While a ‘just and lasting peace’ is the axiomatic goal of a just war, it is not clear what that means exactly. The central question of this chapter is: How should a just war theorist understand peace, insofar that peace is the goal of just war theory, taking into account the theory’s middle position between political realism and moral idealism? In the first part of this chapter, the contemporary debate is mapped and various positions on peace are made explicit. This reveals a shift towards a more positive concept of peace. How far should this shift go? The second part of this chapter places the peace continuum in a lively debate in political philosophy on the role of feasibility constraints in normative theory. This chapter argues that a ‘just and lasting peace’ must be understood as a decent peace that is ‘just enough’.

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Peace plays a central role in the ethics of war and peace, but this proves to be an enormous challenge. In a recent article, Elisabeth Forster and Isaac Taylor grapple with this important topic. They argue that certain concepts in just war theory—aggression, legitimacy, and peace—are essentially contested and susceptible to manipulation. Because the rules are interpreted and applied by the very states that wage war, it is as if the fox is asked to guard the chicken coop—a recipe for disaster. To avoid manipulation of the theory and make the goal of peace attainable, they defend “minimalism” in the ethics of war and peace. This paper responds to and builds on their article. After nuancing the analysis, I will argue (a) that their minimalism does not solve the problem since the proposed alternative concept is equally prone to misuse, and (b) that their minimalism is mistargeted. What I propose is to specify and ground the rules of war without raising the standard too high, to disentangle jus ad bellum and jus post bellum and see peace as guiding principle for jus post bellum, and to interpret that in a minimalist way.

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