| Summary: | My aim in this article is to show that the Christian just war tradition remains very much alive, continuing to develop as it wrestles with conceptual problems and thinks its way through novel cases. I begin by explaining briefly why I choose to think in terms of the Christian tradition. Then I proceed to discuss four controversial issues that my recent book, In Defence of War, has raised: the conception of just war as punitive, the penultimate nature of the authority of international law, the morality of national interest, and the elasticity of the requirement of proportionality. Finally, in order to illustrate the interpretation of some of the criteria of just war, and to show how these develop upon encounter with particular circumstances, I consider three topical cases: Britain’s belligerency against Germany in 1914, the Syrian rebellion against the Assad regime in 2011, and Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza in 2014.
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