The Language of War (original) (raw)
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The concept of just war in Russian and American linguistic cultures
SHS Web of Conferences
The study examines the concept of just war in the military-political discourse and technologies of manipulating the mass consciousness used by the leaders of the Russian and American states in speeches based on the idea of just war. Lexical and semantic analysis of the lexemes “just” and “war” in Russian and English is carried out. The relevance of the study is determined by the increasing attention to the military-political discourse and actualization of the concept. It received consistent substantiation and development in the works of medieval scholastics. In the 21st century, it serves the purposes of moral and ethical justification of modern military conflicts. The purpose of the study was to analyze the concept of just war at the lexical and semantic level and describe its ontological foundations and implementation in the Russian and American mental lexicons. Based on the analysis, the authors have identified general and particular aspects of the just war concept in the Russian...
Just and Unjust Wars - and Just and Unjust Arguments (2003)
OSSA, 2003
Much of the vocabulary that we use to talk about the cluster of concepts associated with war is commonly applied to arguments. Some parts, of course, do not seem to apply so easily, if at all, and that creates problematic distortion. For all its problems, however, there is still much to be gleaned from the argument-is-war paradigm because there are war-concepts that can be but largely have not been deployed in thinking about arguments. Some of them really should be because of the light they can shed on argumentation. In particular, the concepts, principles, and lessons from Just War theory provide a valuable lens for looking at arguments. We can theorize about Just and Unjust Arguments.
Jus ad Vim and the Question of How to Do Just War Theory
Force Short of War in Modern Conflict: Jus ad Vim, 2019
Contemporary debate about just war has been split into two competing camps, the Walzerian approach and its revisionist critics. Rather than engaging each other fruitfully, the two sides have vigorously upheld their respective approach, causing a “war of ethics within the ethics of war.” In particular, they have argued about the question whether there are two distinct moralities of war and peace. This article suggests that the concept of jus ad vim which triggered the most recent battle between Walzerians and revisionists may start a conversation between the two camps. Especially because jus ad vim imagined as uses of force short of war seems to be situated in-between the moralities of war and peace, between military conduct and policing, it may function as jumping-off point where Walzerians and revisionists meet on neutral ground. Critiquing Walzerians for their flawed use of casuistry and revisionists for their ahistorical and impractical reasoning the article argues for a return to a traditional and, preferably, Thomistic casuistry. Such a casuistry, in order not to commit Walzer’s mistakes, needs the revisionists in the role of a lockkeeper who stops the flow of poor casuistry. This function would uniquely fits the tool kit of analytical philosophy which the revisionists employ. As a result, the revisionists could find their place within the just war tradition, a place the Walzerians seem to deny to them.
Selling war. The Role of the Mass Media in Hostile Conflicts from World War I to the "War on Terror", 2013
The irruption, in Modernity, of the masses in the political scene brought about a deep change in the way war is thought and fought. From an operation carried out with the use of a restricted number of troops, modern war has increasingly become an event that requires the total involvement, whether direct or indirect, of the people inside a State. This historical-political change strongly contributed to transform war from a purely military activity to a cultural event. Notwithstanding the varying nature of the media used in the course of history, modern war was always preceded and accompanied by a discourse: a set of narratives and images capable of imposing, on the public sphere, a historically specific concept of war in order to attain popular support. Through the analysis of the different discourses of war, we can observe how the twentieth century, during which the relationship between war and communication reaches its most mature phase, saw the development of three main discourses; three discourses that are different yet inescapably connected. The first half of the century was characterized by the circulation of a discourse that conveyed a positive idea of war, exalting its mortiferous nature and heroic dimension. War thus became socially accepted, and though taking on different nuances in each single country, Europe was pervaded by the idea that war could regenerate a continent considered by many old and tired. After the two World Wars, the tragic historical consequences connected to this discourse and the development of weapons of mass destruction contribute to the development of a very different concept of war. That event which had triggered so much enthusiasm until the mid-twentieth century became a dangerous and potentially catastrophic event, which produced a constant international tension and consequently shifted war onto a strictly virtual plain. Only with the end of the Cold War, there is a return of a war that is actually, materially fought; this time, however, the discourse developed around the concept of war appears to reverse the terms that had been dominant in the first half of the century. The penetrating role of the media imposes the dominant idea, in the public sphere, that war is a cold, aseptic event: it appears as an operation that aims exclusively at restoring a violated normality through absolute technological precision. Through a comparison of the different discourses of war, we can observe how the concept of war continually undergoes a process of semantic sliding. This is not a spontaneous process, but the consequence of constant power dynamics that transform the public sphere into one of the most important and significant battlefields. (The attached file is a draft, but it has the same layout and page numbers as the original)
Delineating the Language Features of War Speeches
Academic Research Publishing Group, 2018
The writer sets out to study excerpted samples of the war speeches made across the world between the World War eras and the present with a view to finding out the linguistic choices favoured by war leaders over time to drum up support for wars. It is argued here that there may be something unique in the linguistic choices made in war speeches which convince people to support the prosecution of wars despite the wanton destruction that follows them. Framed on a descriptive research design, with stylistics as the theoretical framework, the study examines the excerpts chosen by deliberate sampling so as to identify and analyze the features they share. The analysis reveals that the speeches share many linguistic features in common, all of which may be responsible for the control of the minds and actions of the people.
The Laws of War in International Thought (OUP 2020)
The Law of Armed Conflict is usually understood to be a regime of exception that applies only during armed conflict and regulates hostilities among enemies. It assigns privileges to states far beyond what they are allowed to do in peacetime, and it mandates certain protections for non-combatants, which can often be defeated by appeals to military necessity or advantage. The Laws of War in International Thought examines the intellectual history of the laws of war before their codification. It reconstructs the processes by which political and legal theorists built the laws’ distinctive vocabularies and legitimized some of their widest permissions, and it situates these processes within the broader intellectual project that from early modernity spelled out the nature, function, and powers of state sovereignty. The book focuses on four historical moments in the intellectual history of the laws of war: the doctrine of just war in Spanish scholasticism; Hugo Grotius’s theory of solemn war; the Enlightenment theory of regular war; and late nineteenth-century humanitarianism. By looking at these moments, Pablo Kalmanovitz shows how challenging and polemical it has been for international theorists to justify the exceptional and permissive character of the laws of war. In this way, he contributes to recover a sense of the historical foundations and many still problematic aspects of the Law of Armed Conflict.