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Recent decades have seen an increasing reliance on private military contractors (PMCs) to provide logistical services, training, maintenance, and combat troops. In Outsourcing War, Amy E. Eckert examines the ethical implications involved in the widespread use of PMCs, and in particular questions whether they can fit within customary ways of understanding the ethical prosecution of warfare. Her concern is with the ius in bello (right conduct in war) strand of just war theory. Just war theorizing is generally built on the assumption that states, and states alone, wield a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Who holds responsibility for the actions of PMCs? What ethical standards might they be required to observe? How might deviations from such standards be punished? The privatization of warfare poses significant challenges because of its reliance on a statist view of the world. Eckert argues that the tradition of just war theory—which predates the international system of states—can evolve to apply to this changing world order. With an eye toward the practical problems of military command, Eckert delves into particular cases where PMCs have played an active role in armed conflict and derives from those cases the modifications necessary to apply just principles to new agents in the landscape of war.

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls modeled peoples as being independent and mutually disinterested. This is an assumption that mirrors his treatment of individual persons in the domestic context. This article argues that this assumption does not translate to the international context. While individual persons do not require the existence of other persons, states cannot exist independently of other states. Because statehood is a social construct, states require the recognition (and the existence) of other states, and they are incapable of being considered independently of the system and the other states that populate the system. Drawing on aspects of the relational dimension of care ethics, this article considers the implications of rejecting the assumption of independence and mutual disinterest. Theorizing states as inherently connected to one another allows the relationships and connections among them to come into the process of developing principles of justice.

"International Ethics within the International Social Contract" published on by Oxford University Press.

In his provocative book War and Self-Defense, David Rodin criticizes attempts to justify national defense based on an analogy between the individual and the state. In doing so, he treats state personality as an analogy to the personality of the individual. Yet the state possesses the key attributes of moral personality, including a conception of the good life and a sense of justice. The state's unobservable — but nevertheless real — moral personality means that it also possessed the right to defend the continued existence of that personality against an attack. Subject to the same constraints that are placed on individuals, such as necessity and proportionality, the state possesses the right to national defense based on its own personality.