ABSTRACT
The just war tradition, throughout its history, has mainly concerned itself with the ethics of declaring war and of the methods used to wage war. There is now a general acceptance of the necessity for jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria, which a war must fulfil to be justly declared and justly fought. Jus post bellum considerations, on the other hand, are a relatively new aspect of the just war tradition. Many previous just war theorists have touched on them (such as Hugo Grotius,1 who discussed principles of just war termination in De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libris Tres) – but only recently have some begun to consider them distinct and important enough to form a category of criteria. The idea is that, as just war theory contains categories of moral conditions for declaring war and waging war, it should also include a category for ending war; containing rules that determine when and how a war may morally be finished, and what duties the victorious country has towards the defeated (and vice versa).
