“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” rings Charles Dickens' famous beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. The bewildering times it describes, around the French revolution, can find a counterpart in almost any age. Contradictory trends and conflicting emotions are as much part of the human condition as they are of any particular historic time.
Yet, in terms of military force and its right use, ours are quite conflicted times: in some ways the best, and in others ways, if not quite the worst, at least bewildering and dangerous.
On the one hand, our age is a relatively peaceful one. Several remarkably stable trends indicate that international war is becoming rarer, some would say on its way to becoming obsolete. Localized and regional civil wars still inflict great suffering and tragedy. But, so goes the argument, along with the increased hopes for economic success through international cooperation and trade also come the hopes for fewer wars, simply because there will be fewer reasons to fight them. Some, such as Stephen Pinker and Azar Gat, also hold that we human beings are becoming gradually more civilized.
On the other hand, even if the economic argument holds (which many fear it does not), the optimism about human civilization can be questioned, or at least be nuanced. After all, human beings are driven by more than economic incentives, and spurred to action by more than trade and prosperity. Pride, protest, and patriotism are forces stirring deep in the human soul in any age, for good and ill. Exploiting genuine grievances and political chaos for the sake of gaining ideological victory or personal power is also widespread, sometimes leading to untold devastation, as in Syria. And when the drive for prosperity turns to personal greed, without the check of a stable rule of law, corruption is the typical result rather than stable peace. In that sense, we are witnessing events right now that lead us to anything but optimism.
The question about the general direction – if any – of the world is closely related to the question of the relative newness of the phenomena of our age. Are we at the dawn of a new era, with brand new challenges never seen before, or are we simply repeating the same mistakes and successes that have always haunted and graced humankind? Or are both true?
From the point of view of military ethics, we could ask whether the unrest we are seeing of various kinds in the Crimea, Syria, Afghanistan, and the Central African Republic is just a repeat of well-known power struggles and state failures. Or are we seeing something genuinely new, or at least fragments of it? To take but one example: What role does social media play, considering the fact that messages of protest and violence can now be spread and read at a rate that leaves the Gutenbergian revolution in the dust?
This journal – between the lines, and sometimes clearly in them – keeps exploring these underlying topics in manifold ways. In this issue, as in most of our current issues, the quandaries raised by new fighting machines, unmanned, autonomous, and in cyber space, are raised in challenging ways. To what extent are the problems we face – and the solutions we can find – really ages-old, and to what extent is this something brand new? We also pick up on some old-standing theoretical debates with real practical ramifications, most particularly the relationship between having a just cause and a right intention, and the utility and meaning of ‘double-effect’ reasoning. Furthermore, the problems posed by private contractors in that public activity par excellence, namely war, are given renewed attention. All combine well-known debates with new and important formulations of the problems.
This 2014 volume, if it should be read many years from now, may tell its readers that some new issues were indeed on the horizon, and that we and our fine authors managed to detect some aspects of them. A hundred years ago, few predicted what became, that very year, the First World War. Presently, some are foreseeing the dawn of a new Cold War in the wake of Russia's territorial claims. However, maybe the problem is that what we are seeing is quite different from what we have seen before – or at least nothing like what we are comparing it to.
Whatever the answer to those quandaries, our firm belief is that the discourse about the ethical use of armed force must be a crucial part of these debates – whether old or new. If we find ourselves facing brand new problems, but have forgotten to bring both old and new ethical insights to bear, we may come to realize that we have failed to bring the most central question to the table, namely, what all of this means to human beings, their dignity, safety, and security.
Henrik Syse and Martin L. Cook