War of aggression
military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense
A war of aggression, sometimes also war of choice, is a military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense, often for territorial gain and subjugation as a war of conquest, in contrast with the concept of a just war or war of necessity.
Wars without international legality (i.e. not out of self-defense nor sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council) can be considered wars of aggression. However, this alone usually does not constitute the definition of a war of aggression: certain wars may be unlawful but not aggressive (a war to settle a boundary dispute where the initiator has a reasonable claim, and limited aims, is one example).
In the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Article 39 of the United Nations Charter provides that the UN Security Council shall determine the existence of any act of aggression and "shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security".The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court refers to the crime of aggression as one of the "most serious crimes of concern to the international community", and provides that the crime falls within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, the Rome Statute stipulates that the ICC may not exercise its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression until such time as the states parties agree on a definition of the crime and set out the conditions under which it may be prosecuted. At the Kampala Review Conference on 11 June 2010, a total of 111 State Parties to the Court agreed by consensus to adopt a resolution accepting the definition of the crime and the conditions for the exercise of jurisdiction over this crime. The relevant amendments to the Statute entered into force on July 17, 2018 after being ratified by 35 States Parties.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “War of aggression” is military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through aggression, military and conflict, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q474138. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “War of aggression” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.