Abstract
The U.S. takes great pride in conducting war ‘humanely’, but is humane warfare an achievement to celebrate or a cynical contortion of incommensurable principals? This chapter reviews Samuel Moyn’s Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War and advances its own arguments in relation to the concept of humanity. Moyn presents a compelling account of the costs associated with humanising warfare, not least by connecting it with the demise of peace and anti-war politics. But we suggest that the scope of humanity in war is broader and more complicated than Moyn suggests. Our argument rests on two developments in humane war that Moyn dismisses or overlooks. First is the development of rules on the regulation of hostilities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which we argue constitute and calibrate military force in broadly legitimate and ethical terms that prefigure the post-Vietnam War era of humanisation that animates Moyn’s analysis. Second is the turn toward humanitarian wars that emerged in the late twentieth century, and which we argue is an important transformation where ‘humanity’ becomes not only the means but also the justificatory ends of war. The chapter begins with an overview and contextualisation of Moyn’s argument before discussing these respective developments and their implications for Moyn’s analysis. Where Moyn retains an optimism that more humanity could do some good to recover peace, we conclude that once brought into the realm of war, it is humanity that needs to be questioned, perhaps even abandoned.
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Notes
- 1.
Zehfuss 2012, p. 682.
- 2.
Schmitt and Cooper 2021.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
On the Vietnam War and its influence on the principle of proportionality see: Cuddy 2016.
- 10.
Gregory 2022.
- 11.
- 12.
Moyn 2021b.
- 13.
Moyn 2021a, 207.
- 14.
Jones 2020.
- 15.
- 16.
Witt 2021.
- 17.
Douzinas 2009.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
Moyn 2021b.
- 21.
Moyn 2021a, p. 11.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Amanda Alexander has made a similar argument: “It was only at the very end of the 20th century that practitioners of international humanitarian law, following the example set by human rights organizations, suddenly accepted the authority of Additional Protocol I and, with it, a humanitarian vision of the ius in bello.” Alexander 2015, p. 110.
- 24.
Moyn 2021b.
- 25.
International Committee of the Red Cross 2015.
- 26.
Moyn 2021a, p. 197.
- 27.
See: ibid., pp. 85–91.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 85.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 30.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 115.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 23–25.
- 33.
Declaration Renouncing the use, in Time of War, of Explosive Projectiles Under 400 Grammes Weight, opened for signature 11 December 1868, International Military Commission Saint Petersburg (entered into force 11 December 1868) [Explosive Projectiles].
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
- 37.
Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, opened for signature 18 October 1907, International Peace Conference, entered into force 26 January 1910, [Laws and Customs of War on Land], Regulations: Article 22.
- 38.
Ibid., Regulations: Article 23. See also: Kinsella 2017, pp. 205–231.
- 39.
International Committee of the Red Cross undated-b.
- 40.
International Committee of the Red Cross undated-a.
- 41.
Moyn 2021a.
- 42.
Luban 2013, p. 322.
- 43.
Ordinarily, historians identify two ‘branches’ within jus in bello: the older Hague rules associated with the broader means and methods of war and the newer, more humanitarian focused Geneva rules which became known as International Humanitarian Law only in the 1970s. Historians disagree as to whether humanitarian focused IHL genuinely belongs to the longer-standing histories of the rules and regulations of war and belligerent rights or whether it constitutes a convenient or lazy retrofitting of contemporary aspirations and norms on the past. For a useful overview of these debates, see: Alexander 2015. On the politics of naming the jus in bello legal regime see: Benvenisti 2010, pp. 339–473.
- 44.
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, open for signature 13 January 1993, Conference of Disarmament and General Assembly of United Nations, entry into force 29 April 1997 [Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]; Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction), opened for signature 10 April 1972, United Nations General Assembly, entry into force 26 March 1975 [Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons]; Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, open for signature 18 September 1997, The Oslo Diplomatic Conference on a Total Global Ban on Anti-Personnel Mines, entry into force 1 March 1999 [Ottawa Treaty].
- 45.
Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects, open for signature 10 October 1980, United Nations Conference, entry into force 2 December 1983 [Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons].
- 46.
Moyn 2021a, p. 85.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 318.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 293, emphasis added.
- 49.
Moyn 2021b, pp. 182–91.
- 50.
Moyn 2014, pp. 154–197.
- 51.
Moyn 2021a, p. 118.
- 52.
In Last Utopia Moyn argues that human rights emerged as a moral hope in the wake of other failed utopias, and that since the 1970s human rights have been advanced through claims to a “moral transcendence of politics”, Moyn 2010, p. 227 Although Moyn is extremely attentive to the ways in which human rights function as an antipolitical machine, he does not directly take on the use of human rights in the mobilisation of war.
- 53.
Moyn 2021a, p. 7.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 150.
- 55.
Douzinas 2007, pp. 1–28.
- 56.
- 57.
As Anne Orford has argued, the R2P continues a longer legacy that can be traced back to the 1950s and to the idea that the UN had a responsibility to “maintain order and protect life in the decolonised world”, first exercised in response to the Suez crisis of 1956 and the UN offer of military assistance to the Government of the Republic of the Congo in 1960. Orford 2011, p. 3.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 59.
Wheeler 2000.
- 60.
- 61.
Douzinas argues: “The paradoxical, the aporetic, the contradictory are not peripheral distractions awaiting to be ironed by the theorist. Paradox is the organising principle of human rights […]” Douzinas 2007, p. 8.
- 62.
Zehfuss 2012, p. 866.
- 63.
Coker 2001, p. 3.
- 64.
Douzinas 2007.
- 65.
- 66.
Moyn 2021a, p. 91.
- 67.
Mégret 2006, pp. 265–317.
- 68.
Butler 2004, p. 20.
- 69.
Douzinas 2007.
- 70.
Agamben 1998.
- 71.
Shah 2019, pp. 210–218.
- 72.
Çubukçu 2017, p. 265.
- 73.
- 74.
- 75.
Zehfuss 2012, p. 869.
- 76.
- 77.
Abu-Lughod 2013.
- 78.
- 79.
- 80.
Moyn 2021a, p. 4.
- 81.
Ibid., pp. 5–6.
- 82.
Ibid., p. 9.
- 83.
- 84.
- 85.
- 86.
Quoted in: Khan 2021.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
- 89.
Moyn 2021a, p. 13.
- 90.
Satia 2021.
- 91.
Moyn 2021a, p. 316.
- 92.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 93.
Pictet quoted in van Dijk 2022b.
- 94.
van Dijk 2022a.
- 95.
Moyn 2021a, p. 13.
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Treaties
Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and Its Annex: Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, opened for signature 18 October 1907, International Peace Conference, entered into force 26 January 1910
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction, open for signature 13 January 1993, Conference of Disarmament and General Assembly of United Nations, entry into force 29 April 1997
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, opened for signature 10 April 1972, United Nations General Assembly, entry into force 26 March 1975
Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, open for signature 18 September 1997, The Oslo Diplomatic Conference on a Total Global Ban on Anti-Personnel Mines, entry into force 1 March 1999
Convention on the Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects, open for signature 10 October 1980, United Nations Conference, entry into force 2 December 1983
Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Explosive Projectiles Under 400 Grammes Weight, opened for signature 11 December 1868, International Military Commission Saint Petersburg (entered into force 11 December 1868)
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Jones, C., Shah, N. (2023). Wars with and for Humanity. In: Krieger, H., Kalmanovitz, P., Lieblich, E., Mignot-Mahdavi, R. (eds) Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, Volume 24 (2021). Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-559-1_5
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