This issue of our journal – while asking crucial questions about today’s world and our future challenges – contains thoughtful pieces attending to history. It has been compiled while the war in Ukraine continues fiercely and frighteningly, and while violent unrest in Sudan, the Middle East, and several other theaters keeps shocking us.
In this rapidly changing and violent world, does history matter? Can we learn from long-dead figures – most of them, as we are frequently and correctly reminded, white men?
James Turner Johnson has been among the leading scholars to insist not only that we can learn from history, thinkers, and tradition, but that we must. Crucial terminology and theoretical categories as well as deep-seated moral convictions, after all, come from somewhere, and by taking seriously how they have emerged we can more clearly grasp their meaning and importance, in the past and today. Edward Erwin’s useful book review of a recent volume of Johnson’s landmark essays brings this into focus. Not least, it reminds us of the coherence of just-war and military-ethics categories over the centuries and across traditions, even as disagreements have been aired and moral views and contexts have changed. Also in this issue, Mihaly Boda helps us untangle differences and nuances within the history of medieval military ethics, adding insights into why human beings more than 1000 years ago as well as in the present have held some actions to be right and others to be deeply wrong.
As we do our best to insist on basic rules of decency and dignity during armed conflict, and as we ask big questions about the morality of nuclear deterrence or the ethical use of artificial intelligence, we should indeed look back to lessons from past thinkers and traditions. We do this not to copy them, nor to accept their teachings uncritically, but in order to develop our serious conversations about military ethics still further.