The unrelenting advance of technology, paired with unprecedented opportunities for exchanges between and clashes of cultures over the finite resources of a shrinking world sadly promise a dynamic, enduring, and destructive character for future warfare. Preventing and limiting the effects of war have never been more urgent humanitarian imperatives.
It is unsurprising, and perhaps even a little encouraging, that a flurry of efforts to regulate conflict more effectively has emerged from so many quarters. As much as, or perhaps more than, any preceding period, the present features a frenzy of forecasts and legal diagnoses for regulating future warfare. Military, diplomatic, academic, and humanitarian communities have all dedicated impressive human and financial resources to further control the conduct of hostilities. Military and diplomatic legal circles have worked to update legal doctrine to account for predictions of increasingly remote and pervasive warfare. Meanwhile, academic and humanitarian communities have probed existing doctrine for interpretive possibilities that lend greater protections to the civilians who will inevitably be swept up in it and will suffer most. Where these respective communitiesâ predictions and prescriptions find common ground will no doubt influence and form the future laws of war.
While envisioning the future of warfare and generating palatable and effective regulations for it are commendable, whether ongoing efforts adequately account for past experience is also worth considering. The challenge of balancing military imperatives with humanitarian ideals has been at the heart of the law of war project since its earliest days. The past offers us instructive successes and failures at using law to regulate warfare. Across time, space, culture and religion, valuable lessons await those with the opportunity, patience, and skill to discern them.
In this third volume of the series The Laws of Yesterdayâs Wars, Dr Samuel White and his contributors expertly tackle precisely this task. Together with its preceding volumes, this volume offers an unrivalled survey of military, legal, and cultural experience with regulating the conduct of hostilities. Its chapters are highly informative of how an exceptionally wide range of cultures has (and has not) regulated warfare through law. They will certainly stand as lasting contributions in this respect, or as White has termed them a âwider dataset,â in our shared field.
But these chapters are also highly relevant to sorting deeper and enduring assumptions behind the regulation of war. Readers will find themselves asking whether a truly universal war convention has ever been attainable in
Conceptions of the law of war as an essentially international project have seemed to ripen in step with conceptions of an international community itself. When we speak of laws of war today, or perhaps more so of âinternational humanitarian law,â we now mean to refer not to a municipal, local or parochial ruleset or code. We increasingly mean to convey notions of restraint that are shared as fundamental and universal to their agreed context, an essentially universalist convention. But, as White asks, how international is this most codified branch of international law and how international can it ever really be?
As well or better than any preceding text, this volume present readers, and it is hoped international legislators in whatever form the future finds them, new and valuable grist for this legal mill. We at the Lieber Institute for Law and Warfare and the U.S. Military Academy at West are grateful to White and his contributors for this ground-breaking study. It has been our distinct pleasure to feature its preceding volumes on our electronic publication Articles of War. We wish the best of luck to Dr White and his contributors in hoping that the laws of yesterdayâs wars and of the various cultures that developed them can produce a more effective law of tomorrowâs wars.
Professor Sean Watts