Traditions of Just War & Othering

Rory Cox’s Origins of the Just War is a pleasure to read, and a struggle to review. In ‘re-viewing’ a manuscript, one claims to be looking again at something earlier surveyed. At the first hurdle then, the reviewers of Cox’s monograph must fail for this is an area of history and just war theory that is virgin ground. I suspect I was asked to review the book off the basis of an intersecting interest of history and law which Cox and I share. In that aspect, Cox far outstrips me in expertise on the topics of just war and Near-East history.

A review essay also purports to recommend. In that sense, it looks forward: anticipating the reader’s subsequent encounter with the reviewed text, or asking the reader to relive their prior reading of the same. Occasionally, a review will ask readers to swallow a book whole, but usually it will attempt to dismember and reassemble a book for the reader’s ready consumption. To do so, as this review essay does, is a thankless task for the Origins of the Just War must be read as a whole. Any allure of the offer of ‘guidance’ a review lays on this cutting board depends in part upon that clandestine pre-reading of which it boasts. Reading and re-viewing this book was not a task based upon knowing something that the recommended reader does not. It is a review essay that simply tries to pick up on the themes written by Cox and make some further observations.