ment’.Military regimescome in several forms, and the particular form for
which junta is shorthand has most frequently been found in Latin American
countries. Such a junta is usually composed of several officers, of essentially
equal political rank, drawn from all the armed services. The resulting govern-
ment is direct military government by the whole military machine, balancing
the interests of the various services according to their relative power inside the
military apparatus. A junta usually will not be dominated by any one person,
though this is not invariably true (for example in Chile after the coup against
Salvador Allende, the junta was dominated by General Augusto Pinochet), and
thus the presidency, or whatever it is called, can often change hands frequently
as rivalries between the services and between members of the junta fluctuate.
In contrast is the form of military government more commonly found outside
Latin America, where a dictator uses the military to retain power, but probably
governs mainly through civilian institutions, rather than acting simply asprimus
inter paresamong a group of officers. Thus in Pakistan, which was governed by
generals for most of the 1960s and 1970s, there was never a junta, but rather a
series of strong men for whom the military forces were no more than tools.
Just War
The theory of when it is just to fight a war, and how to fight justly, comes
principally from medieval Christian thought and from the great development
of international law that followed, especially in the works ofGrotiusand
Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94). Public interest in just war theory declined
considerably in the 20th century with the growing realization of the horror
of total war. This emotional reaction not only led to a spread of semi-pacifism,
but also to the position that war could not be just, and had to be renounced by
all civilized nations as an instrument of policy. The theory of just war has in
recent years been of great interest to some professional military organizations,
because of increasing unwillingness by professional officer corps to abandon a
more civilian sense of doing only what satisfies their conscience. Largely as a
result of the American involvement in theVietnam Warthe topic has come
to be of increasing interest again, as public debate increased on all defence
matters in Western societies.
The traditional argument on just war (and modern versions have so far
added very little indeed to the well worked-out theory of the past) distin-
guishes two questions. Usually referred to by their associated Latin tags, the
distinctions are betweenjus ad bellumandjus in bello. The first raises the
question of when it is just or right to go to war, the second considers what
methods may be used in warfare. To simplify enormously, most arguments on
the justice of going to war at all boil down to the idea that only defensive war is
Just War