Conceptualizing Politics

3.   Restraints to war, or peace?
Can war be limited in frequency and cruelty? Or can war be erased from the future 
and peace established? How, and to what extent?
The containment of war has been seen by theorists and statesmen as a goal that 
should be strived for by (a) restructuring international relations, or (b) imposing 
normative (legal) constraints on the behaviour of states.
Under (a) the tools known so far are:
•  hegemonic peace. A hegemonic or imperial power keeps peace under the 
countries within its sphere of influence and, thanks to this control mechanism, 
with competing powers as well. The Cold War was a last example of this bipo-
lar hegemonic system, complemented by the balance of terror.
• 
the balance of power as explained above.
• 
the nuclear balance of terror relying on deterrence as mutually assured destruc-
tion; but also the high degree of technological destructiveness another conven-
tional world war would set out works as a deterrent.
• 
collective security, including common security, as previously explained.
• 
democratic peace: democratic countries do not go to war against each other. This 
is a theoretical claim, first raised by Kant (1795) in Perpetual Peace. If you want 
peace, he suggested, you must change the international system, making it fed-
erative in the sense of a league of states; but also eradicate the cause of war in 
the domestic regime, switching it to republican, which for Kant means based on 
the freedom and equality of all citizens under the law; we, living in democratic 
countries, say now democratic instead of republican by looking at the origin 
of the law from the citizens’ will. A republican or democratic regime lacks 
the eagerness for war that characterises absolute or authoritarian or totalitarian 
regimes. Beyond an arguable theoretical claim democratic peace has to date 
been also an empirical fact, since there is not a single case of liberal-democratic 
countries waging war against each other, while they can be – and have been – 
fierce fighters against non-democratic regimes. Needless to say, neither Kant’s 
argument nor its updated version justifies any war to ‘export democracy’. Also, 
an evolution towards populism can spoil democracy and democratic peace also 
in the sense of making a country xenophobic and aggressive.
Under (b), that is from a normative perspective, we re-encounter in full size the 
just war tradition. Just war means justified, admissible war, and this theory is aimed 
at checking the reasons for going to war, strictly defining and limiting them; it has 

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116  World politics and the future of politics
nothing to do with holy war, being instead its contrary, that is containment of war 
rather than enthusiasm for it. Every civilisation has its own standards for admitting 
or rejecting war; we can only briefly illustrate the Western tradition, which goes 
back to St. Augustine, but was in modern times secularised and in this version 
influenced the norms regarding war in international law. The tradition includes ius 
ad bellum and ius in bello.
Ius ad (or in) bellum regulates the right to go to war and has been the least effec-
tive part of the doctrine, since states have often waged war only pretending with 
captious arguments to respect it. In modern times, as we have seen, that right is 
co-extensive with sovereignty, but is now strictly defined by the UN Charter in 
Chapter 7. War is only permissible in self-defence or to support the self-defence of 
a country being attacked, which is what has sometimes occurred since 1945 and 
represents a legal support to collective security systems.
10
 Otherwise, military action 
can only be taken by the Security Council ‘to maintain or restore international 
peace and security’ (Art. 51) with forces provided by the member states and with 
the help of UN Military Staff Committee – which is the provision never enacted 
in over 70 years because of the opposition or lack of interest of the great powers. 
Even the armed forces intervening in Korea 1950 and Kuwait 1990–1991 were 
just a coalition of national forces authorised to intervene by the Security Council.
Ius in bello (the laws of war) is now defined by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 
as far as the distinction of combatants and non-combatants with all its corollaries 
is concerned, and by other conventions with regard to non-permissible weapons 
such as chemical and biological ones. This part of the just war doctrine has been 
more successful than ius ad bellum and was to an extent respected even in the battles 
of the Second World War in Africa and on the Western European front – except in