This book sets out to explore the questions how democracies decide which lives should be protected, how these lives are defended, and how they are distinguished from the lives that can be lost without mourning. The author analyzes through a range of political and philosophical issues the contemporary just war literature. She emphasizes the problem of human rights, the biopolitics of democratic welfare regimes, and the relationship between the aesthetic value of the visual world and the discursive value of democratic politics. In doing so, the book questions standard conventions about the right to kill in warfare, and challenges some of our basic assumptions about the justice of democratic welfare regimes.