By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
Content warning: Mentions of war, violence, and death.
We are often told war can be justified. Our history textbooks glorify national victories. Our films wrap bloodshed in orchestral scores. Our news headlines echo political speeches about defending our honour and dignity. In all these stories nations tell about themselves, we are taught that under the right circumstances, violence is not only permissible, but a noble duty. Rooted in the Just War Theory — which stretches from Roman philosophers like Cicero and Augustine of Hippo to today’s Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter — war can be “fair” when declared by the proper authority, fought for a just cause, and with discretion. A morally palatable violence ready for society’s consumption.
In reality, war refuses to stay within these boundaries. It burns through bodies, homes, histories. In all its chaos and brutality, can war be so easily justified? Can we — should we — accept any framework that permits organized violence against an “other” as a reasonable solution to conflict? This is not to romanticize non-violence. One should question who perpetuates the violence — a controlled enforced state or those resisting erasure? Across traditions to be explored here, thinkers have acknowledged that when confronted with annihilation, violence may be a necessary form of resistance. However, in asking if war is ever justified, what is needed is discernment: a reckoning with the difference between violence as survival and violence as ideology. If our goal is justice, we must begin by asking what kind of worlds we wish to inhabit and by having the radical hope to imagine other futures rooted in interdependence, not domination.
Walter Benjamin, German philosopher and literary critic, in The Critique of Violence, explains how states hold a monopoly on violence, reserving the right to decide when force is justified in the name of preserving laws or creating new ones. What we are told is a “just” war, then, reflects not a universal morality but a project of state power — a story written by the hand that holds the gun, not those caught in its line of fire. If law itself is founded on violence — just as how several modern constitutions have been introduced as a result of revolutions, secessions, or colonial occupation — how can we trust it to regulate ethical violence? Can violence ever be ethical? Through the eyes of various philosophers, traditions, and critical theorists, let’s trace a different path.
Confronting the absurd
From an absurdist standpoint, war is not merely unjustifiable, it is a betrayal of human dignity. French philosopher Albert Camus shaped absurdist philosophy by arguing that the human condition is absurd because we seek meaning in a universe inherently devoid of it. In this light, war is an attempt to impose coherence through brute force rather than confronting the absurd with the conscious decision to live and act ethically despite the lack of a greater meaning.
Following World War II, Camus reflected in one of his essays: “People like myself want not a world where murder no longer exists [ . . . ] but rather one in which murder is not legitimate.”
His reflections reject this normalization of violence that imposes a false binary of force versus submission. Instead, he helps us realise that the choice is between force and solidarity. Writing from the ruins of war, he knew, as we must come to know, that the allure of righteous violence is just an illusion. In the promise of order and justice, what it actually delivers is grief and meaninglessness. He reminds us that we must preserve human dignity, that our longing for justice must not morph into a license to kill. Because there is no justice in death and destruction.
Writing from the ruins of war, he knew, as we must come to know, that the allure of righteous violence is just an illusion. In the promise of order and justice, what it actually delivers is grief and meaninglessness.
The wisdom of non-contention
Where absurdism teaches us to face the void with courage, Taoism invites us to dissolve the very self that clings to control, domination, and permanence. In Tao Te Ching, Laozi warns:
Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man’s tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart,
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.
From a Taoist lens, then, war is not a necessary evil but a disruption to the natural order. When a nation exerts force to prove its greatness, it is already out of step with the Tao. To seek victory through domination is but a desperate attempt of the ego to preserve its attachment and delusion. Even when such a victory is achieved, the winner is spiritually diminished.
Similarly, in Buddhist philosophy, violence is born out of taṇhā (craving) and avidyā (ignorance). It arises when we attempt to impose fixed identities on what is transient: mine, yours, enemy, ally, nation, other. These labels are illusions of our separation that give rise to dukkha (suffering). In the core Buddhist text, The Dhammapada, it is said, “All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.”
This ethic of non-harm is not about passivity but rooted in compassion and interdependence. When reality is understood as everchanging and impermanent, the self becomes fluid and relational, where harming another is no different than harming oneself.
This idea of interdependence is one mirrored in many Indigenous traditions around the world. In The Dawn of Everything, scholars David Wengrow and David Graeber remind us that the idea of warfare as humanity’s default condition is a myth created by modern states to naturalize their own violence. Even when confronted with settler-colonialism, many Indigenous communities did not recognize war as an inevitable feature of human life. Instead, existence is understood as a web of relationships — between land, water, ancestors, spirits, animals, and fellow humans — where balance, reciprocity, and care are centred over domination or conquest. In this world view, violence can never be a solution because it ruptures this intricate web of being.
Decolonial scholar Achille Mbembe argues that sovereignty today is not simply the power to rule, but the power to expose others to death. To decide whose lives are expendable, whose deaths are worth grief and memory. In the name of nationhood, or democracy, people are caged, bombed, starved. The military parade becomes a celebration of technological precision. This very logic of conquest — to penetrate, to dominate, to control — echoes every day gendered performances of dominance.
Peace, then, cannot be built on the same scaffolding that upholds war. To move beyond the myth of a noble war it requires dismantling these deep roots of domination that frame conquest as justice. Across traditions, from Camus to Laozi, Buddhism to Indigenous thought, we find not just a rejection of war but a racial re-imagining of the world where care is not weakness, but a revolutionary force. As Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has argued, true resistance lies in returning to practices of care like storytelling and song that regenerate life without erasure. In rejecting righteous violence, we make space for a conception of justice that is rooted in our interconnectedness.
