INTRODUCTION: Heretics, Humanists, and Radicals

Ethics of war scholarship has become a highly disciplined activity. It is closely associated with a very particular canon of thinkers—many of whom feature in the text that this book follows—Just War Thinkers. What about those figures who are not typically regarded as part of that canon but who have interesting and potentially important things to say about the ethics of war? This book will focus on these figures. Paving the way for the chapters that follow, this introductory essay puts a simple question before us: is there a good reason for the marginalisation of these thinkers, or might ethics of war scholars benefit from engaging them?.