Wars between civilised communities have always been subject, at least in principle, to certain controls and constraints. Our present concept of the laws of war date back to the ideas of the just war developed by Christian thinkers during the Middle Ages. In these studies, eight scholars comprising historians, lawyers and political scientists trace the attempts of the great powers to keep the conduct of war within reasonable bounds; from the great days of Geneva and the Hague Conventions before the Great War to the contemporary discussion on how to limit wars fought with nuclear weapons - and to the no less difficult problem of applying restraints to wars of national liberation. The problem has been made more difficult not only by the development of new weapons but by the growth of new political concepts. This book expounds some of the difficulties which have confronted mankind in his effort to solve it over the past hundred years.