Justice, Conscience, and War in Imperial Britain
In: Political and legal anthropology review: PoLAR, Band 43, Heft 2, S. 319-333
Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the political implications of opposition to war, focusing on the example of conscientious objection to military service. Conscientious objection is often treated as a fundamentally ethical issue; however, this article argues for centering questions of justice in analyses of responses to war. There is a risk that starting with ethics takes for granted the social significance of ethical responses and overlooks particular ethical practices in the reproduction of wider inequalities. More specifically, when an issue is narrowly framed in terms of ethics, it can have implications for who is allowed to speak and what they can speak about. Thinking about war as an issue of justice—in the sense of how society allocates the things that it values—allows the broader issues of hierarchy, distribution, and recognition to be in the foreground. The article focuses on the example of an Indian subject of the British Empire who applied for exemption from military service during the Second World War. The valorization on conscience by the British state prioritized a limited form of opposition to bloodshed grounded in personal moral scruples, to the exclusion of anti‐imperial self‐determination, and turned the war into an issue of individual ethics rather than global inequality.
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