Luke Ford

The laws of war endure not because they solve violence but because they offer those who administer them a way to believe that violence can be redeemed. This is not a cynical observation. It is a structural one. Any system of rules that asks human beings to regulate organized killing, to draw lines inside catastrophe and hold them under pressure, must supply its participants with something more than a job description. It must supply a story about why the work matters, what kind of person the work makes them, and how their contribution connects to something larger and more durable than the immediate event. Without that story, the rules become unenforceable not because they lack sanctions but because they lack believers. The history of the laws of war is, among other things, a history of the successive hero systems that have made believers out of lawyers, officers, diplomats, and humanitarian workers across more than a century of industrial violence.
What changes across that century is not the need for such a story. That need is constant. What changes is the specific form the hero takes, the sacrifice required to earn that status, and the particular kind of innocence the system needs to protect in order to make the hero’s work meaningful. Each framework installs a different hero and a different innocent, presents itself as the natural continuation of what came before, and conceals the fact that it has made a choice. The concealment is not dishonest in any simple sense. It is the condition of the framework’s psychological effectiveness. A hero system that announced itself as a choice, as one possible answer among others to the question of how violence should be organized and explained, would lose the quality of moral necessity that makes people willing to sacrifice for it. The story must feel like the truth, not like a story.
At the turn of the twentieth century, under the Hague Conventions, the available hero is the disciplined officer. The framework treats war as a permanent feature of relations between states, neither to be celebrated nor abolished but to be conducted within professional limits. Suffering, in this account, is caused by technical excess — the use of weapons or tactics that inflict more harm than is necessary to defeat an enemy. The innocent is the civilian who stays in his place and does not participate. The sacrifice the hero must make is restraint: he earns his standing by refusing to use every means available to him even when the state authorizes it, even when doing so might be militarily efficient. This is a genuinely demanding sacrifice. It requires the officer to hold a line inside the heat of battle that serves no immediate tactical purpose. The framework makes that sacrifice feel noble by embedding it in a story about civilization and professional honor. The disciplined officer is the man who can kill without becoming barbaric. He proves that violence and civilization are not incompatible, that war can be conducted within limits that distinguish modern states from the savage violence they claim to have left behind.
The cost of this hero system is what it leaves untouched. The larger structure of imperial war, the economic and territorial interests that drive states to fight, the populations of colonized peoples who bear the consequences of conflicts they did not choose, none of this appears within the frame. The officer who follows the rules of his profession participates in empire while feeling that he transcends it. The framework asks him to be precise and restrained, not to question what he is being precise and restrained in the service of. That question is outside the story.
The First World War destroyed the plausibility of the officer hero without immediately replacing him. The slaughter on the Western Front was conducted within the rules. The gas attacks were the most visible violation, and they were condemned, but the mass death of millions of conscripts in tactically pointless campaigns was legal. Professional restraint had not prevented the worst war in human history. Something was wrong with the diagnosis. If suffering was caused by technical excess, by the use of prohibited means, then following the permitted means should have produced tolerable outcomes. It had not. A new causal story was needed, and with it a new hero.
What emerged from the wreckage, slowly through the interwar period and crystallized at Nuremberg, was the prosecutor. The diagnosis shifted from how wars are fought to the fact of their being fought at all. Suffering is caused not by the field commander who uses a prohibited weapon but by the political leader who decides to launch an aggressive war. Responsibility moves upward, from the battlefield to the cabinet room. The hero is the man who names that crime, who insists that law sits above sovereignty and that leaders can be judged for the decision to go to war. The sacrifice required is a willingness to break with the state, to condemn power rather than serve it, to risk the accusation of treason or hypocrisy in the name of a principle that transcends national interest. This is a heroism of detachment, of the capacity to judge from outside the loyalties that bind ordinary political actors.
The Nuremberg framework offered something the officer framework could not: a way to make the war itself — the decision to launch it, the imperial ambition behind it — the primary crime. Jackson’s opening statement was not just a legal argument. It was a declaration about what kind of story civilization needed to tell about itself. The hero of that story was reason overcoming revenge, law overcoming power, the impartial tribunal overcoming the desire for mere victor’s justice. The framework promised that violence could be made permanently meaningful by being judged, that the deaths of millions could be given significance by the accountability of the men who ordered them.
The cost of this hero system was its dependence on victory. The prosecutor can only function when his side has won. The framework offers no hero for the defeated, no role for the lawyer who must judge her own side’s crimes. It also, in its focus on the supreme crime of aggressive war, made everything that happened within war secondary, including the specific suffering of specific people. Crimes against humanity existed at Nuremberg but were legally subordinated to crimes against peace. The individual victim was evidence of the system’s operation, not the primary object of legal attention. The framework named the engine of destruction with considerable force. It had less to say about the people the engine destroyed.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions made the opposite choice with great deliberateness. They turned away from the question of why wars start and toward the question of how people are treated once wars exist. The hero is no longer the prosecutor who judges from outside but the humanitarian guardian who protects from within: the medic, the delegate, the legal adviser who accompanies the machinery of war and insists on the humanity of those caught in it. Suffering is the abuse of the defenseless, the prisoner mistreated, the wounded left without care, the civilian subjected to reprisals. The innocent is whoever is hors de combat or never in combat at all. The sacrifice required is neutrality, the most counterintuitive demand in the entire history of the laws of war. The guardian must refuse to take sides even when confronted with clear injustice, must extend protection to the enemy’s wounded as readily as to his own side’s, must bracket his judgment about the war’s justice entirely. Standing comes from proximity to suffering without political alignment.
This framework makes violence bearable by promising that humanity can survive inside it, that even the worst wars contain people who hold the line against total degradation. The guardian’s heroism is quieter than the prosecutor’s, less dramatic, but in some ways more demanding precisely because it requires the suspension of the moral judgments that most people consider the foundation of ethical action. You cannot ask which side is right. You can only ask whether this person in front of you is hors de combat and what they need. The framework produces genuine protection for genuine people. It also produces something else: the demand that the protected remain passive, that they earn their protection by not acting, by being the kind of innocent that the guardian can recognize and assist. The active defender, the person who fights back without a uniform, the civilian who organizes resistance under occupation, complicates the picture in ways the guardian framework cannot accommodate. That person sits at the edge of the category, and the framework’s integrity depends on pushing them out of it.
The 1977 Additional Protocols attempted to hold the prosecutor’s framework and the guardian’s framework together while incorporating the politics of decolonization. Wars of national liberation were recognized as international armed conflicts. The fighter whose cause involved resistance to colonial domination could, under certain conditions, qualify for combatant status. The law seemed to be acknowledging that the justice of the cause mattered, that the guardian’s enforced neutrality was insufficient in a world still organized around imperial relationships. At the same time, the Protocols deepened the civilian protection framework, introducing formal principles of distinction and proportionality that placed new burdens on military planners. The hero was now dual: the legal adviser who tightened the rules of attack and the liberation fighter whose struggle was recognized as legitimate.
The marriage produced a hero system under internal tension. The liberation fighter who received recognition had to accept, as the price of that recognition, the disciplinary framework of the laws of war. His cause was acknowledged; his methods were regulated. The justice of the struggle did not exempt him from the requirement to distinguish himself from the civilian population, to carry arms openly, to follow a responsible command structure. What the revolutionary movements got was not validation of their moral legitimacy but absorption into a framework of formal legal criteria that governed them on the same terms as everyone else. The heroic outsider became a regulated insider. And the civilian population that supported them, that fed and sheltered and sustained the resistance, remained subject to the passivity requirement. Their support was understandable, even admirable in some human sense, but it was legally hazardous. The framework could not offer them a heroic role. It could only offer them protection, conditional on their remaining visibly uninvolved.
The 1990s brought a new hero who had not previously been central to the field: the investigator and the witness. The ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and later the International Criminal Court, created institutional roles for people whose primary function was to document atrocity, construct the evidentiary record of mass violence, and turn that record into accountability. Suffering was now atrocity — genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing — deliberate campaigns of organized destruction directed against civilian populations defined by identity. The innocent was the member of a targeted group, persecuted as such. The hero was the person who refused to let the violence disappear into silence, who gathered testimony and preserved evidence and argued in court that what had happened was not the fog of war but crime.
The sacrifice required was a particular kind of emotional labor: the willingness to confront horror in systematic and sustained ways, to sit with survivors and their accounts, to treat catastrophic suffering as material for legal process without losing sight of the human reality behind the evidence. The framework offered a form of immortality through the archive. The record would outlast the events it documented. The crimes would be named. The perpetrators would be judged. The victims would not be forgotten. This was a genuine moral achievement and a genuine expansion of what international law could see. It also introduced new invisibilities. The criminal tribunal framework could accommodate the organized massacre of a passive population. It could accommodate command responsibility for deliberate targeting. It could not easily accommodate the structural economic and political conditions that produced the massacre, the imperial relationships or resource conflicts or great-power interventions that created the conditions for the violence. Those things were not crimes in the relevant sense. They were context. The framework required a perpetrator, a victim, and an act. It was less suited to addressing systems.
After 2001 the hero system fractured rather than evolved. Counterterrorism produced two competing heroes who could not be reconciled within a single framework. The security professional who prevents attacks and accepts legal risk to protect his community is one figure. The human rights advocate who constrains that professional in the name of universal civilian immunity is another. Each claims to save lives. Each offers a story about what good action looks like under conditions of extreme uncertainty. For the security professional, suffering is caused by enemies who exploit legal and social openness, who embed themselves among civilians precisely because the law makes that embedding advantageous. The innocent is the citizen who might be attacked. The sacrifice is the willingness to act under uncertainty, to make targeting decisions that may turn out to be wrong, and to accept the political and legal consequences of that willingness. For the advocate, suffering is caused by the overreach of power, by states that use security as a cover for expanding violence beyond any defensible limit. The innocent is the civilian subject to state force. The sacrifice is persistence in the face of political pressure, the defense of limits that may be temporarily unpopular.
These are not refinements of each other. They rest on different diagnoses of what causes unjust suffering and different identifications of who the primary threat to innocent life is. The law became the site where these rival heroes met and contested the meaning of protection, without either being able to displace the other. The NGO analyst who documented civilian casualties and constructed public counts of the innocent dead added a third figure, a parallel sorter whose authority rested not on state power or legal standing but on the credibility of the evidentiary process. The state sorts for action. The advocate sorts for accountability. The analyst sorts for recognition and mourning. None of these systems talks to the others except in the language of critique.
What has emerged most recently, in the era of data-driven targeting, autonomous systems, and algorithmic warfare, is a hero whose primary virtue is precision. The targeting lawyer and the system designer earn their standing by building and operating processes that minimize error, that apply legal categories consistently, that produce decisions that can be defended as careful and controlled. Suffering is error to be minimized within a framework. The innocent is whoever falls below the relevant risk threshold in the relevant probabilistic model. The sacrifice required is the willingness to accept abstraction, to trust models and workflows and training data rather than direct moral intuition, to locate the ethical in the process rather than in the person. The redemption on offer is optimization: harm is not eliminated, but it is rendered defensible, subjected to review, embedded in a chain of documentation that allows each decision to be audited.
The cost is the distance that abstraction introduces between the person who makes the decision and the person who dies as a result of it. The body disappears into a profile. The neighborhood disappears into a pattern of life. The decision to strike becomes a step in a workflow rather than a moral act that anyone fully owns. The hero of precision can look at the process and say, correctly, that it is more careful than what came before. He cannot easily look at the outcome and say that the person who died mattered as a person rather than as a data point that fell on the wrong side of a threshold. The framework makes the operator feel responsible for the process. It makes it harder to feel responsible for the result.
The dominant elite hero system — organized around international humanitarian law, universal civilian protection, and human rights accountability — is now under pressure that it did not face a generation ago. The pressure does not come primarily from within the framework, from lawyers arguing about proportionality thresholds or activists debating the scope of direct participation. It comes from outside, from political movements that reject the framework’s basic terms and offer a rival story of redemption that a significant portion of the world’s population finds more compelling.
The national protector hero, elevated by populist nationalism across multiple continents, offers a fundamentally different account of what courage and virtue look like in the presence of violence. In this system, suffering is caused by external enemies and by the weakness or betrayal of leaders who prioritize international approval over the safety of their own people. The innocent is the community — defined by nation, culture, religion, or some combination of these — that the leader is charged with defending. The sacrifice required is the willingness to reject external constraints, to defy ICC warrants, to ignore UN resolutions, to accept international condemnation as the price of effective protection. The hero earns his standing by refusing to let outsiders define the terms on which his community defends itself.
This is not an absence of moral content. That is the crucial point that the humanitarian framework tends to miss when it encounters this rival system. The national protector operates within a genuine moral order, one organized around loyalty, survival, and the particular obligations that arise from shared history and identity. Dignity, in this order, lies not in limiting violence universally but in protecting one’s own effectively. The person who subordinates his community’s security to abstract universal norms is not a hero in this system. He is a betrayer, someone who has allowed the deaths of his own people in the name of principles that his enemies do not observe. The framework offers a form of immortality through the survival and honor of the community. Your dead are martyrs, not data points requiring external validation. Your sacrifices are remembered within the story of a people, not processed by an international institution that may not survive the century.
The clash between the humanitarian hero and the national protector hero is not primarily a debate about the content of legal rules, though it produces legal arguments in abundance. It is a clash between incompatible redemption stories, between different accounts of what makes a life well spent in the presence of violence and what form of significance a person’s actions can achieve. The humanitarian framework says you are good if you subordinate your community’s interests to universal rules and hold those rules even when the cost is high. The nationalist framework says you are good if you refuse to let outsiders judge how you defend your own and accept whatever cost that refusal requires. Neither can absorb the other without losing its identity. Neither can demonstrate its superiority to the other on grounds that both accept, because they disagree about the grounds.
There is also a pressure that neither system adequately addresses, and it may be the most significant one for the future of the laws of war. The people who live inside conflict zones and who organize, sustain, and support armed resistance without the backing of a recognized sovereign state fit neither available hero role. They are not the passive innocent that the humanitarian framework needs. They are not the citizen soldier of the national protector framework. They are something the law has consistently failed to accommodate: the politically active person under occupation or siege, the community member who sustains a resistance movement, the organizer whose work supports armed defense without personally pulling a trigger. The laws of war have managed this problem for more than a century by defining these people out of the category of the innocent at the moment of their greatest agency. The framework protects them when they are passive and threatens them when they act.
If a genuinely new legal framework emerges, it may come from the pressure this exclusion creates. It would need a different kind of hero: not the neutral guardian who brackets the justice of the cause, not the sovereign enforcer who protects the particular community, but someone whose heroism consists in recognizing the legitimacy of political agency under conditions of extreme oppression, whose sorting authority affirms rather than eliminates the active defender. That would be a real break from the history of the field. It would require detaching innocence from passivity and attaching it instead to the justness of the position. It would mean the law could no longer maintain its neutrality between aggressors and defenders, occupiers and occupied, the powerful and the stateless. That neutrality has always been the condition of the guardian hero’s standing. Abandoning it would require a different story about what makes the legal actor admirable.
None of the existing hero systems can offer that story without ceasing to be what they are. The humanitarian guardian needs neutrality. The prosecutor needs a clear crime. The investigator needs prosecutable categories. The system designer needs a defensible process. The national protector needs a sovereign community to protect. None of these roles has room for the legitimate self-defense of the stateless, the justifiable violence of the occupied, the moral authority of the person who acts without permission from any recognized legal order.
What the current turbulence reveals is not that the need for a hero system has disappeared. It is that the existing elite system no longer satisfies that need for growing numbers of people, and the rival system that has emerged to challenge it cannot accommodate the people the elite system has always excluded. The search for a new story — about what it means to act well in the presence of violence, about what kind of person that action makes you, about how your choices connect to something that outlasts you — is already underway. The next framework in the laws of war will be written by whoever can answer that search convincingly. What they will need is not better doctrine. It is a more honest account of who the hero is and what we are asking him to give up.