Ethics In War Collateral Damage and Just War Theory

Violent conflict among human beings is, unfortunately, one of the great constants in our history as a species.  As far back as we can see, the human species has engaged in war and other forms of organized violence.  But it is equally true that, as far back as human culture and thought have left written records, humans have engaged in thought about morality and ethics.  Although cultures vary widely in how they interpret death and killing from a moral and religious perspective, every human culture has recognized that taking human life is a morally grave matter; every human culture has felt the need to justify taking of life in moral and religious terms.

A variety of ethical objections have been raised against the military employment of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones). Some of these objections are technological concerns
over UAVs abilities’ to function on par with their inhabited counterparts. This paper sets such concerns aside and instead focuses on supposed objections to the use of UAVs in principle. I examine several such objections currently on offer and show them all to be wanting. Indeed, I argue that we have a general duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly. UAVs can afford precisely such protection. Therefore, we are obligated to employ UAV weapon systems for a justified mission if it can be shown that their use does not significantly reduce a warfighter’s operational capability. Of course, if a given military action is unjustified to begin with, then carrying out that act via UAVs is wrong, just as it would be with any weapon. But the point of this paper is to show that there is nothing wrong in principle with using a UAV and that, other things being equal, using
such technology can be, in fact, obligatory.

Talal Asad’s essay “What do Human Rights Do?” was published
in the year 2000 in the immediate aftermath of the NATO bombing
campaign against Serbia. That same year, Amnesty International
(AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) both released reports
that documented and evaluated the civilian deaths during “Operation
Allied Force”. Both reports sought to determine whether these deaths
complied with international humanitarian law and could therefore be
regarded as “collateral damage”, which HRW, following US military
usage, defined as “damage to civilian objects and civilian casualties
that are incidental to lawful attacks on military objectives.”1
One answer to Asad’s question, ‘What Do Human Rights Do?” is suggested
by the title of Amnesty International’s report on the NATO military
campaign, “‘Collateral Damage’ or Unlawful Killing”: human rights
has become one language used to define certain forms of killing as
‘mere’ “collateral damage”.

This is my contribution to the twentieth anniversary edition of Theory and Event. This is how the editors describe the idea:

"The first is a look back at the founding of the journal through the implications of the present. What is T&E for younger scholars, academics whose intellectual careers postdate its founding? In other words, we wanted the perspectives of those for whom the journal has always been present.  As a gesture toward (and recognition of) the past, and inspired by a conversation with Wendy Brown and William Connolly about the emergence of the journal, we asked a number of such theorists to select an essay from the first five volumes of the journal and engage its insights and influences.  As the reader will quickly realize, these are neither summaries nor histories, but continued engagements with the persistent issues raised by the original work.  Each scholar’s contentions and critique of ideas from a generation ago continue the intellectual project of the journal."

The entire edition is currently free to download here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/35735

A specific cultural awareness and educational preparation is necessary to most effectively minister to US Military personnel and Veterans.  US Military Service Members and Veterans are a unique and the only voluntary minority group in the United States of America.  At different eras in American history US Military Service Members and Veterans have been lauded and despised by the people they serve.  Normally marginalized and viewed on the periphery of the majority culture.  The majority culture of the US historically defines minorities by race and ethnic origin.  Now, sexual identity and religion are definitions that are used to identify minority populations by the US Majority culture.  US Military Service Members and Veterans defy these majority culture categories of minority.  US Military Service Members and Veterans are visually, socially and ethnically a diverse population.  US Military Culture members embrace and live values formative of the original American social and cultural identity.  Additionally, other values that make the success of US Military operations possible seem incongruent with the expressed values of the contemporary US Majority culture.  Among these values are obedience and personal responsibility.  All of these values must be introduced, fostered and bred into US Military Service Members.  These same values are practical expressions of the reality of a life lived in a culture that existence is predicated on a need that is greater than the individual members of that culture, or that cultural group as a whole.  To facilitate effective ministry to this underserved population New York Theological Seminary adopted and implemented a new Doctor of Ministry Curriculum using its standard DMin program platform.

In this chapter we will look at two jus in bello constraints that restrict the amount of force combatants are permitted to use during armed conflict. If the principle of discrimination determines whom we can kill and what we can break, proportionality and necessity determine the amount of damage we may permissibly do. In traditional Just War Theory these two constraints are often combined in discussion of the jus in bello proportionality principle. However, for greater clarity, I will pull them apart here.

This Article investigates how contemporary laws of war rationalize civilian deaths. I concentrate on two specific legal constructions in warfare: the definition of civilian/combatant and the principle of distinction. (The categories of civilian and combatant should be understood as dialogically constitutive and not entirely distinct. In addition, the category of "civilian" is a modern one and premodern legal sources often do not use one term to refer to noncombatants.) I focus on two significant parties in contemporary warfare: al-Qāʿidah (aka Al-Qaeda) and the U.S. military. Al-Qāʿidah diverges from orthodox Islamic law on these two legal issues, while remaining within the Islamic legal tradition. To scrutinize the nature of this divergence, I compare al-Qāʿidah's legal reasoning to the legal reasoning of the U.S. military. I demonstrate that the U.S. military diverges from orthodox international law in ways that parallel how al-Qāʿidah diverges from orthodox Islamic law. Specifically, both the U.S. military and al-Qāʿidah elide orthodox categories of civilians and expand the category of combatant, primarily by rendering civilians as probable combatants. Based on this comparative analysis, I argue that the legal reasoning of al-Qāʿidah (and other militant Islamist groups) is as secular as it is Islamic; I call this fusion secularislamized law.

This book examines John Calvin’s sense of vocation.

1) It begins with an analysis of thinking on prophecy in early, medieval, and Reformation theology.

2) It finds Calvin within a non-mystical, non-apocalyptic prophetic tradition that focused on scriptural interpretation.

3) It argues Calvin believed his prophetic authority was the same as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and suggests that he may have held himself to be infallible in matters related to Christian doctrine.

4) It argues that starting from about 1555, Calvin began to conceive the idea of encouraging one of the French 'lesser magistrates' (the princes of the blood royal) to rise up in armed conflict against the sitting French king with the aim of taking the throne.

5) Thus, it argues that when that did happen in 1562 when Louis of Condé gathered troops in Orléans and declared their intentions to liberate King Charles IX from the evil councillors surrounding him, this had Calvin's fingerprints on it -- Calvin was to a significant degree responsible for this turn of events.

6) Calvin pursued this plan, I argue, as one of a number of approaches to winning France for the gospel. In this way, the volume explores Calvin's sense of vocation and the impact this had on his political thought.

The following is a unique interpretation of the development of Christian Just War theory, and other Christian attitudes towards war and killing, which holds the following points:
• Christian attitudes towards war and the State-sanctioned taking of human life are both linked to the State position regarding capital punishment;
• Christian attitudes towards war largely developed from Jewish thought, but did so in an almost mirror image over time, ending with the Holy War (and arguably its apex of the Crusade).
• Christianity as a religion essentially changed from a religion of individual Salvation, to include group conversion, to a religion which served the State as both Church and State became more intertwined.
Note that the Holy War terminology, which was the original position taken by the peoples and religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt, preceded yet overlapped for a time with Judaism. However, Judaism used different principles, thoughts, and terminology to describe its wars. This terminology included the concepts of commanded wars, discretionary (permitted) wars, and obligatory wars.

This paper is focused on the Niger Delta Region and Ogoniland in particular with respect to the nonviolent remonstration of the Movement of the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) against environmental degradation from 1970 to 2005. The effects of oil exploration & production on Ogoni people are examined. Trail of reactions by the Ogoni people, Shell and the Nigerian government is also discussed. The main objective of this paper is to inquire deeper into the real causes of the environmental degradation in Ogoniland and re-awaken the clamor for Shell and the Nigerian state to clean up the oil spills in the Niger Delta Region and make Shell Petroleum Development Company in particular and other oil companies in general engage in best practices as it concerns oil exploitation and exploration.

Keywords: Nonviolent movement in Nigeria, Ogoni, Shell operations in Nigeria, MOSOP.

Over the past decade, U.S. officials have taken steps to institutionalize the practice of targeted killing of persons outside an identifiable war zone. In the past, such a policy would have been described as extrajudicial killings. Advocates of this policy claim that the practice is permissible because the executive reviews and authorizes every targeted strike. I examine the tenability of this claim in light of Aquinas's understanding of the natural principles of justice and their implication for our definition of murder and the duties of a sovereign judge to those subject to his judgment. I conclude that Aquinas's understanding of murder is expansive enough to include the use of lethal force by public authorities when it proceeds from an act of judgment that disregards a presumption of innocence for the accused and her right to a fair trial.

The research aims to dissect the role played by NATO during the conflict in the Balkan area between the years 1991-1999. In particular, it will take into account the latter part of the war, focusing on 78 days of NATO air strike in Kosovo region.

The answers to the questions of the study are concealed in the articles of several dozen academics and firsthand testimonies of that historical period, such as the famous scholars Norberto Bobbio, Luigi Ferrajoli, Danilo Zolo, Mary Kaldor, Alberto Castelli and, certainly, politicians as the former Italian Minister of Defense Carlo Scognamiglio Pasini or the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

In particular, the book Mediation in International Relations, Multiple
Approaches to Conflict Management by Jacob Bercovitch and Jeffrey Z. Rubin offers diverse resolutions to consider in the next conflicts.

The main purpose of the investigation is to give the reader an example of failed international mediation. Indeed, the study aims to encourage new generations to achieve the necessary skills to successfully manage similar events.

The article intends to investigate the theme of the psychological instance, theorized by Roberto Pane, in a new interpretation linked to the case study of Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome. Following the atomic bombing of 1945, the building, one of a kind in the Japanese setting, has been preserved in the state of ruin. Any completion practice has been excluded in order to preserve the memory of the painful war attack as one with the ruin. Such a brave conservation strategy, nourished by the plan of a new urban park incorporating the ruins, is analyzed according to the theory of the psychological instance by Roberto Pane. It aims at complementing the historical and aesthetical instance associated with the post-war reconstruction debate. The Japanese example poses itself as a paradigm of interpretation of the European debate and its repercussions in the international arena too.

Although long-established military virtues, such as honor, courage and loyalty, are what most armed forces today still use as guiding principles in an effort to enhance the moral behavior of soldiers, much depends on whether the military virtues adhered to by these militaries suit a particular mission or military operation. Clearly, the beneficiaries of these military virtues are the soldiers themselves, fellow-soldiers, and military organizations, yet there is little that regulates the behavior of soldiers towards civilian populations. As a result, troops trained for combat in today's missions sometimes experience difficulty in adjusting to the less aggressive ways of working needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations after major combat is over. It can be argued that today's missions call for virtues that are more inclusive than the traditional ones, which are mainly about enhancing military effectiveness, but a convincing case can be made that a lot can already be won by interpreting these traditional virtues in different ways.

This volume offers an integrated approach to the main traditional virtues, exploring their possible relevance and proposing new ways of interpretation that are more in line with the military tasks of the 21st century.

This book examines how international expectations intersected with the United States Air Force’s fight for autonomy and utility, explains how the service began to change, and asks how airpower—and the US military as a whole—might further deepen its efforts. The author expands perspectives on assessing and directing the use of airpower and encourages further work to maximize both mission accomplishment and civilian protection. The recent evolution of US airpower offers inspiring, if incomplete, evidence that the conduct of war can become more humane while remaining effective. Technology, adversaries, and the goals of armed conflict will continue to evolve, but the central challenge of humanizing war will endure. Part one outlines the challenge that contemporary expectations about the American use of force pose for airpower. Part two describes the Air Force’s adaptation to modern expectations of civilian protection, tracing operational experiences during the 1990s and the consequent operational and institutional innovation.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have been witnessing the emergence of new types of conflicts. These are progressively more complex, but are, still too often, conceptualised and approached simplistically, using a linear type of reasoning. Complexity is disregarded, and the need for systemic thinking is underestimated, not rarely leading to disastrous results. Feedbacks are most often ignored, and the complex dynamics which make a conflict to change over time, following often unpredictable paths, are rarely taken into
account. A shift from a precomplexity mindset to a mindset founded in an understanding of complexity is necessary. In the paper, using concrete examples, we will try to show how a systems thinking approach is essential to analyse today’s conflict, to prevent them, and to act so as to make them develop along non violent constructive paths rather than along violent destructive ones.

How does Shakespeare represent war? Guest editor Patrick Gray reviews scholarship to date on the question, in light of contributions to a special issue of Critical Survey, “Shakespeare and War.” Drawing upon St. Augustine’s City of God, the basis for later just war theory, Gray argues that progressive optimism regarding the perfectibility of what St. Augustine calls the “City of Man” makes it difficult for modern commentators to discern Shakespeare’s own more tragic, Augustinian sense of warfare as a necessary evil, given the fallenness of human nature. Modern misgivings about “honour” also lead to misinterpretation. As Francis Fukuyama points out, present-day liberal democracies tend to follow Hobbes and Locke in attempting to “banish the desire for recognition from politics.” Shakespeare in contrast, like Hegel, as well as latter-day Hegelians such as Fukuyama, Charles Taylor, and Axel Honneth, sees the faculty that Plato calls thymos as an invaluable instrument of statecraft.

My contribution to the nuclear debate presents 3 possible concepts for complexity evolution, which make understood that what is at a stake right now is the evolution of complexity. The use of missiles in any war scenario has very little, and if any very bad effects on reality, which I strongly recommend to not to look for.

The official results of the conference were published under the following document, which you can find at the ETH Zürich file archive: https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/154318/MD_Draft%20Report_16102012.pdf

The official report does not resolve the dilemma that was discussed in Brussels. It reveals a one-sided and partial perspective and does not uncover the risks at which Europe was. The debate was stronger than the report tells and the report fails to describe the Russian position adequately as well as the reality of the debate. The US-American assurance, that the missile defense shield set up by NATO is not offensive and does not mean a threat to Russia  is a discussable statement. Quoting Vershbow as main speaker is nice, but the way this report puts facts and presents opinions is debatable.

A report about the real terms of discussion cannot be published.

Few philosophers have influenced the “post-modern” dialogue on human nature and human sexuality as deeply as the critical theorist, Herbert Marcuse. At the same time, the work of Marcuse and others in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (e.g. Horkheimer, Adorno) often goes unnoticed or unanalyzed both in theological circles, and in evangelical communities more broadly. Marcusean critical theory, however, and its significant and widespread impact on the culture of sex in the post-WWII western world, cannot be overlooked by those committed to the traditional teachings of the historical confessions of the church with regard to human sexuality, gender, and marriage. This paper will give an overview of Critical Theory with a deeper analysis of Marcuse’s particular thought on human sexuality in order to shed some light upon the intellectual backdrop against which current debates within the American church on homosexuality and gender are taking place. In conclusion, I will touch on how Critical Theory has infiltrated the thinking of the church and should be exposed before so-called “epistemic crises” concerning sexual ethics achieve any sort of resolution.

The idea that overly emotional humans make poor ethical actors pervades the current literature on the ethical implications of the development of autonomous weapons systems. From this perspective, developing fully autonomous military robots should be doubly desirable: the technical process of ‘teaching’ robots ethics would finally systematize just war thinking, while robots could uphold the rules of engagement even under the most emotionally trying of situations. This article addresses my doubts about both claims. I argue that truly ethical behavior requires what classical just war theorists would have called soul, or what we might today term conscience – and that the flexibility of the traditional principles reflects this understanding. In pursuit of this argument, this article proceeds in two parts. First, it argues that the apparent ‘messiness’ of just war thought is actually morally useful. Second, it argues that emotions play an important and irreplaceable role in our ethical behavior, particularly as they help us mediate between incommensurable goods and intersecting ethical systems.

"This anthropological study describes a specific form of mediation, as it is practiced in Ethiopia (Northeast Africa) by members of the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups. It introduces elders as male household-heads in their advanced ages, who settle conflicts and arrange marriages for the members of the junior generations. There are not only 'easy' cases dealt with, which one might assume to be too 'unimportant' for state courts or other juridical institutions but also aggravated cases that may affect the wider group or that have inter-ethnic dimensions. The study uses specific case studies of marriage, bride abduction, physical injury and homicide for illustration. Within the book, reference is made to speech-act-theory and the 'new ethnographic' approach related to it. Both rhetoric strategies and non-verbal means of communication are discussed, such as postures, gestures, spatial arrangements, numerical symbolisms, or the deliberate use of certain kinds of dress and of material objects. Special attention is paid to the use of ritual in mediation procedures. The book brings to light significant regularities that are inherent to the different types of elders' proceedings. Peculiar elements and phases can be distinguished that re-occur in all types of processes analysed in the study. This cannot exclusively be explained by reference to 'process', as a general idea of people negotiating law. It moreover hints to the existence of a formal 'procedure', which follows its own rules. Accordingly, a change of perspective 'from process to procedure' is suggested in the book's programmatic title.

http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/title_2776.ahtml

Book Order US:
http://www.amazon.com/From-Process-Procedure-Aethiopistische-Forschungen/dp/3447066113/

Book Order Germany:
http://www.amazon.de/Process-Procedure-Mediation-Formality-Ethiopia/dp/3447066113/
http://www.buchhandel.de/detailansicht.aspx?isbn=9783447066112"

Sparrow argues that military robots capable of making their own decisions would be independent enough to allow us denial for their actions, yet too unlike us to be the targets of meaningful blame or praise—thereby fostering what Matthias has dubbed “the responsibility gap.” We agree with Sparrow that someone must be held responsible for all actions taken in a military conflict. That said, we think Sparrow overlooks the possibility of what we term “blank check” responsibility: A person of sufficiently high standing could accept responsibility for the actions of autonomous robotic devices—even if that person could not be causally linked to those actions besides this prior agreement. The basic intuition behind our proposal is that humans can impute relations even when no other form of contact can be established. The missed alternative we want to highlight, then, would consist in an exchange: Social prestige in the occupation of a given office would come at the price of signing away part of one's freedoms to a contingent and unpredictable future guided by another (in this case, artificial) agency.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0260210516000255

How do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognized normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This paper argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema.’ Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in World War II, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello that anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to.

I offer eight arguments against the Doctrine of Double Effect, a normative principle according to which in pursuing the good it is sometimes morally permissible to bring about some evil as a side-effect or merely foreseen consequence: the same evil would not be morally justified as an intended means or end.

This authored book offers an institutionalist-based philosophical analysis of the use of lethal force by police officers and military combatants according to which the moral rights and duties of these institutional role holders differs from one another and also from that of ordinary citizens. As such, it is at various with standard revisionist accounts. It is of interest to those researchers and students in police ethics and military ethics in particular.

Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance,
state anthropophagy and survivance, this essay anatomizes the
Derridean contretemps- the essential accident- as the time out
of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics
while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war.
Accidentalized violence does not speak to war as inconvenienced
by mishaps but rather to the political mobilization of the accidental
as war by other means. Collateral damage and enforced disappearance
constitute a temporal counter weight to the indivisibility of
sovereign force, crosscutting the latter with shape shifting indeterminacy
that preempts critical witnessing and political dejustification.

A cornerstone of traditional just war theory is that combatants on both sides of any conflict are legitimate targets of attack. This is not because they are engaged in wrongdoing but because they pose a threat to others. So long as they follow the jus in bello rules of proportionality and discrimination, those who fight for an unjust cause and those who fight for a just cause are moral equals: both may permissibly kill and both may permissibly be killed. This is the doctrine of the ‘moral equality of combatants’ (MEC) and it has long been the standard view. A revisionist challenge, however, argues that one is not liable to be killed if one fights for a just cause. People have a presumptive right against being killed, after all, so why should a soldier fighting for a just cause lose that right for posing a justified threat against an unjust enemy? Jeff McMahan makes the case for this revisionist view in Killing in War. He explicitly rejects the MEC and instead endorses an asymmetric view of the morality of combatants. Critics object that this revision makes just war impossible because without the MEC it is impossible to justify our convictions about legitimate and illegitimate targets. In this article, I defend the revisionist view against this objection. My defence, in turn, leads me to propose a new and more adequate account of enemy status.

The ability of international ethics and political theory to establish a genuinely critical standpoint from which to evaluate uses of armed force has been challenged by various lines of argument. On one, theorists question the narrow conception of violence on which analysis relies. Were they right, it would overturn two key assumptions: first, that violence is sufficiently distinctive to merit attention as a category separate from other modes of human harming; second, that it is troubling in a special way that makes acts of violence peculiarly hard to justify. This paper defends a narrow understanding of violence and a special ethics governing its use by arguing that a distinctive form of ‘Violent Agency’ is the factor uniting the category while partly accounting for the fearful connotations of the term. Violent Agency is defined first by a double intention (1) to inflict harm using a technique chosen (2) to eliminate or evade the target’s means of escaping it or defending against it. Second, the harms it aims at are destructive (as opposed to appropriative). The analysis offered connects the concept of violence to themes in international theory such as vulnerability, security, and domination, as well as the ethics of war.

Our contemporary condition is deeply infused with scientific-technological rationales. These influence and shape our moral reasoning on war, including the moral status of civilians. In this paper, I discuss how technology shapes and directs the moral choices available to us by setting parameters for moral deliberation. I argue that technology is an actant of moral significance to just war thinking, yet this is often overlooked in attempts to assess who is liable to harm in war and to what extent. This omission produces an undue deference to technological authority, reducing combatants, civilians, and scenarios to data points. If we are to develop a maximally restrictive framework for harming civilians in war, which I think should be a goal of just war thinking, then it is imperative that the scientific-technological dimension of contemporary war is given due attention.

Just War Theory (JWT) replaced an older "warrior code," an approach to war that remains poorly understood and dismissively treated in the philosophical literature. This paper builds on recent work on honor to address these deficiencies. By providing a clear, systematic exposition of "Honor War Theory" (HWT), we can make sense of paradigm instances of warrior psychology and behavior, and understand the warrior code as the martial expression of a broader honor-based ethos that conceives of obligation in terms of fair competition for prestige. Far from being a romantic and outmoded approach to war, HWT accounts for current conflicts and predicts moral intuitions that JWT either rejects or cannot comfortably accommodate. So although it is not recommended as a replacement for JWT, there is good reason think that a fully mature, realistic, and yet properly normative theory of war ethics will incorporate a variety of insights from HWT.

A fronte dell'ampia letteratura esistente sul rapporto tra “Chiesa” e “guerra” - in particolare per quanto riguarda la c.d. dottrina della “guerra giusta” - la guerra cristera (o Cristiada), che ha insanguinato il Messico dal 1926 al 1929, non sembra ad oggi avere ancora ricevuto l'attenzione che merita dalla storiografia italiana ed europea. Per quasi tre anni decine di migliaia di cattolici reagirono con le armi alla persecuzione legalizzata della Chiesa portata avanti dal governo laicista figlio della Rivoluzione degli anni Dieci, rendendo inevitabile una mediazione politica tra l'episcopato messicano e il governo che coinvolse anche il Vaticano e la diplomazia statunitense. Fin dai primordi del conflitto, la necessità di assicurare alla causa dei cristeros l'appoggio della gerarchia ecclesiastica spinse i leader del movimento armato a sollecitare a più riprese una presa di posizione ufficiale della Santa Sede, al fine di vincere le resistenze di quanti nell'episcopato e più in generale nel mondo cattolico messicano si mostravano riluttanti ad appoggiare l'insurrezione. Anche dopo la conclusione della Cristiada il problema si ripropose periodicamente Oltretevere, dove Pio XI e il cardinale segretario di Stato Eugenio Pacelli (succeduto al cardinale Pietro Gasparri all'inizio del 1930) si trovarono a dover conciliare le istanze dei messicani più intransigenti – convinti che il ricorso alle armi fosse ancora l'unica opzione possibile per difendere i diritti della Chiesa e dei cattolici – con la necessità di garantire la sopravvivenza della Chiesa in Messico attraverso gli strumenti tradizionali della diplomazia.
Esito della composizione di queste opposte esigenze furono alcune importanti encicliche e altri documenti pontifici, la cui lettura – unitamente all'analisi dei rispettivi processi redazionali – permette di individuare le linee di fondo della riflessione magisteriale sulla legittimazione della violenza e la sua evoluzione lungo tutto il pontificato rattiano.