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How did Hugo Grotius connect crime and punishment to just war?

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Oil portrait of Hugo de Groot, also known as Hugo Grotius, by the workshop of Michiel Janszoon van Mierevelt, showing him with a ruffled white collar and dark clothing. — Hugo Grotius Portrait of Hugo de Groot (Hugo Grotius), oil on panel by the workshop of Michiel Janszoon van Mierevelt, 1631; in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

In his seminal work De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Hugo Grotius developed a theory of crime and punishment to provide a framework for regulating international conflict.1

Because there is no supreme judge to settle disputes between independent powers, Grotius argued that war must be tolerated as a necessary means to resolve conflicts. To restrain the violence of these conflicts, he proposed that the resort to war should be limited to specific, just causes—essentially treating war as a form of litigation.1

Within this legalistic framework, Grotius characterized certain wars as a form of "just punishment" for crimes committed by states or other independent powers. By framing military action as a response to wrongdoing, he sought to move beyond mere self-interest and establish a normative basis for war that could be governed by natural law and the law of nations, ultimately aiming to minimize bloodshed.12