Preface

Writing about war, I often mistype the word “casualties,” leaving me to wonder what is casual or causal about the harm befalling combatants and noncombatants. Similarly, as a student of armed conflict, I often wonder what is civil about civilians or civil war. Casual suggests the chance or accidental nature of wartime injuries and deaths. Causal, on the other hand, directs our attention away from chance and toward a discernible sequence of events that result in injury or death. Civil connotes a measure of respect for normative behavior and, therefore, responsibility on the part of all participants, including soldiers, civilians, and bystanders, for the goings on in wartime.

Responsibility and liability do not change much whether one considers war from the perspective of states or insurgents. In many ways, therefore, The Ethics of Insurgency is a sequel to Moral Dilemmas of Modern War. Both books question the moral and legal limits imposed on state and non-state actors in modern warfare. In Moral Dilemmas I asked how states may fight successfully against guerrillas who employ terrorism and fight from within civilian populations. My answer, I thought, was rather modest. I did not advocate dogmatic adherence to existing law, nor did I advocate jettisoning the law in its entirety. Rather, I hoped that the ethical principles that protect the basic rights of combatants and noncombatants could guide me as I threaded my way through the demands of ethics and the exigencies of modern battle. The result was to lend qualified support to targeted killing and various nonlethal weapons and to lower the bar on harming civilians who provided significant support to their side’s war-fighting efforts.