Insisting that peaceful resolution of conflicts is not a utopian goal, this book is an intervention into the violent politics of a changing global order.

Jeff Noonan shifts the focus away from the content of ideologies to examine the way in which different justifications of war always employ the same distribution of values. Moral economies of war reduce human life to an instrumental value of some higher political goal: national security, national liberation, justice for historical wrongs suffered, the revolutionary overthrow of all conditions that oppress humanity.

The book argues that the moral economy of war is both materially irrational and morally incoherent: every instance argues that the lives of some must be sacrificed for the sake of the lives of others. Moral economies of war thus assume that life is of ultimate value (otherwise, why fight) but they subordinate this value to some non-living system goal. Moral economies of peace, by contrast, start with life as the ultimate value and interpret all other political values in light of it. National security, justice, or radical social changes are political values only to the extent that they demonstrably improve life conditions for each and all. Far from a utopian moralistic plea, the material rationality, moral coherence, and realistic possibility of organizing domestic and international politics in the moral economy is a function of treating history as a learning process.