APQ - APPON PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Armed conflict has been a persistent feature of human history, generating consequences that extend well beyond physical destruction into the moral, existential, and human rights dimensions of affected societies. This paper presents a critical interpretive review of sixty-three scholarly works published between 1973 and 2025, examining how existing normative frameworks, namely Just War Theory, International Humanitarian Law (IHL), and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), address the ethics and legality of armed conflict. The review argues that all three frameworks exhibit structural inadequacies when confronted with asymmetric warfare, non-state armed actors, and hybrid operational environments. More critically, this paper advances a specific original claim: that moral injury (the damage done to the conscience and moral identity of combatants and civilians through participation in or exposure to war) constitutes a neglected dimension of jus in bello assessment and should be formalised as a proportionality factor in normative evaluations of wartime conduct. Drawing on clinical moral injury literature alongside legal and philosophical scholarship, the paper argues that integrating this experiential dimension into Just War Theory and IHL would produce more honest and ethically robust frameworks. The study suggests selective and politically constrained application of R2P across cases including Syria, Libya, and Sudan. Post-conflict justice mechanisms consistently fall short of normative ideals. It is against this backdrop that future scholarships must develop adaptive mechanisms that are gender-sensitive, culturally grounded, and empirically testable.

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