Guerra

The essay examines the relationship between war, law, and technology from an anthropological and historical-philosophical perspective. Beginning with the so-called Gombe Chimpanzee War, it challenges the analogy between animal aggression and human warfare, arguing that war is a specifically human phenomenon rooted in culturally constructed forms of collective identity and “cultural pseudospeciation.” It then reconstructs the role of international law in containing and formalising organised violence through the development of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Particular attention is devoted to the just-war tradition, from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to the Second Scholasticism, and to Alberico Gentili’s decisive contribution to the transformation of war into a regulated conflict between formally equal public enemies. This legal tradition progressively imposed limits concerning permissible weapons, legitimate targets, protected persons, and the spatial boundaries of hostilities. The final section considers how cyber warfare, drones, autonomous weapons, and artificial intelligence are eroding these distinctions. By transferring lethal decisions from human beings to algorithms, emerging military technologies risk neutralising both biological inhibitions against killing and the legal mechanisms developed to restrain violence, thereby paving the way for a genuinely posthuman form of warfare.