Humanizing The Laws Of War

Richard Baxter was the pre-eminent scholar of the laws of war in the last century. This book brings together his key writings in this area in an accessible form, with a new introduction and biographical note written Professor Detlev Vagts and Judge Stephen Schwebel.

An analysis of the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in international norm creation and the progressive development of international humanitarian law.

An internationally-recognized authority on constitutional law, national security law, and counterterrorism, William C. Banks believes changing patterns of global conflict are forcing a reexamination of the traditional laws of war. The Hague Rules, the customary laws of war, and the post-1949 law of armed conflict no longer account for nonstate groups waging prolonged campaigns of terrorism—or even more conventional insurgent attacks. Recognizing that many of today's conflicts are low-intensity, asymmetrical wars fought between disparate military forces, Banks's collection analyzes nonstate armed groups and irregular forces (such as terrorist and insurgent groups, paramilitaries, child soldiers, civilians participating in hostilities, and private military firms) and their challenge to international humanitarian law. Both he and his contributors believe gaps in the laws of war leave modern battlefields largely unregulated, and they fear state parties suffer without guidelines for responding to terrorists and their asymmetrical tactics, such as the targeting of civilians. These gaps also embolden weaker, nonstate combatants to exploit forbidden strategies and violate the laws of war. Attuned to the contested nature of post-9/11 security and policy, this collection juxtaposes diverse perspectives on existing laws and their application in contemporary conflict. It sets forth a legal definition of new wars, describes the status of new actors, charts the evolution of the twenty-first-century battlefield, and balances humanitarian priorities with military necessity. While the contributors contest each other, they ultimately reestablish the legitimacy of a long-standing legal corpus, and they rehumanize an environment in which the most vulnerable targets, civilian populations, are themselves becoming weapons against conventional power.

Two broad competing normative conceptions of war can be distinguished in the history of legal and political thought. The first and nowadays more familiar belongs to the tradition of "just war." It sees war as an instrument of justice, indeed the most extreme form of supra-national lawenforcement, justified only in the most serious cases of violation of right. The second conception has been labelled "lawful", "legitimate", or "regular war", where war is not enforcement of justice, but a legally regulated procedure governing the pursuit of conflicting legitimate claims amongequal and autonomous political entities.This book sheds light on the relationship between law and morals in armed conflict, and can be read as a historical argument against the disappearance of the regular war concept. Kalmanovitz highlights three important contemporary challenges: the juridification of aggression and the "turn to ethics"in international law; the progressive individualization of war; and the predominance of asymmetrical warfare and armed nonstate actors.This study of the regular war tradition brings historical and theoretical perspective to these recent conceptual transformations, which undermine the fundamental and long-standing distinction between war and police action. It contributes to clarify the stakes in the erosion of internationalpluralism and the normative depoliticization of war. In revisiting the regular war tradition, a clearer sense of these ongoing transformations is realised, inspiring fresh perspectives on the justifiability of war.

"[A] brilliant new book . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides." —Jackson Lears, The New York Review of Books A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere. In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war. Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

Traven argues that universal moral beliefs and emotions shaped the evolution of international laws that protect civilians in war.