The more 'humane' the war, the longer it lasts
Yale professor Samuel Moyn, in a major Oxford lecture, argued that the West's drive to fight 'cleaner' wars is perpetuating them.
Oxford’s academic year has come to an end. The prime minister of the UK has announced his resignation. I believe it is time for some marking - of graduate students and of the Labour Party both.
While my colleagues and I sit down to read exam papers, I doubt Starmer, his cabinet, and the broader party will attempt any soul-searching about their clumsy budget management, which rightly angered pensioners, and was compounded by disability benefit cuts.
And then there was Starmer’s timid stance towards the warmongering Israeli government, and how his intransigence, as an international lawyer no less, in refusing to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide, cost him and his party. He just does not get this, does he?
Because that refusal was not merely a political miscalculation. It was a symptom of something deeper: a habit of mind, widespread among Western liberal leaders, of substituting legal proceduralism for moral clarity when it comes to war. It is what some scholars call the ‘juridification of moral judgment’, where a question of right and wrong is handed over to lawyers and quietly loses its moral charge. Starmer’s proceduralism and juridification looked like rigour but was really a form of acquiescence. And I am no lawyer, but it was not even on Starmer's side, since many respected scholars of genocide are certain that what we are seeing in Gaza meets the legal definition.
The law, read honestly, pointed exactly where he refused to go. Surely Starmer was not alone in this. He was, in fact, entirely representative.
Oxford’s top lecture
Yale professor Samuel Moyn came to Oxford last month to deliver the Cyril Foster Lecture, one of the university's most distinguished annual lectures in politics and international affairs. His title was "Gaza, the Humanisation of War, and the Politics of International Law," and his argument was that the West's drive to "humanize" war, a project that gathered force during the war on terror and found its most articulate expression under Obama, ends up legitimizing and perpetuating the very wars it claims to constrain.
Unlike Starmer, Moyn believes in the power of the word genocide. He has little faith in courts to deliver justice. His point is that the charge itself, when mobilized politically, has proved a formidable instrument of delegitimation. He also argued that how Western leaders frame their approach to war shapes, in ways they rarely reckon with, how long those wars last and how they end.
Lay down your arms!
Moyn’s starting point is historical. The anxiety that making war more bearable might make it more durable is not new. It was Berta von Suttner, the Austrian novelist and peace activist whose 1889 novel Die Waffen Nieder! — Lay Down Your Arms — made her the era’s most formidable voice against war, who first gave this worry its sharpest expression. Von Suttner was scandalized when a peace negotiation she attended devolved into little more than an exercise in sanitizing combat. She feared, with some prescience, that criticizing the brutality of war without questioning its legitimacy would only make war easier to sustain. She was outraged when the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 went not to an opponent of war but to someone who had campaigned to reduce its cruelties, helping craft the 1864 Geneva Convention. Von Suttner eventually won the prize herself in 1905. The argument she lost then is the one Moyn is still making now.
The modern form of this problem, Moyn argues, took shape during the ‘war on terror’ and crystallized under Obama. The move was elegant in its way. Rather than debating whether the United States had the right to wage the wars it was waging, the conversation shifted entirely to how those wars should be conducted. Obama, in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, made this explicit, disavowing the pacifist tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. in favour of a philosophy that accepted war as sometimes necessary, provided it was fought within humanitarian constraints. Drones instead of torture. Targeted killings instead of mass internment. The humanitarian framework did not restrain the war on terror. It laundered it.
Law as collective politics
Moyn’s framework for understanding how this works rests on three effects that the laws of war produce when applied to an actual conflict: legitimation, perpetuation, and displacement. They are worth taking in turn, because each illuminates something different about what happened in Gaza.
On legitimation, Moyn is careful not to treat law as a simple tool of power. The laws of war are not fixed rules that states either obey or violate. They are, in his account, a form of collective politics, a terrain of ongoing struggle over meaning and application. Lawyers are political actors. They work to re-describe preferred outcomes as legal requirements, narrowing ambiguities to secure relevance. This does not mean law is merely cynical but that its application is always contested.
This contest is not evenly distributed. There is a persistent divide between a military community and a humanitarian law community, and a starker one between the Global North and the Global South. The Global North typically favours permissive interpretations of the law; the Global South, shaped by the experience of imperial and colonial violence, pushes for stricter ones.
Israel has been a pioneer of this interpretive game. It has led in claiming to humanize its conduct while simultaneously expanding the legal basis for the harm it inflicts: doctrines that permit strikes on otherwise protected sites once designated as militarily used, rules of engagement rewritten to maintain technical proportionality while producing vast civilian casualties. The euphemism is doing enormous work, and it is meant to.
The war that will not end
A state will claim legal compliance even when the claim is hard to believe. The point of the claim is not to be true. It is to keep the conflict inside the frame of law, where conduct can be debated, interpretations contested, and legitimacy slowly accumulated. That is the strategy: stay legal, or appear legal, and the war retains its standing. For instance, it worked for the war on terror, where the move to drones and special forces bought genuine moral acceptance even as the fighting expanded.
In Gaza the same strategy failed, and it failed for a specific reason: the violence was too large and too visible to be absorbed by legal argument. The scale of the killing, the denial of food and aid, the systematic destruction of homes and hospitals, and the open language of some Israeli officials about what they intended could not be reframed as regrettable but lawful. The legal claims kept coming, but they no longer did the work of legitimation. They produced the opposite, a steady draining of the war’s moral standing.
That failure is what gave the genocide charge its force. When South Africa brought its case to the International Court of Justice in January 2024, the charge did not depend on enforcement to matter, and it has not been enforced. Its power was in naming the war as a crime of a particular kind and making that naming stick in public argument. It reframed what the war was about. And it carried a further charge for Israel specifically, because Israel’s own founding story is built on the prevention of genocide, which made the accusation harder to dismiss and more wounding when it held.
There is a second way the humanitarian frame shapes a war. The demand that a war be fought humanely can, paradoxically, make it harder to end. American officials in the early months of the Gaza war reportedly urged Israel to fight more ‘humanely’ not purely on ethical grounds but as a strategic necessity. More ‘humane’ conduct would preserve the legitimation required to keep fighting.
In Moyn’s account, Israel did adjust, over time, in response to diplomatic pressure and public scrutiny. The killing slowed after the opening months, which were by far the deadliest. More than 30,000 of the dead, over 40 percent of the eventual toll, were killed in the first five months alone, at a rate far above what followed. This is not a reassuring finding. It describes management rather than restraint. A calibration of violence to a level that avoids total global outrage while allowing the genocide to continue indefinitely. Moyn calls this ‘humane continuation.’
Decline of peace movements
There is also the most important question, the one no one dared to ask in the first place. Was this war justified? Was the self-defence argument well-founded? The intense focus on how Israel was fighting in Gaza crowded out the more fundamental question of whether, and on what terms, it had the right to fight at all. The laws of war distinguish between jus in bello (the law governing how a war is fought) and jus ad bellum (the law governing whether resorting to war is justified at all). Since October 7, Western governments, legal commentators, and media coverage have been almost entirely preoccupied with the former. The debate over the latter was not lost so much as squandered. This was, Moyn argues, the single biggest missed opportunity of the entire episode.
The displacement was more political than legal. The underlying Western, and particularly American, strategic vision in the region had little to do with Palestinian rights and everything to do with Israeli-Saudi normalization as a mechanism for degrading Iranian power. Within that framework, Gaza was an obstacle to be managed. Who cares about the moral weight of a population whose fate carried independent moral weight. The fixation on humanitarian conduct served, whether intentionally or not, to obscure this. Those who concentrated on Gaza’s brutality rarely integrated a broader political path to peace, leaving their interventions, however morally serious, vulnerable to the charge that they had no answer to the region’s actual power dynamics.
This brings Moyn to what he calls the year's worst casualty: the dearth of any serious peace project. The era of humanizing war has coincided with the decline of peace movements. The irony is almost too neat. At the moment when the tools for laying out the inhumanity of war have never been more powerful, the political will to demand its end has never been weaker. Ceasefires and political initiatives were left, at points, to Donald Trump. Those who marched and petitioned and litigated had, in Moyn's reading, no concrete political destination to offer. Protesting is one thing, a crucial thing, but there needs to be something beyond it, a place that transgressive politics aspires to reach. A just peace.
The sail and the wind
His conclusion is not that humanitarian law is worthless. It embodies, he says, a minimal ethics within a tragic world, and can serve as anti-war politics by other means, yani not by courts per se. But in general, we should acknowledge that humanitarian law is no panacea, because we have a bigger problem.
To make this point, Moyn reached for a metaphor that belongs to the Palestinian-American legal scholar and author of the 2019 book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, Noura Erakat. Erakat, who tirelessly accounts for how international law has been wielded against the very people it purports to protect, wrote that law is like a sail. The wind is political mobilisation. The direction of the boat depends not on the sail but on where the wind is blowing.
Moyn’s use of it was pointed: if the legal emphasis is carrying us in the wrong direction, we need to go to port, reconsider, and cut a new sail. But even a new sail solves nothing without a destination. The wind is politics and power; the sail is the legal framework we choose to deploy. Neither means anything unless we have first decided where we want to go. Surely not a humane war, not a just war, not even the mere absence of war. But peace. A just peace. The pressing question, the one that the humanization of war has consistently displaced, is what a just peace would actually look like, and who is prepared to fight for it politically. These expectations of humane conduct are now entrenched among millions, and they will not vanish quickly. The framework is here to stay. The destination is what remains to be chosen.
Any reason for hope?
Wallahi not much.
The record since October 2023 confirms that none of this is likely to stop. The logic of humane war is self-replenishing. Israel has conducted a sustained military campaign in Syria, launching hundreds of airstrikes and ground incursions since December 2024, seizing territory, each operation justified in the familiar language of national security and the protection of minorities.
The genocide in Gaza continues, both in its conduct and in the intent its perpetrators no longer trouble to hide. The West Bank has been added to the equation. Lebanon is devastated and remains under Israeli military pressure. Iran has been struck twice now, months apart. The region is being reshaped, strike by strike, in real time, and the international response follows the now-predictable pattern Moyn described: condemnation of conduct, silence on justification, and impunity in practice.
We should not place much hope in the prospect of Netanyahu’s removal from power. His opposition shares the same foundational commitments, inimical to any Palestinian political future: settler colonialism in the West Bank, the permanent containment or elimination of Palestinian political agency in Gaza, the strategic imperative of degrading Iran and Hezbollah. The issue is not one man’s character or one government’s excess. It is about a state that has, over decades and with Western backing, built a doctrine of permanent war managed to a level of acceptable inhumanity.
This is the region’s foreseeable future, then, unless the political will to demand otherwise is rebuilt from the ground up. The sail will not save us. We need to know where we are going before we argue about how to get there. Will Labour reckon with any of this? Will the man tipped to replace Starmer, Andy Burnham, do any better? I doubt it.
P.S. Moyn's argument here draws on his 2021 book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. His other recent books include Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023) and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His latest, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth, and What to Do About It, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month.
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