Scarred souls, weary warriors, and military intervention: the emergence of the subject in the just war writings of Jean Bethke Elshtain

Abstract

Over the past three decades Jean Bethke Elshtain has used her critique and application of just war as a means of engaging with multiple overlapping aspects of identity. Though Elshtain ostensibly writes about war and the justice, or lack of justice, therein, she also uses just war a site of analysis within which different strands of subjectivity are investigated and articulated as part of her broader political theory. This article explores the proposition that Elshtain's most important contribution to the just war tradition is not be found in her provision of codes or her analysis of ad bellum or in bello criteria, conformity to which adjudges war or military intervention to be just or otherwise. Rather, that she enriches just war debate because of the unique and sometimes provocative perspective she brings as political theorist and International Relations scholar who adopts, adapts, and deploys familiar but, for some, uncomfortable discursive artefacts from the history of the Christian West: suffused with her own Christian faith and theology. In so doing she continually reminds us that human lives, with all their attendant political, social, and religious complexities, should be the focus when military force is used, or even proposed, for political ends.

How I learned tostartworrying and love the just war tradition

“…18 I will not pretend to have any deep understanding of this approach, but the evidence before me suggests that it is a direction well worth pursuing. The sophistication of (relatively) recent works along these or related lines by Ronan O'Callaghan (2016) and Peter Lee (2013), as well as by Zehfuss, indicate its rich promise. More tangentially: Bulley (2009).…”

Delivering life, delivering death: Reaper drones, hysteria and maternity

“…3 The trope of the ‘Beautiful Soul’ who remains at the home hearth and who requires the protection of the masculine ‘Just Warrior’ remains a strong one, and one which disciplines women’s actions (Carreiras, 2006; Cohn, 2013; Elshtain, 1995; Goldstein, 2003). As such, war narratives have almost exclusively been constructed around the male head of the family going off to war in order to protect the home and hearth, and the stay-at-home wife, who provides the rationale for the warrior’s actions, but has no active part in hostilities beyond birthing the next generation of just warriors and beautiful souls (Elshtain, 1995; Lee, 2013). This narrative myth has powerful disciplinary effects on our thinking about warfare, including drone warfare, because it scripts who can and cannot be considered intelligible as a member of a drone crew.…”