Just Peace or Just War? Theological, Ethical and Technological Reflections on Armed Conflict

Armed conflict management increasingly demands new normative and strategic frameworks that preserve human life while maintaining effective deterrence capabilities. This study develops a multidisciplinary framework for rethinking armed conflict through the concept of just peace, integrating theology, ethics, law, technology, and empirical communication analysis. The research analyzes 7957 YouTube videos from NATO, the United Nations, and the Vatican, published over two years, employing semantic network analysis, modularity-based community detection, and sentiment analysis to identify emerging discourse patterns around peace, technology, and regulatory complexity. The findings suggest that contemporary socio-technological conditions are increasingly framed in ways that open a discursive space for rethinking conflict management beyond exclusive reliance on large-scale lethal force. Positive messaging correlates with higher audience engagement, while concepts such as law, ethics, religion, and technical standards emerge as interconnected regulatory domains. The study concludes that just peace is not naïve pacifism but a strategic, normatively grounded reorientation in contemporary deterrence thinking. Effective implementation requires integrated regulatory frameworks combining legal norms, ethical principles, religious values, and technical standards. The evolving technological landscape may allow deterrence systems to move beyond exclusive reliance on lethal force toward more humane and efficient conflict-management mechanisms.