It’s a Trap! Re-Thinking Samuel Moyn’s Humane Beyond the North Atlantic

Samuel Moyn’s latest book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, offers a compelling re-reading of the history of the laws of war not as the precursors of international humanitarian law, but as enablers of what he calls “inhumane war”. Instead of advancing the cause of humanization of war, Moyn argues in favour of pacificism and the abolition of war in its entirety. And yet, Moyn’s decision to tell his history through two interconnected but different parts – one on the broader history of the laws of war and another on the very recent present of US domestic politics – forces the book to embrace a North Atlantic, Anglo-American vision of international law that robs it of valuable insights from the Global South and its relationship to the same body of laws. In this review essay, I explore these missed connections seeking to offer a more global approach to the history of war and peace.

Indigenous Australian laws of war: Makarrata, milwerangel and junkarti

Studies in Australian history have lamentably neglected the military traditions of First Australians prior to European contact. This is due largely to a combination of academic and social bigotry, and loss of Indigenous knowledge after settlement. Thankfully, the situation is beginning to change, in no small part due to the growing literature surrounding the Frontier Wars of Australia. All aspects of Indigenous customs and norms are now beginning to receive a balanced analysis. Yet, very little has ever been written on the laws, customs and norms that regulated Indigenous Australian collective armed conflicts. This paper, co-written by a military legal practitioner and an ethno-historian, uses early accounts to reconstruct ten laws of war evidently recognized across much of pre-settlement Australia. The study is a preliminary one, aiming to stimulate further research and debate in this neglected field, which has only recently been explored in international relations.

Introduction

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced in a decade of conflict in Syria. The devastation caused by the unrelenting war makes this crisis one of the most serious humanitarian disasters in recent history. The widely reported and available numbers—more than six million internally displaced and five million refugees, roughly half the population of the entire country—reflects only a fraction of the conflict’s toll (OCHA 2019). Hundreds of thousands of people have been besieged, hospitals have been destroyed, and humanitarian access has been restricted. This has led to countless denunciations from international organizations, states, and civil society movements calling for the laws of war to be respected, sieges lifted, and humanitarian access facilitated. But beneath each of these humanitarian appeals lies a complex reality extending beyond the binary narratives that have come to define the Syria war: of an “evil regime” willing to demolish neutral hospitals in its quest to defeat a popular uprising, or of “terrorists” using hospitals to launch attacks against a legitimate government. Indeed, each reasonable demand for a more humane conduct of warfare interacts with the complexity of Syria’s history and the role of social services in the postcolonial period, the evolution of the application of the law of war in the context of a war on terrorism, the lived experiences of the tactic of siege that follows Syrians across borders, the use and manipulation of humanitarian narratives to fuel complex ...

Naming and Shaming the Bombers

This chapter recounts how Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) failed to turn the tide against the attacks on hospitals through its approach of naming and shaming the perpetrators of hospital bombings. It speculates that the failure to stop the attacks was either caused by the way in which the international humanitarian law (IHL) is wired to provide exemption for warring parties or MSF’s inability to deliver consistent messages necessary to generate pressure on offending nations. It also mentions the Syrian government’s denial of assistance to the population and disrespect to the laws of war that centered the state as both perpetrator and aid responder. The chapter looks at the Syrian government’s ability to deny and allow access to services that served to amplify its control and project its sovereignty. It elaborates how the Syrian state centered its own sovereign control by being the focus of diplomatic efforts to ensure humanitarian access.

Revisiting the Memory of Solferino: Knowledge Production and the Laws of War

During the course of the second half of the 19th century, the rules regulating the conduct of armies during hostilities were internationally codified for the first time. The conventional narrative attributes the codification of the laws of war to the campaign of civil society, especially that of the founders of the Red Cross—Henry Dunant and Gustav Moynier. In what follows, we problematize this narrative and trace the construction of this knowledge. We explore how the leading figures of the Red Cross, who were aware of the shortcomings of their project, were nonetheless invested in narrating its history as a history of success. Their struggle to control the narrative would eventually confer the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) with considerable interpretive and agenda-setting authority in the realm of the laws of war. We dwell on the meaning of this conscious exercise in knowledge production and its normative ramifications.

Comparing Islamic and International Laws of War: Orthodoxy, “Heresy,” and Secularization in the Category of Civilians

This Article investigates how contemporary laws of war rationalize civilian deaths. I concentrate on two specific legal constructions in warfare: the definition of civilian/combatant and the principle of distinction. (The categories of civilian and combatant should be understood as dialogically constitutive and not entirely distinct. In addition, the category of “civilian” is a modern one and premodern legal sources often do not use one term to refer to noncombatants.) I focus on two significant parties in contemporary warfare: al-Qāʿidah (aka Al-Qaeda) and the U.S. military. Al-Qāʿidah diverges from orthodox Islamic law on these two legal issues, while remaining within the Islamic legal tradition. To scrutinize the nature of this divergence, I compare al-Qāʿidah’s legal reasoning to the legal reasoning of the U.S. military. I demonstrate that the U.S. military diverges from orthodox international law in ways that parallel how al-Qāʿidah diverges from orthodox Islamic law. Specifically, both the U.S. military and al-Qāʿidah elide orthodox categories of civilians and expand the category of combatant, primarily by rendering civilians as probable combatants. Based on this comparative analysis, I argue that the legal reasoning of al-Qāʿidah (and other militant Islamist groups) is as secular as it is Islamic; I call this fusion secularislamized law.