War and peace underwent radical changes in early modern Europe. Warfare itself, along with diplomacy and peace-making, changed dramatically during this period, but so too did the discussion of war and peace within the discursive domain of moral and juridical-political thought. Fundamental shifts in the early modern discussion of rights of war and peace occurred because previous assumptions were radically challenged by concrete events and experiences (such as the Reformation or the discoveries and occupation of new continents by Europeans). This in turn led to new ways of moral and political thinking which sought to find answers to these new challenges.

Popular support for war is widely understood to solidify Britain’s sense of itself in the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that objections to war shape Britain’s identity in the closing decades of the century, as the people are called upon to evaluate the justness of the nation’s acts in war. These acts are understood to be public acts, authored by each and every individual, including those who do not directly wage war. The attention to public responsibility coincides with renewed scrutiny of war’s harms, and the moral urgency of recognising and halting war’s killing animates philosophical essays, sermons, and poems, including works by Jeremy Bentham and Anna Letitia Barbauld. The period’s anti-war arguments foreground concepts of injury and responsibility that anticipate later developments in international law and ongoing discussions in moral philosophy.

Drawing together emerging domestic and regional reform struggles with wider geopolitical developments, this chapter explores a new way to think about the unfolding of rights history. Starting in the later nineteenth century, the forces encouraging growing intergovernmental contact and cooperation through multilateral agreements and codified law – technological and industrial changes, including the spread of ever more deadly weapons, the easing of transport and communications, expanding educational opportunities, and a growing reading public – drew likeminded female and male reformers together in spaces beyond borders through new patterns of transnational mobilizations and formal international organizations. Many local advocates pushing against the limitations of the natural rights traditions of liberal citizenship increasingly drew strength in numbers by transcending existing political arrangements and combining national, regional, and international advocacy.

The Eastern Crisis is a nonwar case that occurs during the heyday of the Concert of Europe. Nevertheless, the major powers avoided war with one another not because of the Concert’s deliberations, but rather because of domestic politics within France. King Louis-Philippe reined in his hard-line prime minster, Thiers, thereby removing the threat of war. This indicates that domestic politics is more important than system structure, at least in this case. One major lesson we can derive from this case is that “someone must stand for peace” – that is, one way for actors to avoid war is for a strong leader to rein in domestic hard-liners.

By late 1964, peace activists coalesced to oppose US policy on the emerging Vietnam crisis. US government decisions stimulated greater dissent, turning a peace movement trying to stop the war’s escalation into a persistent antiwar movement. The movement had three primary constituencies that differed in fundamental ways: liberals, pacifists, and leftists. Their essential arguments fell into different categories. Practically, the United States could not create a stable representative South Vietnamese government from the outside. Its open-ended commitment to Vietnam did not involve vital US interests, would divert resources from more significant needs, and did not justify the costs. Morally, protesters believed that the destruction and cost of an extended war would be worse for the Vietnamese than communist rule and making the Vietnamese suffer for American objectives was ethically unacceptable. Others claimed that the process of intervention violated US political ideals and threatened its democracy. Pragmatists argued that China was the real Asian threat, and that America’s policy was counterproductive by undermining regional stability.

Hobbes argues that in a “condition of meer nature,” lacking a common power, reason requires that we appoint one, lest our lives be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” No covenant of peace can be effective without a Sovereign arbiter to enforce it. Therefore, reason requires each of us to surrender the natural right to judge for ourselves, and to appoint a Sovereign. An effective Sovereign must have authority to determine religious practice and to raise an army – precisely the powers the “Roundhead” rebels had denied Charles I.

Starting with three good ideas – natural equality, government resting on consent, and government limited by the terms of that consent – Hobbes derives distressing conclusions. Reason requires submission to the Sovereign even in matters of conscience. The Sovereign can do subjects no injustice. Mixed government must lead to civil war. This chapter traces and tests Hobbes’s reasoning.

The Japanese archipelago and the Korean peninsula are neighbouring regions, with histories of similarities and contrasts. Currently inhabited by a population of about 123 million in an area slightly bigger than Germany, Japan has been relatively isolated throughout much of the last two millennia. In the late nineteenth century, Japan reinvented itself from a land on the margins of the Sinitic cultural zone to a world power. In contrast, Korea – a landmass a little larger than Great Britain and inhabited by about 78 million people – was an active participant in the China-centred world order during much of its 2,300 year-history before losing sovereignty to Imperial Japan in 1910. (See Map 13.)

Chapter 1 is the introductory chapter. It introduces the reader to the two seemingly complementary global imperatives of ‘dealing with the past’ and ensuring non-repetition of mass atrocities. The chapter sets up a conundrum about transitional justice, ontological (in)securities, and non-recurrence. It then proceeds with a summary of the book’s key questions and core arguments. The chapter subsequently puts forward a brief history of the evolution of transitional justice as a global project, a vehicle of peace as well as security, discussing the claimed intersections between transitional justice and ‘Never Again’. This is followed by brief notes on methodology and contributions of the book. In outlining the contributions, the chapter demonstrates how the book interacts with and enriches scholarly knowledge in the field of transitional justice as well as in ontological security studies. Finally, the chapter introduces the outline of the book with brief chapter summaries.

How did Kant incorporate elements of natural right into his philosophical system after radically transforming the basis for philosophical claims in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Groundwork, and other related texts? I show how Kant praises certain ideas by natural law theorists while rejecting their foundations and many of their applications. Two particular areas reflect this process: Kant’s rejection of slavery and his developing work on war and international institutions for peace. Feyerabend must be understood as a stage in the development of Kant’s overarching unitary theory of right that fuses domestic and international right.