Conspiring with the Enemy

Jeff McMahan, University of Oxford:
War is the fiercest form of human competition; yet it often involves cooperation among adversaries, even as they try to slaughter one other. Drawing on an impressive survey of military history—ancient and modern, Eastern and Western—Yvonne Chiu distinguishes among numerous forms of cooperation in war and even identifies an “ethic of cooperation” of which she finds manifestations throughout the history of warfare. Many of the instances she recounts are moving and inspiring, and the book as a whole offers grounds for optimism about the future of warfare.

David Luban, Georgetown University:
Chiu shows that the ethic of cooperation in warfare is a major normative feature of war-fighting, today as well as in the distant past. Other writers on just war theory sometimes drop hints of this, but the great accomplishment of this book is to bring the ethic of cooperation out of the shadows and reveal it as something absolutely central to warfare ethics. Chiu’s scholarship is impressively wide-ranging, and she has a tremendous eye for the telling anecdote, historical episode, and quotation.

Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations:
Yvonne Chiu has written an original and important book. Conspiring with the Enemy's argument is strong throughout; the writing is clear and often elegant, and the historical references, illustrations, and examples make the book engaging as well as educational. Who ever heard of such a thing as cooperation between enemies in war? Henceforth no one will ask that question.