Wars with and for Humanity

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.