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Articles

Mohist Anti-Militarism & Just War Theory

Shaun O’Dwyer takes an unfortunately still relevant look at how to avoid war.

With the return of geopolitics, and with the international institutions built after 1945 to prevent or contain war now being perilously weak, the world again faces growing risks of conflict between industrialized nations - such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There have been polarized responses to this conflict. One response has been to denounce Western military support for Ukraine as ‘militarism’. Often such denunciations cloak a hypocrisy which faults Western imperialism while giving a free pass to the imperialism of non-Western powers, such as Russia or China. Yet both hypocritical anti-imperialists and more impartial pacifists frequently conflate militarism – the policy of building armed forces and using them aggressively to advance national interests against other states – with deterrence and just war theories created to counter militarism.

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