Just Cause (in War)
Classical just war theory distinguishes the justice of going to war (jus ad bellum) from the justice of how war is waged (jus in bello) (see War). As the theory of jus ad bellum evolved over the past millennium, a war had to satisfy multiple criteria to be just. The war must be waged (1) by a legitimate authority who is (2) acting with right intention; (3) the war must have reasonable prospects of success at attaining its goals, the importance of which is (4) proportional to the harm that the war can be expected to inflict (see Proportionality (in War)); (5) the war must be the last resort; and (6) there must be a just cause for the war. None of these criteria is clear or unambiguous, but just cause is perhaps the most contested. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
practical (applied) ethics; 
war and conflict
War, Aggression and Self-Defence by Yoram Dinstein
Yoram Dinstein’s seminal textbook is an essential guide to the legal issues of war and peace, armed attack, self-defence and enforcement measures taken under the aegis of the Security Council. This fourth edition incorporates new material on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, response to armed attacks by terrorists, recent resolutions adopted by the Security Council and the latest pronouncements of the International Court of Justice. In addition, several new sections consider consent by States to the use of force (as expressed either ad hoc or by treaty); an armed attack by non-State actors; the various phases in the Gulf War up to the occupation of Iraq in 2003 and beyond; and immunities from jurisdiction. With many segments rewritten to reflect recent State practice, this book remains a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the legal issues surrounding war and self-defence. An indispensable tool for students and practitioners.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.