Global Violence: Ethical and Political Issues

Eric A Heinze

Jan 2016 · Routledge

About this ebook

What does it mean to say that a particular war is just or unjust, that terrorism is always wrong, or that torture can sometimes be morally justified? What are the moral bases for the possession or use of nuclear weapons, intervening in other countries’ civil wars, or being a bystander to genocide? Such questions take us to the heart of what is morally right and wrong behaviour in our world.

Global Violence: Ethical and Political Issues

provides readers with the analytical tools to better understand the suppositions that underlie the debates about such questions, as well as advances its own reasoned and informed ethical analyses of these topics. The book engages different normative approaches from the fields of ethics, political theory, and international relations and uses them to examine a set of case studies on the subjects of inter-state and civil war, nuclear weapons, terrorism, torture and genocide.

About the author

Eric A. Heinze is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Oklahoma, USA. He is the author of Waging Humanitarian War: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention (2009); co-editor of Ethics, Authority, and War: Non-State Actors and the Just War Tradition (2010); and editor of Justice, Sustainability, and Security: Global Ethics for the 21st Century (2013).