What are the ethical implications of considering the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its afterlives in the continuing violence of anti-Black racism as a war? Daniel A. Morris shows how asking this question shifts the frame of just war theory and poses uncomfortable yet urgent intellectual challenges. Treating Black political leaders as serious thinkers, Morris presents a surprising tradition of just war reflection that stretches from Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vesey, and David Walker to the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements.

Vincent Lloyd, Villanova University

Daniel A. Morris's Force, Religion, and the Quest for African American Justice: A Study of the Black Just War Tradition is magnificent. It understands the centuries of violence against Black people and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as acts of war. Morris argues the domination, enslavement, and murder of Black people in the United States and throughout the African diaspora was embedding in the very logic of white Christian Just War Theory. Contrary to liberal theory's rejection of Black militancy and armed revolt as vengeful politics, Morris shows how Black revolutionaries such as Frederick Douglass, David Walker, the Deacons of Defense, and the Black Panthers Party utilize Just War Theory to justify their use of violence against white terrorism. Morris claims Black thinkers' arguments for the use of violence against white supremacy constitute a Black Just War Tradition. Morris's prose is convincing. His analysis is sharp, but most of all, his arguments for a Black Just War Tradition feel right.

Tommy J. Curry, the University of Edinburgh