Honourable Mention for the BISA Susan Strange Prize

Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West's ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox: Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book examines how we have responded to this dilemma and challenges the vision of ethical war itself, exploring how the commitment to ethics shapes the practice of war and indeed how practices come, in turn, to shape what is considered ethical in war. The book closely examines particular practices of warfare, such as targeting, the use of cultural knowledge, and ethics training for soldiers. What emerges is that instead of constraining violence, the commitment to ethics enables and enhances it. The book argues that the production of ethical war relies on an impossible but obscured separation between ethics and politics, that is, the problematic politics of ethics, and reflects on the need to make decisions at the limit of ethics.

"Her book opens with an invitation to the reader to consider both the promise and the peril of the idea that war can ever be a noble or worthy enterprise. [Zehfuss] ultimately argues that the peril far exceeds the promise. But how she gets there is fascinating." - Cian O'Driscoll, EIA (Ethics & International Affairs), 34, No. 4

"War and the Politics of Ethics does a] remarkable job of drawing attention to the way in which ethics can work to enhance the destructiveness of war" - Thomas Gregory, Millennium: Journal of International Studies