In this program I would like to think with y ou about conditions for war and peace.

This is a question that has plagued the thoughts of many thinkers in the past. War, of course, is a terrible destruction. So many people die. And so many peoples' living are uprooted. And therefore, it is only legitimate to think that wars of all kinds should be eliminated from the Earth. But when it comes to the measures for peace, what we need to prevent warfare, then suddenly, the whole discussion becomes so complicated. Like, for example, one way to avoid war would be to have a strong military and show force to ones neighbors, so that you would not be attacked so easily. The other extreme would be to eliminate all possession of arms, that weapons should disappear from the earth, so that people can enjoy peace. And as you can see, thinking about condition of war and peace is an extremely controversial manner, matter that does not allow easy answers. And that is exactly what I want to do in this course.

Instead of providing you answers, I want you, I want to provoke your ideas, your reactions, your internal in-, in-, internal difficulty in facing the problems. Let's start from the most easy and the most difficult question. Can war be necessary? That alone is an extremely controversial issue. For we would like to think that war is unnecessary but that not be, that not may be the case. And there's a problem. As wars produce much disasters and calamities it is easy to reach conclusions that wars are not desirable.

But then what war is not desirable? What is not desirable is an invasion to your homeland. And, even if it, it accompanies many victims of such aggression, it must be legitimate to fight against the invaders. And then here, you have the heroes who fight against the invaders and the victim who suffered from the aggression from the invaders. In this light, it is not that the war is unnecessary here. It is that the invasion was unnecessary and that we should fight back. This combination of hero and victim is almost ambiguous when we follow the tradition of war memories in every country. Starting from the, from the First World War to the Second World War, you see many war memorials that are dedicated to those people who passed away and those people who fought gallantly against the enemies. But at the same time, we must start to think that war is something that cannot be avoided anyway. That war is like part of our human nature, that cannot be challenged. So this leads to this question, can wars be avoided? In many ways, wars were seen as something similar to natural disasters. Just like earthquakes or fires, war is something that just happens, and that it is the will of the God that dictates such calamities. God's ways are always so difficult to know for the mortals and that is something that is beyond our reach. At the same time, there were some ideas that emerged essentially in Europe in the 17th century, that war is not a natural disaster but something conducted by humans. And because it is conducted by humans, we can change it. Now by arguing that war is a human behavior, and one that can be controlled. I'm not arguing that those in 17th Europe argued about abolishing warfare.

Far from it. They were arguing that war is actually a tool of a state's policy. A government has a right to use war as a rational tool of foreign policy. If you follow that line, then the argument is quite different from the one that you might anticipate from taking wars as natural disasters. And in many ways, it was this legacy of the renaissance or the humanitarian views on war. Not humanizing war but taking war as a human behavior that formed the basis of international law. And of course, we can argue that wars of, wars of self-defense is an inherent right of individual nations. And also, so long as governments decide to go to war, there is no reason that such action should be limited. But then, the argument should go even further than that. For, for example, take a case where a large of number of people are being massacred. Which happens all the time, in many wars, but it can also happen without a war. Take for example a dictator who is killing people in his or her, his or her land. Thousands of people are being slaughtered by the dictator, should such situation be allowed to continue. Then you have a very different question here. This is not about war as a rational tool of foreign policy. This is a question about intervening into a humanitarian disaster and save people from tyranny and violence. We will discuss later about this question of responsibility to protect. So, as you can see, this avoidance of war is closely be-, closely related to another question that is, should wars be avoided? Under certain circumstances, war it might be the case that we should fight war to save people. And refusing to participate in a military

action against a violent villain, would be taken as, not only cowardice, but a conspiracy of silence, that allows so many people to die. But then, if it is the case, that there can be a necessary war, we also have to pay attention to the fact that war brings out much casualties and destruction. Now who are we to argue that war is necessary when the war is killing a large number of people and the destruction brought about by that war is much larger, could be much larger than the war itself. And that leads to the question, the final question here. When are wars necessary and when are wars unnecessary? Establishing a principle on this issue is not only important in observing wars, but also in proposing very concrete foreign policy. For, if you, if we fight unnecessary wars, wars that are unnecessary, then we are simply allowing people to be involved in mass killings. and we are allowing people who do not have to die pass away before their fate. [BLANK_AUDIO]