War is an action between nations, states, organized groups of people, or political communities. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau states, war is waged between things rather than between persons. The crucial point is that interpersonal and even most intergroup conflict does not constitute war. Customarily, war is understood as armed conflict between states or armed conflict between opposing political communities within a state, as in civil war. War involves the intentional infliction of harm on others identified as appointed representatives of the opposing state or political community. That harm may consist in such measures as disabling resources and supplies for comfortable living, forcibly imposing a new rule of law on a people, and, of course, the injury and killing of enemy forces. During war, otherwise commonly held rights, including the right to private property, may be temporarily suspended and some standard rules of right conduct, such as “do not kill,” are set aside. Nevertheless, war...
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Scholz, S.J. (2011). War, Just and Unjust. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_83
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