ABSTRACT
The nature and scope of the field of military ethics as it came into being and has developed is defined by a conversation that has taken place within the frame of Western culture. This is reflected in the chapters above-both in their topics and in their authors. But every major culture of the world has produced its own literature on the ethics of warfare. The purpose of this section of the present volume is to provide a window on three important examples of this: the Islamic, the Chinese, and the Indian. Each has had a different historical experience of warfare; each brings distinctive moral perspectives to bear on its understanding of war; each employs its own historical tradition somewhat differently in regard to contemporary armed conflict. The purpose of the chapters below is to describe the contours of the treatment of the ethics of war in the historical traditions of these three major cultures and to indicate important ways in which these deep cultural traditions matter for contemporary thinking and practice regarding armed conflict.
