Christian Nikolaus Braun

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at King's College London

Contemporary just war thinking has mostly been split into two competing camps, namely, Michael Walzer’s approach and its revisionist critics. While Walzerians employ a casuistical method, most revisionists resort to analytical philosophy’s reflective equilibrium. Importantly, besides employing different methods, the two sides also disagree on subst...

One of the most contested arguments in contemporary just war thinking has been the question of the right starting point of analysis. On one side of the argument, one finds Catholic Church officials who argue for a ‘presumption against war’ as jumping-off point. On the other, one encounters critics of that position, led by James Turner Johnson, who...

This article contributes to the debate about the future of just war thinking, which has been challenged by the emerging school of just peace. Just peace thinkers hope that by foregrounding nonviolent means just war reasoning will become obsolete. Recently, the German Catholic Bishops have argued that the traditional understanding of just war contri...

This article investigates curious parallels in the development of thinking on war and peace in the Catholic Church and the German Green Party. Like Catholicism, the Greens started as an overwhelmingly pacifist movement. However, similarly to Catholicism after it became the state religion of Rome, the Greens began to support military action in the l...

Now in its third year, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine remains at the very top of the international security agenda. This conflict has largely refocused the West's attention away from the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In February 2022, German chancellor Olaf...

This forum urges international relations (IR) practitioners to rethink the nature of both failure and success, and their own responsibility in building an academy that enables scholars of all backgrounds to thrive. Reflecting on their own experiences, the contributors detail factors that commonly stymie promising work in IR. These range from the qu...

This article grapples with the justifiability of nuclear deterrence in the aftermath of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. Disillusioned about the failed promise of nuclear disarmament, as well as other ethical issues inherent to nuclear weapons, Pope Francis has attached the immorality label not just to the use of the Bomb but also to its...

A moral compass for the use of limited force that draws on the just war thought of Thomas Aquinas One of the most contentious developments in contemporary international relations has been the increased use of limited force. On the one hand, insofar as it signals greater constraint, the shift away from the mechanized slaughter of large-scale warfar...

Both traditional just war theory and military virtue ethics have an important place in most military curricula. The revisionist approach, however, has struggled to gain traction in the curricula of military academies. This chapter analyses how the practical applicability of revisionist just war thinking indeed is limited, but argues that revisionis...

This article makes moral sense of the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. It does so by applying classical just war thinking. The classical bellum justum, it argues, can make a distinctive contribution toward evaluating the decision to leave Afghanistan, a decision that continues to be discussed controversially. The article points out that...

In this essay, I reflect on the divergent arguments about limited force made by Daniel R. Brunstetter and Samuel Moyn in their respective monographs. Arguing that their positions can be reconciled, I agree with Brunstetter that limited force has a role to play in establishing and maintaining a just world order. At the same time, however, I am mindf...

This chapter places drone use in the context of a contentious development in contemporary military affairs: the increase in instances of states resorting to so-called ‘force-short-of-war’ ( vim ). On the one hand, a shift in modern warfare away from large-scale slaughter and toward more calibrated applications of force (such as drone strikes) may b...

This article responds to Anh Le’s critique of my Journal of Military Ethics article entitled “The Morality of Retributive Targeted Killing.” Le argues that while retribution can in theory function as justification, purely retributive targeted killings cannot be found in practice. Moreover, pointing to the virtue of charity, which partly underpins m...

This collection of essays explores a variety of ways of thinking ethically about drone violence. The violent use of armed, unmanned aircraft (‘drones’) is increasing worldwide, but uncertainty persists about the moral status of remote-control killing and why it should be restrained. Practitioners, observers and potential victims of such violence of...

This short essay responds to Kristopher Norris’s reply to my article entitled ‘The Catholic Presumption against War Revisited’. It engages with Norris’s three main points of critique.

This article assesses whether the contemporary consensus of just war thinking to allow only for defence as just cause for war between states should also be applied to the practice of targeted killing of non-state actors. It argues that it should not and puts forward an argument for a just cause of retribution for war between states and culpable unj...

This article assesses the recently renewed interest in the just war criterion of sovereign authority from a Thomistic perspective. It contrasts the classical conceptualisation of authority as found in the work of St Thomas Aquinas with the argument made by today’s revisionist just war thinkers. The article points out that the two approaches start f...

Between 1949 and the late 1970s, interactions between China (PRC) and Middle Eastern nations were limited. After China started to implement economic reforms in 1978, however, the country opened up to the global economy in general and the Middle East in particular. Since the 1980s, the new Chinese economic dynamic, as a result of its economic reform...