Just Peace as Ideal Theory and its Relevance to Christian Ethics of War

It is a commonplace in the just war tradition that the aim of a justified war is a just peace, and moreover, that the peace that is aimed for is not only the aim of war, but should play a part in regulating it. However, the conception of just peace and how it could serve those purposes is underdeveloped in the tradition . My aim in this thesis is first to articulate just peace as an ideal theory in the Rawlsian sense, and then to reconstruct the just war criteria as nonideal theory along the lines that Rawls suggests for what a nonideal theory should provide, and finally, to assess the relevance of the ideal of just peace for a variety of Christian approaches to war.