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The Other's War is an intervention into a set of contemporary moral, political and legal debates over the legitimacy of war and terrorism within the context of the so-called global war on terror.
Tarik Kochi considers how, despite the variety of its approaches – just war theory, classical realist, post-Kantian, poststructuralist - contemporary ethical, political and legal philosophy still struggles to produce a convincing account of war.
Focusing on the philosophical problem of the rightness of war, The Other's War responds to this lack. Through a discussion of a number of key Western intellectual traditions, Kochi demonstrates how often conflicting and contradictory conceptions of war’s rightness have developed in modernity. He shows how a process of ordering violence around different notions of right has constantly redrawn the boundaries of what constitutes ‘legitimate’ violence.
Such a process has consequences for anyone who claims to be fighting a ‘just war’. Building upon this account and drawing upon the philosophical heritage of G.W.F. Hegel and Ernst Bloch, The Other’s War proposes a new understanding of war, not just as a social condition characterised by violent conflict and struggles for power, but as the attempt of individuals and groups to realise their normative claims through violence.
