Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope, Michele Moody-Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 328 pp., cloth $120, paperback $28, eBook $27.99.

Abstract

because their actions are not even potentially morally justified. It is not that the Nazis, in planning and carrying out the Holocaust, fought a bad or wrong war. Rather, they did not fight a war against the Jews at all; they committed a genocide. This ethically meaningful distinction is lost if we accept Heuser’s very broad definition of war. This is a variation of the demarcation issue that is a long-standing difficulty in Western just war theory. As Heuser notes, such demarcation questions arise in part because of the fuzzy boundaries that are part and parcel of the long genealogies of thought and practice about war. Because she is primarily concerned with delineating and tracing the movement of those boundaries over time, I understand why she takes a more expansive view of war than many contemporary just war theorists; and it is still an open question as to who is correct regarding this issue. Ultimately, this book serves as both a comprehensive investigation into how cultural narratives surrounding war arose and changed over time in light of practices of war, and an in-depth study of war-related conceptual and normative topics. It will be extraordinarily helpful for readers looking to comprehend how people and groups in the West have thought, and continue to think, about war and how they arrived at those understandings. The deeply appropriate upshot of Heuser’s monumental work is an encouragement to think further and to reflect on how we might change our current cultural narratives and realities surrounding war now that we fully grasp their histories.