The War in Ukraine and the Return of Just War in Protestant Just Peace Approaches

Over the course of the twentieth century, Protestant churches such as the Evangelical Church in Germany and ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches embraced a just peace approach at the expense of traditional just war thinking. However, since Russia's war against Ukraine, the just peace approach has been criticized as too abstract and unrealistic to apply to the concrete and urgent moral questions about the conduct of war and the just use of means in war that Ukraine and its allies face. This prompted theologians, churches, and councils to return to core elements of the just war tradition. This article discusses whether and, if so, how it is possible to integrate the approaches of just peace and just war. It is argued that this depends on whether one adopts a more restrictive or a more permissive account of just war, on the one hand, and how one considers just peace, on the other hand: either as a complete substitution for just war thinking or as a guiding peace vision that does not rule out the legitimacy of using military force under strict conditions.