidal acts in Gaza

UN Palestine rapporteur Albanese says threshold met for several genocidal acts by Israel in its war on Gaza.

The live page is now closed. You can continue to follow our coverage of the war in Gaza here.

• The United Nations’ Palestine rapporteur Francesca Albanese says there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the threshold is met for genocidal acts by Israel in Gaza war.
• The UN Security Council for the first time passes a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Fourteen countries voted in favour of the resolution; the US, Israel’s main ally, abstained.
• Israeli air strikes kill at least 22 Palestinians in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah region and 30 in Rafah in the south.
• Palestinians who fled the ongoing Israeli siege of al-Shifa Hospital say Israeli tanks and armoured bulldozers drove over at least four bodies and ambulances. Israeli forces have also surrounded al-Amal and Nasser hospitals in southern Gaza.
• At least 32,333 Palestinians have been killed and 74,694 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. The revised death toll in Israel from Hamas’s October 7 attack stands at 1,139, with dozens still held captive.

Israel’s COGAT says 258 aid trucks entered Gaza today

The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) office claims that of those 258 trucks that entered the Strip, 166 carried more than 3.1 million kg (7 million pounds) of food.

It also said that 125 aid packages were dropped over northern Gaza, which the UN has repeatedly said faces imminent famine, containing more than 113,398kg (250,000 pounds) of food.

Hamas deputy military commander killed in Gaza air raid: Israel

Hamas deputy military commander Marwan Issa was killed in an Israeli air strike this month, Israel’s military spokesperson says.

“We have checked all the intelligence,” Rear-Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a televised statement. “Marwan Issa was eliminated in the strike we carried out around two weeks ago.”

Issa was at the top of Israel’s most-wanted list together with Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, and Hamas’ leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas. The White House said on March 18 that Issa had been killed, but Israel had not confirmed his death until now.

Thank you for joining us

This live page is now closed.

Read about how the world reacted to today’s ceasefire resolution from the UN Security Council here .

Check out the latest episode of Al Jazeera’s Inside Story on threats to UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, here .

You can find more news, features and videos on the war here .

A recap of today’s events

We will be closing this live page soon. Here’s what happened today:

• The UNSC approved a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire during Ramadan and the release of Israeli captives after the US failed to veto it. The resolution was welcomed globally, except by Israel, which cancelled a delegation visit to Washington, DC.
• Hamas said in negotiations with Israel and others that it would be sticking with its original positions of a ceasefire, return of displaced Palestinians and exchange of prisoners.
• Fighting is still ongoing around the al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, while the al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis is out of service after an Israeli siege.
• A top UN rapporteur’s report said Israeli actions in Gaza meet the threshold for genocidal acts on several grounds and called for action.
• Israeli Minister Gideon Saar and another ally have resigned from Benjamin Netanyahu’s emergency government, which could put pressure on others to follow.
• UNRWA said more people will die of starvation and other conditions imposed by the Israeli military if humanitarian aid is not significantly increased.

Israel’s refusal to send delegation to US creates division in government

Reporting from occupied East Jerusalem

This was a delegation that was supposed to head to Washington at the request of US President Joe Biden.

It was going to include the minister of strategic affairs in Israel, Ron Dermer, the National Security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi and representatives from the coordinators of government activities in the occupied Palestinian territories for the Israeli army.

They were supposed to go to Washington to brief American officials about how exactly Israel plans to invade Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah.

We’ve seen a lot of back-and-forth public disagreements between both American and Israeli officials about this topic. The Americans have simply said it’d be a red line and a mistake. Netanyahu has previously said that, with or without US support, the invasion is going to happen.

Now there are some issues internally within Israel’s government.

Benny Gantz, a member of the country’s war cabinet, said that it could be a mistake not to send this delegation at a time when US support is critical in this war.

Red Crescent: Gaza’s al-Amal Hospital out of service after Israeli siege

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says it has managed to evacuate staff, patients and dead bodies from the besieged al-Amal Hospital in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.

The organisation said it coordinated with the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to evacuate 27 medical staff, six patients and one patient companion.

The organisation was also able to get two bodies out of the hospital, namely of PRCS volunteer Amir Abu Aisha, killed by the Israeli military, and a civilian who was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers.

“PRCS Al-Amal Hospital, in Khan Yunis, is out of service after the occupation forces forced the hospital staff and the wounded to evacuate it and closed its entrances with earthen barriers.”

Today, the Palestine Red Crescent teams, in coordination with the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs and the International Committee of the Red Cross, evacuated the PRCS’s staff at #AlAmalHospital in Khan Yunis, totaling 27, in addition to 6 patients and one… — PRCS (@PalestineRCS) March 25, 2024

Israeli military claims attacks on Hezbollah outposts, operatives

The Israeli army says its air force struck a “military structure” belonging to Hezbollah in the area of Mais al-Jabal.

It also released aerial footage that it says shows an operative with the armed Lebanese group being detected entering a building, with the site bombed by fighter jets shortly after.

The Israeli military said it also launched artillery attacks on the source of a rocket launch into northern Israel from southern Lebanon.

Earlier, it had released footage of an attack on two purported Hezbollah operatives in southern Lebanon after aerial surveillance tracked their movement.

Palestinians in Gaza cautiously optimistic on UN ceasefire resolution amid Israeli bombs

Reporting from Rafah, southern Gaza

The resolution that has been passed today by the UN Security Council is a gate of hope for Palestinians here who have been under unrelenting bombardment for (more than) five months, with the UNSC not managing to pass a ceasefire resolution until now.

Palestinians believe that Israel might not fully commit to the UN Security Council resolution. But they believe that it will create the way later to increase international pressure on Israel to commit to the resolution.

However, there has been no letup in air raids in the past 24 hours. (Israel is) intensifying its bombardment from land, air and sea.

Israeli forces are manoeuvring troops on the ground, adopting a strategy of blowing up residential neighbourhoods one after the other.

Rafah has been bombarded in the past hour where a number of Palestinians have been reported injured after being hit with a drone missile in the western part of the city.

PA’s Abbas meets with German foreign minister in Ramallah

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during her regional tour to discuss Israel’s war on Gaza.

The meeting took place at the presidential headquarters in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, with Abbas saying the UN Security Council resolution must be implemented, the Wafa news agency reports.

Abbas discussed humanitarian aid, opposed further displacement of Palestinians and slammed an Israeli move to seize more Palestinian land.

He also reportedly discussed the two-state solution with the German foreign minister, urged all countries to formally recognise a sovereign state of Palestine and stressed that the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) must be supported.

Two week ceasefire in Ramadan ‘not enough’: MSF

Avril Benoit, the US executive director of Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, says that while the UNSC resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza during Ramadan was a “constructive step”, there was a need for “a sustainable ceasefire”.

“A two-week ceasefire is not nearly enough time to respond to the overwhelming humanitarian needs. We repeat our urgent demand for a sustained ceasefire now,” she said in a statement posted on the group’s website.

“In the meantime, Council members must ensure that the ceasefire is put into action immediately and doesn’t end up being merely words on paper.”

“Council members must ensure that the ceasefire is put into action immediately and doesn’t end up being merely words on paper.” @avrilbenoit responds following the UN Security Council resolution on a temporary ceasefire in #Gaza . Read more 👇 https://t.co/lI4OSnjqB4 — MSF International (@MSF) March 25, 2024

Netanyahu ‘not so upset to turn down $3.3bn’ in US money: Sanders

US Senator Bernie Sanders points out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is apparently upset after the UN Security Council vote, having cancelled a delegation to Washington, DC, and blasting the resolution.

“But he’s not so upset that he’ll turn down $3.3bn in taxpayer dollars to fund his immoral war,” the Democratic senator said in a post on X, adding that the US should cease sending Israel money “to starve Palestinian children”.

Sanders also said that Washington must push all parties to honour the resolution, which calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all captives, and significantly increase humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Netanyahu is upset. He cancelled a delegation to DC because the U.S. abstained from a resolution calling for a ceasefire. But he’s not so upset that he’ll turn down $3.3B in taxpayer dollars to fund his immoral war. No more money for Netanyahu to starve Palestinian children. — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 25, 2024

Jordan: Israeli reaction to UN resolution shows ‘disdain’ for international law

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi says the UNSC resolution on Gaza must be implemented so Israel won’t continue to violate international law with impunity.

He wrote in an X post that the “reaction by the Israeli government reflects the disdain with which it holds international law”.

Safadi had earlier today heavily criticised Israel in a joint news conference with UN Secretary-General Guterres, also calling for sanctions on Israel and for all states to stop sending it arms.

The #SC finally adopted a Res. demanding a ceasefire & an end of the Israeli starvation of 2.3m Palestinians. Reaction by Israeli govt. reflects the disdain with which it holds Int’l law. Res. must be implemented. Israel can’t continue to violate international law with impunity — Ayman Safadi (@AymanHsafadi) March 25, 2024

Iran says UNSC resolution on Gaza ‘positive but insufficient step’

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Nasser Kanaani, says in a short statement that after six months of failure to adopt a deterring resolution on Israel’s “war crimes and genocide” against Palestinians, the UN Security Council vote was “a positive but insufficient step”.

“A more important step than adopting this resolution would be [an] effective action to implement it,” he said, adding that Israeli attacks on Gaza and occupied West Bank must halt, the siege of Gaza must end, crossings must open to aid and international funding must come through to rebuild the enclave.

“The reaction of the child-killing Zionist regime to the resolution indicates its clear anger from this irreparable defeat both in the field and in international politics,” Kanaani said.

White House sees UNSC rift with Israel as manufactured crisis: Report

Washington believes the public display of dissatisfaction with the US by Israel over the UNSC resolution is a manufactured crisis by Netanyahu for domestic purposes, US outlet Axios cites unnamed US officials as saying.

On Sunday evening and Monday morning, White House officials told Netanyahu’s aides in discussions about the UN resolution that the US would likely abstain from voting, a source with direct knowledge was quoted as saying.

But they reportedly told the Israelis that Biden is not changing course on Israel and views the resolution as non-binding – something the US State Department said publicly after the vote as well.

The report says the White House is now “perplexed” by Netanyahu’s cancelling of an Israeli delegation’s trip to Washington, DC, with one official saying this is “self-defeating” behaviour.

Countries should ‘pressure’ Israel into ceasing attacks on Lebanon: PM

Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Monday that the international community should put pressure on Israel following the passage of a UNSC resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

In a statement shared by his office, Mikati welcomed the resolution, saying it was “a first step on the path to stopping the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip”.

There’s been a regular exchange of fire between the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and the Israeli army since the war began.

Palestinian Authority ‘welcomes’ UNSC resolution

Hussein al-Sheikh, a top aide to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, says: “We call for a permanent cessation to this criminal war and Israel’s immediate withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.”

We welcome the #UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the #Gaza Strip. We call for a permanent cessation to this criminal war and Israel's immediate withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. https://t.co/woxJznMwQo — حسين الشيخ Hussein AlSheikh (@HusseinSheikhpl) March 25, 2024

UN mourns 171 staff members killed by Israeli military in Gaza

Today is the 171st day of Israel’s war on Gaza and it also marks 171 members of UN staff killed in the enclave.

“Most recently was Hani, killed in northern Gaza while looking for food,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), in a post on X.

“I hope that the UN Security Council call for an immediate & durable ceasefire will bring to Gaza & the region the peace its people so well deserve.”

Far more UN staff members have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza than in any previous conflict.

Today, marks day 171 of this endless war. Today also marks 171 @UNRWA team members killed since 7 October in #Gaza Most recently was Hani, killed in northern Gaza while looking for food. During the solidarity visit of our @SecGen in the Holy Month of #Ramadan we mourned our… — Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) March 25, 2024

Hamas says sticking to its original position in truce negotiations

In a press statement, the group has said that Israel has not responded to any of the demands it set forth during this round of negotiations over a ceasefire and prisoner swap.

It said that it informed mediators that it “is adhering to its position and vision that it presented on March 14”, which includes four points: “A comprehensive ceasefire, withdrawal [of Israeli forces] from the Gaza Strip, the return of the displaced, and a real exchange of prisoners”.

Hamas also accused Netanyahu and his government of “thwarting all negotiation efforts and obstructing reaching an agreement so far”.

Mediators Egypt, Qatar and the United States spent weeks trying to narrow differences between Israel and Hamas over what a ceasefire would look like before this round of negotiations between Hamas and Israel began.

Talks appear to have stalled in recent days, though US officials said today that “progress” had been achieved over the weekend.

Germany to give $48m to UNRWA across region

The German government says it is providing 45 million euros ($48m) to the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied West Bank.

“With this sum, we support health and education services as well as cash-for-work programs for Palestinian refugees,” the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development said in a post on X.

This comes days after the US Congress ratified a bill that suspends UNRWA funding until March 2025, which the UN organisation said will lead to more people not having enough to eat in the Gaza Strip.

Germany is providing 45 million euros for @UNRWA in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank. @BMZ_Bund @AuswaertigesAmt With this sum, we support health and education services as well as cash-for-work programs for Palestinian refugees. https://t.co/GMKiwQVhmQ — Germany in the United Nations (@GermanyUN) March 25, 2024

Turkey calls UNSC resolution a ‘positive step’

Turkey called the resolution passed earlier in the UN Security Council, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and the return of all captives held there as well as the prospective return of humanitarian access to Gaza, “a positive step”.

“We hope that Israel will comply with the requirements of this resolution without delay,” Turkish Foreign Affairs spokesman Oncu Keceli says.

“We call on the international community to take a united stand against Israel to end the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and to find a lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he adds.

US military says it carried out aid drops into northern Gaza

The US army’s Central Command says the operation included C-17 aircraft and US soldiers specialised in the aerial delivery of humanitarian assistance.

The aid, which included 46,000 meals, was dropped into northern Gaza, “an area of great need, allowing for civilian access to the critical aid”.

The US has denied it was responsible for a deadly airdrop in early March when malfunctioning parachutes carrying aid crates killed five Palestinians and wounded 10.

March 25 USCENTCOM Conducts Humanitarian Airdrops into Gaza U.S. Central Command conducted an air drop of humanitarian assistance into Northern Gaza on March 25, 2024, at 12:10 p.m. (Gaza time) to provide essential relief to civilians affected by the ongoing conflict. The joint… pic.twitter.com/RQQjplan5P — U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 25, 2024

‘This is a struggle to survive’: Gaza shop owner

This video from the al-Haq rights group, based in the occupied West Bank, shows how Abu al-Saeed al-Sousi, the owner of the oldest felafel shop in Gaza, is running his business amid widespread starvation there.

“There is no electricity, no gas, and we still manage to work,” he said, adding that he is selling his felafels much cheaper than usual to help people out even as prices are skyrocketing as local markets have shut down in Gaza.

“This is a struggle to survive. We are struggling to maintain our existence. We were hit in 2021, and the shop was gone, and hopefully, if God wills it, we will come back and rebuild again.”

#Gaza testimonies: The Oldest Falafel Shop in the Gaza Strip: “This is a struggle to survive…We are here, we are struggling to maintain our existence. We were hit in 2021 and the shop was gone, and hopefully, if God wills it, we will come back and rebuild again.” #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/z5oQVwfrsZ — Al-Haq الحق (@alhaq_org) March 25, 2024

Qassam Brigades targets Israeli military near al-Shifa Hospital

Video obtained by Al Jazeera shows the military wing of Hamas is targeting Israeli vehicles with rocket launchers and sniping Israeli soldiers on a rooftop in Gaza City.

The Israeli military’s week-long siege on the hospital in north Gaza has left the facility significantly damaged. The Israeli military claims it has killed more than 175 Palestinian fighters and arrested hundreds more inside and around the hospital.

Qatar welcomes UNSC resolution calling for Gaza ceasefire during Ramadan

In a statement, the Qatari Foreign Ministry says it hopes the resolution represents a step towards a permanent ceasefire in the besieged coastal enclave.

“The ministry stresses the importance of committing to implementing the resolution, especially the ceasefire, and allowing humanitarian aid urgently and without obstacles into the entire Gaza Strip, and to be positively involved in ongoing negotiations,” it says.

The ministry also stressed that Qatar is continuing its role as interlocutor “in cooperation with other partners to stop the war on Gaza and remedying its humanitarian ramifications”.

South Africa urges UNSC to ensure ‘compliance’ with resolution

South Africa says it welcomes the adoption of a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all captives held by Palestinian groups.

“It is now the responsibility of the United Nations Security Council to ensure that there is compliance with the resolution, which is binding on the parties,” South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation said in a statement.