The Sorting Machine: Innocence as Political Demand in the Laws of War

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

The law does not merely protect the innocent. It produces them. To receive protection under the laws of war, a person must first satisfy a set of conditions that have nothing to do with their moral worth and everything to do with their political behavior. They must remain still. They must remain disengaged. They must remain legible as harmless to whoever holds the authority to sort. This demand has been present in the laws of war since at least 1900. What has changed across more than a century of humanitarian progress is not the demand itself but the sophistication of the machinery used to enforce it and the range of actors authorized to operate that machinery. The history of international humanitarian law, read through the category of innocence rather than through the institutions that claim to protect it, is a history of refining the conditions under which protection attaches — and of explaining away, at each successive stage, the suffering of those who failed to satisfy them.
Before the Hague Conventions codified anything, the classical law of war was at least honest about what it was doing. The civilian population was bound to the fate of its sovereign. Citizens were passive enemies. They warranted some protection, but only conditionally, only insofar as they genuinely did nothing. The franc-tireur — the farmer who took up a rifle without a uniform or a chain of command — forfeited everything. This was not squeamishness about civilian suffering. It was a considered theory: that the relevant distinction was between those who submitted to the state’s monopoly on violence and those who challenged it. Protection followed submission. The irregular fighter who blurred the line between soldier and civilian was the primary threat the law feared, not because he was more dangerous than a regular soldier but because he made sorting impossible. Innocence, from the beginning, was a status conferred on those who did not complicate the picture.
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 formalized this understanding. The civilian keeps protection by staying in place. Sorting authority rests with the commander in the field, who looks at a body and decides whether what he sees is a lawful combatant or an unlawful participant. The law rewards stillness and penalizes the defender who acts outside approved structures. The franc-tireur debates of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War sat just beneath every negotiating session. Germany, which had fought through irregular resistance in France, was the most insistent that combatants must carry arms openly, follow a responsible command, wear a fixed distinctive sign. The requirement was presented as a humanitarian advance — soldiers also have rights and deserve to know who they are fighting. The effect was to define any deviation from state-sanctioned military organization as a forfeiture of protection. Innocence was conditional on visible compliance with the very institution that was doing the killing.
The First World War did not change the rule. It changed the image used to enforce it. Allied propaganda, responding to the German invasion of Belgium, produced the modern template of innocence: the violated woman, the orphaned child, the elderly civilian shot in the street. These images were not simply false, though some were. They were selective. They fixed in the international imagination a figure of innocence that was feminized, passive, and entirely without agency. The propagandists understood, correctly, that the most compelling innocent is the one who cannot possibly threaten anyone. The raped woman and the bayoneted baby are innocent precisely because they could not have done anything to deserve what happened to them. They had no politics, no organizational capacity, no weapons. They were acted upon absolutely.
This imagery fed back into law by stabilizing a template. The protected person is the one who does not act, does not organize, does not resist. The more passive the figure, the more legible the innocence. Sorting authority began to migrate outward from the battlefield commander toward the political elites and public narratives that fixed these images in the international imagination, deciding whose suffering would be recognized as wrongful and whose would be explained away. The person who fought back, even against an invading army, became harder to place in the category the law was building. Defense looked like participation. Participation looked like forfeiture.
The Nuremberg Tribunal hardened the template while appearing to transcend it. The paradigmatic innocent was now the Jew in Nazi Europe — someone subjected to state violence of unimaginable scale without having chosen the conflict, without having done anything to invite it, without any capacity to alter the machinery directed against them. The moral power of this figure is genuine and the historical justification for it is complete. But it locked in a structure whose implications extended beyond its immediate context. Innocence, at Nuremberg, meant radical passivity in the face of organized power. Responsibility was concentrated entirely at the top, on the leaders who planned and launched the violence. The civilian remained a tragic backdrop — someone acted upon rather than acting. Political agency on the part of the victim was not just irrelevant to the legal analysis; it was invisible. The law built its new architecture around the figure of the wholly defenseless, and that figure became the standard against which future claims to protection would be measured.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions expanded the circle of protected persons and introduced real, enforceable rules about the treatment of prisoners, the wounded, and civilians under occupation. These were genuine humanitarian advances. But they came with a condition that has done more work than any other clause in the history of the laws of war. Protection attaches to the civilian who refrains from taking a direct part in hostilities. The moment that threshold is crossed, protection is suspended — for such time as the direct participation continues. The clause polices the boundary of innocence through activity. Feed a fighter, carry a message, scout a road for an armed group, and your status becomes contestable. The law had always demanded passivity. Now it stated the demand explicitly, as a formal legal condition, and handed sorting authority to military lawyers and targeting processes who would operationalize it in real time.
The requirement sounds neutral. In practice it is not. The people most likely to feed fighters, carry messages, and provide shelter and intelligence are the people who live in conflict zones, whose communities are occupied, whose families are threatened, and who respond to those conditions by doing what people in their position have always done: organizing their own survival and resistance. These are ordinary responses to extraordinary danger. Legally, they are also the moments when protection can thin or vanish. The law does not protect the person who defends themselves in ways it has not pre-authorized. It protects the person who endures.
The 1977 Additional Protocols responded to the era of decolonization and appeared to mark a significant departure. Wars of national liberation were recognized as international armed conflicts. Guerrilla fighters who did not wear uniforms could qualify for combatant status under certain conditions. The law seemed, for a moment, to be acknowledging that resistance to colonial occupation was politically and legally legitimate. What it actually did was absorb that acknowledgment into its existing framework without changing the framework’s fundamental demand. The civilian still had to remain not directly participating. The more a population organized its own defense under occupation, the more it risked sliding out of protection at the moment of action. The law refined the language of distinction and proportionality, placed new burdens on military planners, and expanded the class of professional legal advisers authorized to define the limits of permissible participation. The underlying demand — remain passive, remain disengaged, or accept the consequences — survived every revision intact.
What changed in the 1990s was not the demand but the visibility of the victim it centered. The ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and later the International Criminal Court, built their jurisprudence around identity-based persecution. The civilian population became the primary object of protection against genocide and crimes against humanity. Innocence attached to membership in a targeted group. This made certain harms newly legible that previous frameworks had missed or minimized. The specific suffering of specific communities — their systematic destruction as groups — became the organizing concern of international criminal law. But the core intuition persisted. Innocence was strongest, most legally compelling, when the victim appeared entirely defenseless and non-participating at the moment of attack. Judges and investigators reconstructed patterns of victimization after the fact, and the cases that landed most cleanly were the ones where the victims had done nothing. The tribunal system could accommodate the organized massacre of a passive population far more easily than it could accommodate the ambiguous violence of a war where victims were also sometimes fighters.
It was after 2001 that the passivity requirement showed its sharpest edge. Counterterrorism created conditions in which armed groups lived among civilian populations, and states argued that this embedding made sorting nearly impossible without expanding the definition of who counted as a participant. The concept of continuous combat function entered the legal vocabulary. A fighter who put down a weapon and picked up a phone to organize the next operation did not, under this analysis, return to civilian status between operations. Participation was defined not by the act of pulling a trigger but by the ongoing role a person played within an armed group’s organizational structure.
The Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling in the targeted killings case of 2006 crystallized what this expansion meant in practice. The court rejected what it called the revolving door of protection — the idea that a fighter could shed and resume civilian status by setting down arms. It recognized a category of persons who perform a continuous function within an armed group, including organizers, recruiters, and logisticians who may never personally commit an act of violence. Under this framework, the political organizer in a conflict zone who coordinates community resistance, manages logistics, or recruits participants in an armed movement becomes a legitimate target. Not because of anything they have done with their hands. Because of their role, their associations, their history of engagement.
The court presented this as a natural extension of the duty to distinguish combatants from civilians. In a sense it was. The logic follows directly from the demand that has governed the field since 1900: innocence requires non-participation, and participation now includes influence, organization, and political agency exercised in the service of armed resistance. What the court made explicit was something the framework had always implied. The only fully innocent civilian is the one who does nothing. The one who organizes a community, coordinates a defense, sustains a resistance movement — this person has complicated the picture. And to complicate the picture is, in the law’s terms, to accept a degree of risk that the fully passive civilian does not face.
The cost of this logic is not hard to identify. When direct participation is defined broadly enough to include organizers and recruiters, the space of legitimate political resistance under occupation effectively disappears. Anyone who takes a role in sustaining the organized life of a community resisting occupation — and almost everyone in such a community takes some such role — becomes potentially targetable. The law does not protect the political actor. It protects the person who has withdrawn from politics entirely. Under occupation, withdrawal from politics is not a neutral act. It is a form of submission. The law, by protecting only those who submit, is not neutral between occupier and occupied. It is the occupier’s instrument, dressed in the language of universal protection.
The latest developments have not reversed this logic. They have automated it. Data-driven targeting turns the person into a pattern of signals. Innocence becomes a function of whether a phone travels with known fighters, whether a location matches a target profile, whether a pattern of life deviates from what an algorithm defines as civilian behavior. The demand for passivity survives in the data stream. The system rewards those who remain within expected behavioral thresholds and flags those who move in ways associated with participation. Humans sign the warrants, but the shape of the decision is set upstream by training data and system design. The sorting authority has migrated into workflows and code, but the underlying question is the same one the Hague commanders were asking in 1900: does this person look like a civilian or a participant?
Alongside state targeting systems, NGOs and humanitarian organizations have become powerful rival sorters. They document harm, classify the dead, and publish counts of civilian casualties. A person may be recorded as a legitimate target in a military file and as an innocent civilian victim in an Amnesty International report. The category has become a site of institutional competition. The state sorts for action and justification. The NGO sorts for recognition and accountability. Neither system asks whether the underlying demand — remain passive or accept the risk — is itself legitimate. Both compete to control the answer to the same question: who counts as innocent.
Followed across more than a century, the category of the innocent reveals a consistent political demand beneath its shifting forms. In 1900, innocence required visible submission to the state’s monopoly on violence. In 1914, it required the appearance of helplessness. In 1945, it required radical passivity before organized power. In 1949, it required formal abstinence from direct participation in hostilities. In 1977, it required the same abstinence even under occupation and colonial domination. After 2001, it required not just behavioral abstinence but biographical distance from any organizational role in armed resistance. Today it requires passivity legible to an algorithm.
Each refinement was presented as a humanitarian advance. Each made some victims more visible. Each simultaneously moved the line so that a different set of people, those who responded to danger by organizing rather than enduring, fell outside the category at the moment of their greatest need. The law does not protect people who challenge organized force from within the civilian population. It protects people who accept what is done to them. It tells the occupied, the besieged, the persecuted: you may survive, or you may resist, but if you resist in ways we have not pre-authorized, you do so without our protection.
This is the demand the field has never openly stated and cannot state, because stating it would expose the humanitarian framework’s deepest tension. A law that protects only the passive is not a law for people in danger. It is a law for people who have already given up. The sorting machine has grown more sophisticated, more precise, more distributed across institutions and systems and code. The act at its center has not changed. It is the continuous classification of human beings into those whose suffering the world is permitted to mourn and those whose suffering the law explains away by their failure to remain still.

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Diagnoses of Suffering: Competing Causal Theories in the Laws of War

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

Every legal system embeds a theory of harm. To prohibit something you must first decide what causes it, and to assign responsibility you must first decide who or what drives the causal chain. Criminal law answers these questions for individual violence. International humanitarian law answers them for the violence of states and armies. The difference is that criminal law argues about its causal theories openly, in courts, with adversaries on both sides. International humanitarian law tends to present its theories as obvious descriptions of reality, as the natural acknowledgment of what any serious regulation of war requires. The theories are therefore harder to see, and harder to challenge, than the rules they generate.
What follows is a diagnosis of the diagnoses. From the late nineteenth century to the present, the laws of war have cycled through a series of distinct causal frameworks, each identifying a primary source of unjust suffering in armed conflict and a primary party responsible for it. Each framework has presented itself as the correction of what came before. None has admitted that it made a choice about what to see and what to leave invisible. The history of international humanitarian law is not a story of accumulating protections. It is a succession of replacements, each carrying its own theory of violence, each concealing something the previous theory had managed to name.
The place to start is not 1900 but slightly before it, with the understanding of war that the Hague Conferences inherited and codified. The classical law of war treated the civilian population not as a protected category but as a belligerent mass bound to the fate of its sovereign. Citizens were passive enemies. They warranted some protection, but only conditionally, only insofar as they remained genuinely passive, and always subject to the overriding logic of military necessity. If placing pressure on the general population could bring the war to a speedier conclusion, that pressure was permitted. If besieged civilians starved, that was the fortune of war. The causal theory underlying this framework was not indifference to suffering. It was a particular understanding of what suffering in war is: an unavoidable consequence of the citizen’s bond to the state. Responsibility lay diffusely across the entire belligerent population, which shared the fate of its government and could not claim exemption from it.
This framework was honest in a way that later ones were not. It did not pretend that civilians could be cleanly separated from the wars their states prosecuted. It acknowledged that modern, organized societies fight as societies. The cost of that honesty was that it offered almost no affirmative protection. The citizen was exposed because the citizen was implicated. That equation, brutal as it is, has never been fully refuted. Every subsequent framework has tried to escape it, and none has entirely succeeded.
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 introduced the first modern modification. The diagnosis shifted from the nature of war to the conduct of war. Suffering, in this framework, is caused by technical excess: the use of weapons or tactics that inflict more harm than is necessary to defeat an enemy. The 1868 St. Petersburg Declaration had already banned certain explosive bullets on the grounds that they uselessly aggravate wounds. The Hague rules extended this logic to poisoned weapons, expanding bullets, and the bombardment of undefended towns. Responsibility rested on the field commander and the state that authorized prohibited means. The moral architecture was chivalric and professional. War between symmetric armies of disciplined soldiers could be civilized if officers exercised restraint. The suffering that remained after that restraint was applied was not unjust. It was the residue of legitimate violence.
This framework left the structural causes of war entirely outside its gaze. Why wars started, who benefited from them, what economic or imperial interests they served — none of this was the law’s concern. The law regulated the conduct of war, not its existence. That limitation was not an oversight. It reflected a genuine theory: that the primary cause of unjust suffering in war is the failure of individual commanders to observe the rules of their profession. Fix the conduct, and the suffering becomes tolerable. The diagnosis was narrow by design.
The First World War destroyed the plausibility of that diagnosis. The slaughter on the Western Front could not be attributed to the technical failures of field commanders. The means and methods were more or less legal. The suffering was produced by the war itself, by the decision of political leaders to mobilize entire nations against each other in pursuit of territorial and economic advantage. A new causal theory began to form in the aftermath, one that located the source of unjust suffering not in how wars are fought but in the fact of their being fought at all.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 was the first formal expression of this theory. War as an instrument of national policy was renounced. The diagnosis was now political: suffering flows from the decision of states to use armed force to pursue their interests. Responsibility shifted upward from the battlefield to the cabinet room. The individual soldier remained bound by the rules of conduct, but the new framework insisted that the soldier’s suffering, and the civilian’s, originated in a political choice that could itself be judged and condemned.
Nuremberg crystallized this shift and gave it juridical force. The International Military Tribunal declared aggression the supreme international crime, the one that contained within it the accumulated evil of what followed. This was not merely a legal ruling. It was a causal claim. Every atrocity committed during the war, every prisoner abused, every civilian starved or shot, was traceable to the original crime of launching the war. Responsibility was concentrated at the top: on the leaders and planners who made the decision to go to war for territorial conquest and economic exploitation. The tribunal juridified, in the language of law, an anti-imperial critique that had been building since at least Lenin’s analysis of the First World War as the product of capitalist states competing for colonies and markets. Du Bois had argued it. Leonard Woolf had argued it. The Soviet jurist Trainin had developed it into a formal theory of criminal responsibility. At Nuremberg it became positive law.
This framework named the system. It understood mass atrocity not as the product of individual cruelty or battlefield excess but as the output of a particular economic and political logic: the logic of imperial expansion, of states that treat other peoples’ territories and labor as resources to be seized. The prosecution described Nazi colonialism in explicit terms. Plans to depopulate the East for German settlement, to administer occupied territories through ruthless exploitation, to starve millions in order to extract food and raw materials — these were presented not as aberrations but as the consistent expression of an imperial project. The causal theory was structural and systemic.
What the Nuremberg framework could not do, and did not try to do, was speak to the experience of the individual victim once the war machine was in motion. Crimes against humanity were real at Nuremberg, but they were secondary — legally subordinated to crimes against peace, understood as consequences of aggression rather than as wrongs in their own right. The voices of survivors were largely absent. The suffering of specific people in specific places was evidence of the system’s operation, not the primary object of legal attention. The framework named the engine of destruction. It had less to say about the people the engine destroyed.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions made exactly the opposite choice. They retreated from the question of why wars start and concentrated entirely on how persons are treated once war exists. The diagnosis changed completely. Suffering is now attributed not to imperial ambition or the decision to launch aggressive war but to the power imbalance between those who exercise control and those who are subject to it. The prisoner in the camp, the wounded soldier on the field, the civilian under occupation: these became the central figures of the legal imagination. Responsibility lay with whoever held power over a protected person. The causal story was intimate and relational. Harm flows from the captor’s failure to respect the captive’s humanity.
This is the humanitarian paradigm at its most focused. It offered real protections that Nuremberg’s structural framework could not: specific rules about the treatment of prisoners, the conduct of occupation, the care of the wounded. But it achieved that focus by bracketing everything the Nuremberg framework had insisted on naming. The politics of the war, the economic interests it served, the imperial structures that produced it — all of this disappeared from view. The law was neutral as between aggressors and defenders. A prisoner of an aggressive state had the same rights as a prisoner of a defensive one. The cause of the war was irrelevant. What mattered was the immediate relationship between the person with power and the person subject to it.
The 1977 Additional Protocols attempted to hold both frameworks at once and produced the tensions that still run through the field. On one side, the Protocols deepened the civilian protection framework, introducing formal principles of distinction and proportionality that required attacking commanders to calculate the expected civilian harm of any strike and refrain from attacks where that harm was excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage. Suffering was now linked to the failure of that calculation. Responsibility lay with the planner of the attack who did not take adequate precautions. On the other side, the Protocols recognized wars of national liberation as international armed conflicts and acknowledged colonial domination as a source of suffering with moral and legal significance. For a moment, the anti-imperial narrative of Nuremberg and the victim-centered narrative of Geneva seemed to be operating together.
The marriage did not hold. The proportionality framework, which became the dominant legacy of the Protocols, is a technology of individual accountability applied to specific attacks. It asks whether this commander, planning this strike, made a reasonable assessment of this target. It does not ask why the war exists, who benefits from it, or what structural conditions produced the population that is now being bombed. The anti-imperial element was formally present but practically marginal. The causal emphasis remained on the individual decision-maker’s failure of calculation rather than on the system that put him in a position to make that calculation.
What happened in the 1990s was not a further development of the existing framework. It was a consolidation of the victim-centered approach and a decisive marginalization of the structural one. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the political conditions that had made the anti-imperial critique viable in international law. The ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and later the International Criminal Court, developed a new causal theory: suffering as the product of organized, identity-based persecution. Ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity — these categories made the specific victim visible in unprecedented ways. The law trained its attention on the persecuted group and on the network of perpetrators that targeted it. Doctrines like joint criminal enterprise and command responsibility allowed accountability to reach up through chains of command to the leaders who planned and authorized the campaigns.
This was, in its way, a genuine achievement. The IMT had mostly ignored victims. The new tribunals put them at the center. But the framework came with its own invisibilities. Identity-based persecution is a real phenomenon, but it does not explain why certain groups are targeted in certain places at certain times, what economic or political pressures fuel the campaigns, or who benefits from the displacement and destruction. The structural analysis that animated Nuremberg was not inherited by the criminal tribunals. It was discarded as irrelevant to the question of individual criminal responsibility. The law could now punish the mastermind of a genocide. It could not name the system that made the genocide possible.
The period after 2001 broke the diagnostic consensus further. Counterterrorism produced two competing causal theories that have never been reconciled. States argued that unjust suffering in armed conflict is now primarily caused by non-state actors who embed themselves among civilians, use human shields, and exploit the law’s protections to conduct attacks while hiding behind the civilian population. Under this theory, responsibility for civilian casualties lies substantially with the armed groups that create the conditions for them. Critics argued, with equal conviction, that the primary cause of unjust suffering is state overreach: expansive interpretations of military necessity, the targeting of dual-use infrastructure, the use of weapons systems whose effects are inherently indiscriminate in urban environments, and the detention and treatment of those designated as enemy combatants outside the protections of either the laws of war or domestic criminal law. Under this theory, responsibility lies with the states that construct legal frameworks to authorize conduct they could not otherwise justify.
These two theories are not refinements of each other. They rest on incompatible diagnoses of what armed conflict in the twenty-first century actually is. The first treats the non-state actor as the primary threat to civilian life and the state as the primary instrument of protection, constrained but ultimately legitimate. The second treats the state as the primary threat and the law as a set of safeguards that states systematically undermine. Both theories have adherents among serious lawyers. Both have been embedded in legal arguments before courts and tribunals. The field has not resolved the dispute. It has accumulated the competing frameworks on top of each other, producing a body of law that can be cited in support of almost any position.
More recent developments have added further layers without resolving the underlying tension. The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect introduced a theory of institutional failure: suffering is caused by states that are unwilling or unable to protect their own populations, and responsibility shifts to the international community when that failure occurs. The growth of urban warfare as a distinct legal and tactical problem has produced a diagnosis based on environmental complexity: civilian harm is the statistically probable result of using explosive weapons in densely populated areas, and responsibility lies with the parties that create or exploit that environment. The development of autonomous weapons systems has introduced what might be called a diffusion theory: suffering may be caused by algorithmic decisions that no individual authorized in any meaningful sense, and responsibility becomes hard to pin on any specific person or institution. Sanctions and economic measures have reopened the question, long dormant since the Nuremberg era, of whether economic coercion that produces mass civilian suffering can itself be a violation of the laws of war, and if so whose responsibility it is.
Each of these additions presents itself as filling a gap left by previous frameworks. None acknowledges that the gap it is filling was created by a prior choice about what to see. The Nuremberg framework left a gap in individual victim protection because it was focused on the system. The Geneva framework left a gap in structural accountability because it was focused on the victim. The criminal tribunals left a gap in understanding the conditions that produce atrocity because they were focused on prosecuting individuals. The counterterrorism frameworks left a gap in state accountability because they were focused on non-state threats. The gaps are not accidents. They are the shadows cast by each framework’s primary light source.
The question that this history raises, and that no framework has answered, is whether it is possible to hold both levels in view simultaneously: the structural causes of armed conflict and the individual experience of its victims. Every attempt to do so has eventually resolved in favor of one or the other. The Nuremberg framework chose the system and lost the victim. The Geneva framework chose the victim and lost the system. The Additional Protocols tried to hold both and produced a body of law whose structural commitments have been quietly eroded while its individual accountability mechanisms have flourished. The criminal tribunals chose the individual perpetrator and lost the structural driver.
This may not be a failure of legal imagination. It may be a feature of law itself. Law requires a manageable subject. To prohibit something, you need to be able to describe it, assign it to an agent, and apply a consequence. Structural forces are not agents in the legal sense. Imperial capitalism does not stand trial. The economic logic that drives states to compete for territory and resources cannot be sentenced. The law can name these forces in its preambles and its historical findings. It cannot reach them with its sanctions. The individual commander who ordered the strike, the camp official who authorized the abuse, the political leader who planned the aggression: these are the legal system’s preferred subjects because they are the ones the system can actually process.
The cost of that preference is visible in the history. Every framework that has tried to name the system has eventually been absorbed by the one that focuses on the individual. Nuremberg’s anti-imperial critique became the civilian protection paradigm of the Geneva system. The Geneva system’s structural neutrality between aggressors and defenders became the criminal tribunal’s individualized accountability. The criminal tribunal’s focus on identity-based persecution has been overlaid by the counterterrorism framework’s focus on the non-state actor’s tactics. Each absorption is presented as progress. Each represents a choice about which half of the truth the law will see.
The laws of war are not accumulating toward a final, correct diagnosis of unjust suffering in armed conflict. They are cycling through a series of partial diagnoses, each capturing something real, each concealing something real, each presenting its concealment as the natural horizon of what law can do. The debates that feel most intractable in contemporary armed conflict, about drone strikes and autonomous weapons, about sanctions and siege warfare, about the status of fighters who belong to no state and answer to no government, are intractable in part because the parties to them are operating with different inherited theories of causation that the law has never reconciled and never will. Until we acknowledge that every framework makes a choice about what causes suffering and who bears responsibility for it, the next humanitarian advance will simply replace the current one, leaving the same question unanswered underneath a different set of rules.
What causes unjust suffering in war. Who is responsible for it. The laws of war have been answering these questions for more than a century. They have never given the same answer twice.

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The Plumber Standard: Stephen Turner, Habermas, and the Limits of Expert Authority

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner’s critique of Jürgen Habermas cuts to the heart of how we understand knowledge, expertise, and democratic life. Habermas argues that expert cultures make genuine democratic discussion impossible. He sees experts as hidden policymakers who operate behind a wall of bureaucracy, manipulating social conditions to produce what he calls the colonization of the lifeworld, a process that manufactures unthinking satisfaction in the public. Turner notes that this picture treats the public as a pitiful and ineffective victim, passive before forces it cannot comprehend.
Turner rejects this model at its foundations. Expert authority is neither absolute nor hidden, he argues. Many claims to expertise simply fail to gain acceptance. The public decides whether to honor expert conclusions as neutral fact, and that decision, however imperfect, is genuinely theirs. Experts must earn their legitimation through performance and testimony. Turner’s comparison to a plumber is deliberately mundane: judging whether a plumber fixed the pipe is within the capacity of ordinary people, and judging whether an expert’s claims hold up works the same way. The Habermasian picture of a helpless public steered by invisible technocrats dissolves once you see that expert authority is a contested status, not a guaranteed one.
But Turner’s critique runs deeper than a disagreement about expert power. The deeper problem is that the entire model of knowledge underlying Habermas’s theory is mistaken. Habermas still works within a rationalist inheritance. He assumes that communication can, in principle, be purified, that there is a standpoint, even if only ideal, from which distortion can be identified and removed. Turner’s work in cognitive science and social theory rejects this at a more fundamental level. There is no stable layer of shared premises that can be made explicit and justified in the strong sense Habermas requires. What we have instead are practices, habits, and learned capacities that resist reduction to rules or fully articulated frameworks.
Turner’s engagement with cognitive science makes this concrete. Social theory, he argues with David Eck, has relied on inherited mentalistic concepts that no longer match what we know about the brain and cognition. The standard computational model of the mind treats thinking as rule-following and cognition as the manipulation of representations stored in something like boxes, a picture that Turner calls “boxology.” Much of what actually guides judgment cannot be made explicit in this way. It is not hidden knowledge waiting to be expressed. It is knowledge that exists only in practice, in the embodied, embedded, and enactive capacities that people develop through participation in a world of affordances and scaffolding. The ideal speech situation assumes that participants can bring their reasons into a form that is publicly assessable and that disagreement can be resolved through discursive testing. Turner’s point is that this assumes far too much about what human beings can articulate.
This is where Turner’s work on tradition becomes essential. Drawing on Michael Oakeshottturning to Wittgenstein. Habermas argues that a language game rests on a background consensus about truth and norms, a consensus that must be open to discursive justification if it is to count as genuine. Wittgenstein, as Turner reads him through Rush Rhees, sees no such foundation outside the game itself. Consensus exists in the common use of rules, not in something beneath or behind them. You can explain arithmetic or the standards of French cooking, you can show someone how it works until they catch on, but you cannot justify these things in the strong sense Habermas demands, and demanding that justification is, Turner argues, of doubtful coherence.
What follows from this is a broader skepticism about expert consensus that Habermas does not share. Expert opinion, Turner notes, often obeys the laws of fashion rather than the laws of progress. Professional communities are routinely wrong, sometimes for long periods, and the authority they command does not protect them from error. Expert claims are often made deliberately difficult to assess, and that difficulty is part of their authority. But past experts also tried to prove their objectivity and neutrality, which is precisely what made them open to external judgment. This creates a persistent tension. Experts attempt to maintain authority by increasing complexity and insulation, yet they remain vulnerable to breakdowns in trust when their claims fail in visible ways. Dr. Anthony Fauci could be held to account not despite the difficulty of assessing his claims but because the older norm of objectivity still exposed him to scrutiny.
This tension is central to Turner’s critique of what he calls the liberal theory of science. That theory assumed science earns authority through transparent methods and reproducible results. Turner argues that this description no longer fits reality. Scientific authority today depends heavily on institutional trust, specialization, and cognitive asymmetries that make direct assessment difficult. The gap between the ideal and the actual creates both the appearance of technocratic dominance and the conditions for populist backlash. Habermas sees this gap as evidence of colonization. Turner sees it as the ordinary condition of fallible authority in a complex society.
What replaces Habermas in Turner’s account is not a new ideal but a different picture of social life. Knowledge is local, partial, and embedded in practices that cannot be fully articulated. Authority is earned but also contested. Consensus is provisional and often unreliable. There is no standpoint outside the game from which distortion can be definitively identified.
Democracy, on this view, is not the approximation of an ideal speech situation. It is the management of ongoing disagreement under conditions of uncertainty, where judgments about expertise are themselves part of the political process. The standard is not undistorted communication. It is whether people, using the limited tools available to them, can navigate a world where those who claim to know are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and never fully transparent. That is a much lower standard than Habermas offers. It is also one that fits how people live.

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Obituary For Iconoclastic Alexander Technique Teacher David Arthur Gorman

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

Obituary:
David Arthur Gorman was born on February 3, 1950, in Kitchener, Ontario. He was an artist, a scientist, a writer, and above all, a lifelong explorer. He was driven by a profound curiosity about understanding how things work, in the human body and in the mind. That curiosity shaped the course of his life.

David’s brilliant mind led him to make innovative discoveries about human functioning and how the way we think impacts our being.

Trained as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, he remained deeply committed to learning, questioning, and refining his understanding throughout his life. He continually re-examined his experience and research, allowing his work to evolve over decades. From this dedication emerged his own approach, which he named LearningMethods.

For more than forty years, David devoted himself to teaching individuals and groups around the world. He was a path opener, helping others recognize new possibilities within themselves and within their professions. Students of all ages and from many countries found that David’s work transformed their lives.

A natural leader, David played a central role in founding and shaping professional organizations in the United States and Europe. He trained teachers in the United Kingdom through his Alexander Technique training course and offered workshops internationally in his own approach. His influence continues through the many students and professionals he mentored over the decades.

In 1980, David also gave the world a beautiful 650-page anatomy book, entirely hand-drawn and handwritten in its first edition. It stands as a testament to both his scientific knowledge and artistic talent. Now in its sixth edition, the book continues to support students and professionals around the world.

He possessed an extraordinary capacity for work, matched by his deep generosity and empathy. He gave freely of his time and attention to friends, colleagues, and students, always willing to listen, support, and encourage. Countless students describe David as a life changer, a guide whose insight and presence altered the course of their lives in lasting and meaningful ways.

In his final years, David faced a neurological illness with quiet courage and clarity. Even in his last days, his mind remained steady and perceptive. He understood that his time was limited, accepted it with grace, sharing precious moments with his sons, Walker and Elliot, and with his wife, Eillen. He left this world very peacefully, with his wife and two sons by his side on February 7th, 2026.

David’s life bridged science and art in a way that felt seamless. The background image above is one of his remarkably lifelike drawings. In the mid-1970s, he spent time dissecting and drawing in the human anatomy lab at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. In a profound full circle, he chose to donate his body to the same anatomy lab at the University of Guelph, continuing his dedication to learning and teaching even beyond his lifetime.

Many of his articles are available on the LearningMethods website, recently updated by his son Elliot.

As with other high-commitment groups, Alexander Technique teachers are loathe to criticize each other publicly while privately they sanction their peers who leave the reservation. Gorman left the Alexander Technique clique to create his own technique, inspired by F.M. Alexander’s work, that he called Learning Methods. I thought it was brilliant.

DirectionJournal.com hosts an excellent interview with David Gorman. Robert Rickover recorded this interview.

I spoke to David for almost two hours on Feb. 16, 2012 via Skype.

Here are some highlights:

David: “F.M. Alexander had problems. When he was a kid, he had problems with breathing. Then he had problems with his voice. He tended to have a framework on solving problems. A.R. Alexander didn’t have particular problems. He seemed happy and healthy and OK with his use and functioning. His emphasis with the work was on your thinking and the way you meet the moment, as witnessed by the work of Marjorie Barstow, Frank Pierce Jones, and the people who worked more with A.R. than F.M.”

“It’s unlikely that Alexander [Technique] will ever turn into a drop-in class of 20 people where you go through a set of postures.”

“People don’t realize that there’s no such thing as a stressful job. There’s an attitude they have towards their job that is stressing them. Often people are in a job where there are other people around them who aren’t stressed at all. And they don’t put two-and-two together and go, ‘This can’t be a stressful job if this other person isn’t stressed.’ They don’t think to ask the other person how they see the job to see what they’re not getting stressed by it.

“They’re not used to looking at their own thinking and going, what am I up to and how do I see it? Instead they just go, I’m all stressed and tense. How do I get rid of it? They will often go to any number of different body works but they won’t have changed a thing about how they meet the job. They’ve just gotten good at getting rid of the tension. They haven’t changed. They’ve got a coping mechanism.”

David has a good ebook on fitness: “Obviously if someone is not working on changing their habits, all they end up achieving by exercising their habit is to reinforce the vicious circle whereby they get stronger at their habit. In other words, if they’re pulling down and tightening in ordinary activities, they’ll just pull down and tighten that much more when they exercise. And even if they do achieve a higher level of cardio-vascular fitness and they’ve gotten stronger at contracting, bracing and tightening with weights or fitness machines—the type of activity that makes somebody hard and firm – then they will actually need that cardio-vascular stamina in order for the heart to be able to push the blood through those tightened and braced muscles. In fact, it’s very revealing that often when someone like that manages to achieve the sort of global release in a lesson that takes a lot of pressure off both the contents of the torso and the musculature, their blood pressure can drop so radically that they’ll see black spots in front of their eyes, feel light-headed and maybe even pass out. They’re no longer so hard and tight and hence the blood can flow through rather than being forced through the veins and arteries that had previously been squeezed in the muscles.”

Posted in Alexander Technique | Comments Off on Obituary For Iconoclastic Alexander Technique Teacher David Arthur Gorman

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Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

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Libertarian Author Brian Doherty Is Dead At Age 57

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

I often bring out the worst in people, but with author Brian Doherty, I only got his best.

He was kinder to me than I was to myself.

This is Burning Man

Reason magazine associate editor Brian Doherty drives up at 12:30PM June 22, 2004, in a white Subaru. It looks like a pigsty inside. Books, magazines, newspapers, wrappers, dental floss, pillows…

Brian jumps out. He's short, grey-haired, and bookish.

We sit down for lunch and discuss his first published book.

"Why did you write it?"

"I began going to the event in 1995. There were 4,000 people there.

"We're building a temporary city in the Black Rock Desert, in the lake bed, every year, Black Rock City, in the middle of the desert, 70 miles outside of Reno. I found the people interesting. How fun and funny and lively and dangerous they were to be around. It struck me from the beginning as a writer's dream. It had an underground feel to it. It felt like it would be a betrayal of that community to talk about it to outsiders.

"Last year, there were 30,000 people there. Somewhere in the middle, I realized it was not meant to be an underground secret. That was an affectation that I picked up from other people.

"I wrote a political piece about it for the February 2000 issue of Reason, a political magazine. How is it that this danger and illegality-filled event come to a reapproachment with the federal government, who owns the land (Bureau of Land Management) on which the event is held.

"I've been working at Reason since the summer of 1994.

"My first draft of the story was 12,000 words, more than twice as long as the version that ran. I realized I was sitting on top of a book's worth of material.

"Getting a book deal took three years. It took two agents and dozens of rejections. For nine months, it was my fulltime task finishing the book."

"How does being at Burning Man make you feel, as opposed to your ordinary life?"

"I didn't make myself the star of the book. But I sit at a desk all day. I'm a writer. I'm a reader. I rarely do anything that interacts with the physical world. Burning Man makes me confront the physical world in a vivid way.

"There is no life in the Black Rock Desert. It's hot. If you don't go with an RV, it's just you and the blank world and the temperature. It wipes away everything that is habitual about my life for two weeks. Then I go back to my normal life, where I read eight to ten hours a day. Most of my work involves reading. Most of my leisure involves reading. I'm constantly listening to music. When I'm at home, there's a record playing in my house. When I'm out there, I don't get to listen to any music of my choice and I don't read anything. I never drink caffeine out there. Here, I never go half a day without caffeine.

"It's an interesting lesson in your own malleability. People are very big at adopting fake identities out there. I don't do that explicitly. I don't dress funny.

"Most important, every time I'm out there, I apprentice myself to some large art project. I get to be a part of a team, something which has always been important to me. I like groups more than one-on-one relationships. I like to be part of gangs pursuing goals of interest to me. Out there I get to weld, drill, dig. I learn skills and to interact with the physical world. That's an opportunity I never get to pursue anywhere else but there.

"The event lasts a week. I usually go a week early and leave a week late. It's exhilirating, life-affirming, fascinating for me to do these things and be surrounded by thousands of interesting people. The default assumption is that you are all buddies out there."

"What do your parents think about Burning Man?"

"I don't know. They haven't read my book. I wouldn't be surprised if my dad started reading the book. I wouldn't be surprised if my mother didn't. If they do read it, I would imagine that at the end of it they would not think that Burning Man was something that they would enjoy going to and probably not something that they would approve of.

"My wife has been to Burning Man three times. She doesn't like it. She thought she might like it. After three years, she's indulged me enough. She doesn't like the kind of person you find there. That hippy dippiness aggravates her. She has more of a punk harsh face to the world. She hates the physical environment. She's not into consuming lots of food and water.

"I ended up making the book more character driven than idea driven. When I went in, I thought it would be 50/50. It ended up 95% character driven."

Brian got into punk rock in 1984 while in 11th grade in Jacksonville, Florida. A year later, he embraced the punk club scene and started playing bass guitar in various bands from 1986-95 (Misfits Trend, Target Practice, Touch N' Go Bullethead, The Jeffersons, Turbo Satan, The Sawdust Seizures, Satellite). I ran a record label from 1993-99, The Cherry Smashers.

"I never adopted the look."

"What do you think of the Australian punk band Air Supply?"

"I've enjoyed some performances of the Australian punk band Air Supply. I have a big tent vision of punk. It became in the '90s as a way of life. Short, aggressive, fast-paced songs with lyrics barked out by angry bald guys."

"What's your favorite Air Supply song?"

"The One That You Love. I once did karaoke to Making Love Out of Nothing At All."

"What's your favorite Barry Manilow song?"

"His version of Ships. 'We're two ships that pass in the night.'"

"What's your favorite John Denver song?"

"The first record I ever bought with my own money was John Denver's Greatest Hits. I still like Rocky Mountain High.

"One of the principles I try to live by is staying true to my life. I'm big on continuity but I must confess I have not maintained an enthusiasm for John Denver."

"Why don't you bring a Sony Walkman to Burning Man so you can listen to music?"

"I tend to be lazy in my preparations. For three weeks, I eat nothing but room-temperature prepared food of the canned vegetables, beef jerky variety. The same with music. I've gotten used to that it is a break from my habitual obsession to listening to music at all times. I know that I am listening to more music and enjoying it less. I am an obsessive record collector. I have about 5,000 records and 2,000 CDs. I began collecting in the mid '80s. I will buy any given thing depending on how I find it cheapest.

"Are you really a fan of Australian pop?"

"My favorite group is Air Supply. It takes me back to when I was 13 and my emotions were most honest and vivid."

"Go to Burning Man. Vivid is the word we use to describe what it is like."

"I hear there is video of you participating in a public orgy at Burning Man."

"I do not believe so. Public orgies, no? We are getting into territory here, Luke, where I will have to, due to the sensitivities of my wife who will probably read this, decline from speaking."

"Burning Man does not sound like a nice place for sex."

"It is not a comfortable place for sex. Once we break the surface of the Black Rock Playa, it becomes this fine omnipresent black rock power that has a grit to it. Most people there will be dirty and dusty and probably smelly. You are not showering as much as normal. But Burning Man does have a sensual atmosphere. I have never witnessed an orgy. I have witnessed one-on-one sex acts."

"What's the ratio of men to women?"

"I guess about 60/40 men to women. Medium age? I'd guess 25-40. Most people under 25 are not going to be able to afford it. It also happens the first week before Labor Day, the first week of my college's semesters.

"They sell tickets on a sliding scale from $145-250. They stop selling tickets at the door on Thursday night. Certain people in the community thought that the wrong element was coming out on the weekend. The man burns Saturday night. Half the city tends to leave on Sunday, and half on Monday. We're all leaving down one dirt road which leads to one two-lane highway which is 70 miles back to Reno.

"People find themselves behaving in a different way at Burning Man. They're nice. It's a communal feeling."

"What's the racial make-up?"

"Almost entirely Caucasian."

"Do you think that that accounts for the general feeling of niceness?"

Brian chuckles. "Well, that's a very interesting question.

"I believe that the self-selecting nature of Burning Man would and could cut through racial divides. That said, we haven't tested it yet. In an average year there, I probably see about ten black people.

"One year, one of the people on my work team was black. For a couple of days, he and I and some other people were digging a giant hole. Just for amusement, we began chaining ourselves together. I don't think we were thinking about the racialness of it."

"How do white people keep the word of it away from black people?"

"Word of it is spread through a nexis of a certain kind of community. Channels that are not intentionally white-only but are white-only. Hipsters who are in touch with these underground currents of culture. Hippies, punks and gearheads."

"Do you take any illegal drugs at Burning Man?"

"Yes."

"How many people at Burning Man do you think are active in an organized religion?"

"Very few. The religious vibe out there is gooey modern syncretistic pagan. There are Christian ministers, some who shout fire and brimstone. Some are ecumenical happy loving Christians. There are a lot of people doing energy stuff. I've never knowingly met an Orthodox Jew there."

"Do you believe in God?"

"No."

"I think of Burning Man as a secular reach for community and the transcendent."

"I think that is exactly correct. Community is one of the buzz words of the Burning Man world. I tend to be a shy and insular person. I don't interact with strangers."

Brian burps in the middle of the last word.

"Strippers?" I ask.

"I interact a lot with strippers out there. Not so much with strangers. People form small camps out there. I don't feel comfortable with more than 150 people."

"Do you find it aesthetically pleasing for one man to place his penis in the buttocks of another man?"

"No.

"I've read a lot of your interviews. Do you make it a habit to ask uncomfortable questions of race and homosexuality at every interview?"

"Yes."

"I have little memory of the writing process of this book. I was on ephedra. I was sleeping three hours a night for seven weeks. I was listening to an oldies station constantly. It all became a blur.

"I've never desired a huge amount of give-and-take with readers. Reason.com's comment section is very disturbing to me. I don't want to read them but I find myself reading them. That level of laying yourself out there, I'm not completely comfortable with.

"I tend to go out of town every weekend.

"I don't vote. I'm not registered with any political party."

Joe Herman writes: "I'm an Orthodox Jew that attended burning man last year (and am returning there this year). I camped with a Jewish Theme Camp (look for the Black Rock JCC on the playa this year) – and helped facilitate Friday Night services and a communal Shabbat meal at Burning Man. We had over 100 people there, many of whom never experienced the Sabbath before. It was an amazing experience, and plans are underway to repeat the event this year."

On Aug. 15, 2004, I post:

My First IM With Cathy Seipp
IM is an ancient Aborigine bonding ritual. It’s the first time I’ve had it with Cathy. Now we’ve done everything a man and woman can do together. It makes us feel very close.

Luzdedos1: Hi Cathy
Luzdedos1: It’s Luke
Miss Seipp: Eew! IMing!
Luzdedos1: We’ve never done this before.
Miss Seipp: I know it is Luke!
Luzdedos1: I’ve never done this with any girl before.
Miss Seipp: Yeah…kind of weird….
Luzdedos1: Be gentle with me.
Miss Seipp: Oh right you only do it with Weisblott right?
Luzdedos1: True
Miss Seipp: Shaddap. You’re even awfuller on IM.
Luzdedos1: How did you suddenly show up on IM?
Luzdedos1: I’m composing my heartfelt inscriptions for your books.
Miss Seipp: I figured out how to enable it, as an experiment, but it might not be a good idea. Are you going to Brian Doherty’s book reading?
Luzdedos1: No. Where is it?
Miss Seipp: It is Wed Aug 18 at Book Soup.
Luzdedos1: Will Heather be there?
Miss Seipp: You could ask Heather.
Luzdedos1: nah
Luzdedos1: What have you been doing, delight of my eyes and love of my life?
Miss Seipp: I been working…
Luzdedos1: the mean streets of Silver Lake

On Sep. 18, 2004, I post:

Luke Ford’s Book Club
For those who want the communal experience of going to shul, but go out of their mind reciting the prayers:

God in All Moments: B
Jews & Gentiles: A Historical Sociology of Their Relations: F
The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voice, by Israel Knohl: B+
Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates: B+
Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century: F
An Introduction to Jewish Ethics by Louis E. Newman: B+
Heschel, Hasidism and Halakha by Samuel H. Dresner: A
This is Burning Man by Brian Doherty: B
The Anti-Chomsky Reader: B+
Sam Spiegel: D
Manic Power by Jeffrey Meyers: A

On May 11, 2006, I blog:

‘I’m Off My Meds!’

I charge into the LA Press Club at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, and find Matt Welch in a natty suit and tie studying silently. I jam my tape recorder into his face and bellow into his ear, “I’m off my meds!”

He turns to me and smiles. “Hi Luke.”

“What contribution to the civic discourse that makes democracy possible has Hustler magazine made?”

Matt claims he’s seen only two issues. “At the front of the magazine,” says Matt, “they have these terrible graphic jokes.”

Luke: “A lot of them are racial. Just plain racist.”

Matt: “I haven’t seen that. It’s harder core than I’m able to enjoy in my pornography. But as those jokes intersected with politics, I found them amusing and useful by juxtaposing and occasionally disgusting sexual acts with political issues and personalities of the day, it treated politics with the seriousness and perhaps accuracy that it deserves.”

I email journalists I know, beginning with Reason magazine’s Editor Nick Gillespie, because he’s the most indulgent of my antics:

Dear Dr. Gillespie,

As one great magazine editor, do you have any thoughts on the job Allan MacDonell did with Hustler and how he informed the national conversation about our society’s pressing issues?

PS. If you purely had a physiological reaction to Hustler, it would be groovy to hear that too.

Nick replies: “Luke, interesting interview (as always). I’m afraid I haven’t read Hustler in something like 15 or 20 or more years, so I can’t comment on the job Allan MacDonell did with it. He sounded pretty sharp, though I disagree with his admiration for Lewis Lapham.”

The other indulgent Editor I know is Rob Eshman of the Jewish Journal. He responds to the same question: “Huh?”

A certain female journalist at a certain ethnic/religious weekly claims she’s never read Hustler.

I don’t know if I can trust her journalism now.

Jack Shafer of Slate.com Press Box replies: “Nope.”

My reflections: As long as Larry Flynt is publishing Hustler we can be assured that nearly all possible editorial options are being considered in America.

Why this Chinese wall of silence?

Why can’t we have an adult discussion of Hustler magazine in this greedy uptight society?

Why do we live in a country where an author of four books who was once Hustler’s Asshole of the Month can land on the cover of LA Weekly and not find comfort in the arms of a loving woman?

Welch says he has special glasses to adjust to his oddly-shaped face.

I tell Matt that he looks like Billie Jean King who grew up a block away from Matt in middle-class Long Beach.

Adam Parfrey (Feral House) wonders if Matt and Billie were extracted from the womb by the same tongs.

I’d like to get Matt fired from the Times so I won’t feel inferior to him anymore.

I use Emmanuelle Richard’s phone to call Cathy Seipp but she’s taking a bath and won’t deign to speak with me.

I’ll show her. I lean over and tell a man that Adam was Cathy Seipp’s first boyfriend. The man gives me a disgusted look and says that’s too much information.

Ben Sullivan notices and appreciates that I’ve lost 20 pounds (from not taking my lithium).

I tell a leftie that John and Ken at KFI radio have an impact on the electorate because they articulate and give direction to to what were previously unformed emotions. I often listen to the radio or read an article and say, “Yes, that’s it!” Someone has crystalized my thinking and given me impetus to do something.

Four people sit on the panel: “Censorship, Cowardice, or Good Taste? The L.A. Press Club is pleased to host a lively panel discussion debating the ongoing fallout of the infamous Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad. Were newspapers prudent or cowardly for refusing to reprint the images? Do smaller publications and websites who reproduced them deserve praise or scorn? Are Muslims truly offended at all depictions of all religious figures? Is it censorship when private entities like Borders Bookstores refuse to carry issues of the Free Inquiry that include the cartoons?”

Panelists include:

Eddie Tabash — Chair of Center For Inquiry-West, constitutional lawyer, and chair of the national legal committee of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. www.tabash.com.

Edina Lekovic — Communications director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (www.mpac.org).

Brian Doherty — Senior editor, Reason magazine (www.reason.com), and author of the forthcoming Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

Moderated by Matt Welch (www.mattwelch.com), assistant editorial pages editor of the Los Angeles Times.

“This set-up is so like Insider the Actor’s Studio,” says Edina who charms most of the audience.

The conversation is carried on at a high level that makes me feel comparatively dirty. How can I think impure thoughts about girls when Muslims are dying in the streets protesting blasphemous cartoons?

Luke Y. Thompson wears a t-shirt that pictures a man fornicating with a dog. I tell him I can’t set him up on dates because of his proclivity for tattoos, piercings, colored hair and obscene t-shirts.

“I didn’t realize that the crowd you hang out with had such lofty standards,” says Thompson. He notes I also color my hair.

Yeah, but I’m more subtle. My hair looks natural, thick and alive, pulsating with my manliness.

Nathan Nance writes me: “Luke Y. Thompson is my personal hero and fave movie critic. I’m glad to see he garnered a mention from the L.A. Press Club event.”

Brian Doherty exceeds my expectations. He takes the least time and makes the best points. Why doesn’t Europe get rid of its blasphemy laws, hate laws, etc?

Eddie Tarbash, the whore’s best friend, says his mother survived Auschwitz yet he wants to rescue Holocaust-denier David Irving from an Austrian jail where he’s incarcerated for the crime of denying that six million European Jews were murdered during WWII.

Tarbash looks like the quintessential Jewish nerd — he’s short with bad eyesight and a paunch. His eyes blink rapidly and his face twitches constantly while on stage. He’s hyper-intellectual and hyper-verbal.

Sartorial Splendor award goes to Eddie. Matt gets an honorable mention. Edina’s OK. Brian’s as rumpled and ratty as you’d expect from someone at that pot-smoking dog-f—ing filthy rag Reason.

A man who runs an organization to turn Iranians secular gives a long disjointed speech at the end (I clap and yell my approval at its conclusion), “which is a marvellous note to end on,” says Matt Welch.

“Let such people blog!” I scream when asked my opinion of that last speaker. “When people are that socially inept, that inconsiderate of their audience, that unable to get to the point, let them blog!”

“But would you read their blog?”

“Never!”

I tell Diana of the LA Press Club that they can auction me off for dinner (but not to a cannibal or a homosexual predator).

I badger the COO of the Center For Inquiry-West about his lack of a sex life. What kind of star power does his COO title carry at bars? He says he doesn’t go to bars but we suspect we know the answer to my question.

So what’s the point of doing something if you don’t get Heaven or chicks?

I demand to know why he’s not screwing around on his wife (she lives in Illinois). He’s an atheist, he has the whole building to himself, he can offer to show girls a bust of Steve Allen, enlargements of his publication’s covers, or his etchings of David Hume, yet he’s as chaste as a monk.

Back To The Role of Hustler Magazine in our Civic Discourse:

I email:

Dear Mr. [Tim] Rutten,

Do you have any thoughts on the job Allan MacDonell did with Hustler and how he informed the national conversation about our society’s pressing issues?

PS If you purely had a physiological reaction to Hustler, it would be groovy to hear that too.

Tim Rutten (from The Los Angeles Times) replies:

I’ve never been a Hustler reader, so I’m afraid I don’t have any thoughts on Allan MacDonell or his contribution. However, I always have admired the willingness of Huster, Playboy and similar publications to pay serious writers serious money to do serious journalism and to defend the First Amendment freedoms on which we all rely. I’m aware, of course, that they have economic and status reasons for doing so. . .but, at the end of the day, who cares? The fact remains that they did these things when others wouldn’t. As far as my “physiological reaction to Hustler” goes, suffice to say that my response is about the same as that of most men when presented with pictures of attractive women unclothed.

I email Reason magazine senior editor Brian Doherty: “What is its cultural significance and does it play a significant role in your history of libertarian thought in America?”

He replies:

In the current draft, no role at all, though I am aware that writings of a libertarian nature have appeared in HUSTLER’s pages. The researching of such magazines, saved and archived in few libraries, is difficult, and time is a scarce resource for any book one actually wants to finish. I focused in my forthcoming RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM: A FREEWHEELING HISTORY OF THE MODERN AMERICAN LIBERTARIAN MOVEMENT not so much on every eruption of libertarian thought or action in our culture, of which Hustler has certainly represented some (its very existence and certain legal actions and suits it has been involved in represented a valued expansion of freedom of the press, which I do firmly believe should and ought to apply to the impossibly offensive, and Flynt had a least a brief flirtation with support for the LP, if I recall correctly–was this before or after his brief turn to born-again Christianity?), as on those thinkers, institutions, and publications that a self-conscious movement libertarian recognizes as “part of our story.”

In truth, I’m sure I don’t know as much about HUSTLER as I ought. Nothing like writing a book to give you that nagging feeling about all sorts of things. I do intend to read that new book about it Adam P is publishing. I might have avoiding learning about it ever since finding a copy of it in the woods as a 9 year old with pictures of women smoking through their anus. (Perhaps that was in Penthouse? I’ll never know, I suppose.) I did hope to interview Playboy’s Hugh Hefner for my book regarding certain libertarian-important figures who worked for him (such as Robert Anton Wilson) and libertarian-important articles he ran (such as Karl Hess’s “The Death of Politics”) and whether he saw any explicitly libertarian implications in his “Playboy philosophy” and how he can make that philosophy jibe with any of the standard political party and ideological choices in our culture, but got no response from his p.r. flaks and had no direct means to contact him.

Brian Doherty's Latest – Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement

I interview Brian by phone Friday, Jan. 19, 2007.

Brian: "I've been a libertarian since I was 16. What turned me libertarian was reading the science fiction novel THE ILLUMINATUS! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. At the University of Florida, I discovered there was a political party and intellectual movement pushing these ideas. As I wanted to learn more, I looked for a book like the one I've written and there just wasn't one.

"My first conscious reading and note-taking for this book began in the Spring of 1994.

"The intent of the book is not to turn people into libertarians. It's a book of history and journalism.

"As a libertarian activist, I believe that this book is important in helping people take libertarian ideas seriously.

"There are dozens of books on communism in the United States… To the extent that libertarianism has been dealt with in intellectual histories of the United States, it has been considered this little pimple on conservatism's left shoulder. That's why I wanted 'Radicals' in the title of the book. I wanted people to understand that libertarianism is not a right-wing philosophy.

"The only book that tries to do what this book does is Bringing the Market Back In: The Political Revitalization of Market Liberalism: The Political Revitalization of Market Liberalism by political science professor John E. Kelley. It tries to tell in one hundred pages what this book tells in 700 pages."

Luke: "Is Stephen Levitt, author of Freakonomics, a libertarian?"

Brian: "I don't know, but there's so much economics at the heart of libertarianism. Four of the five main characters in my book were professionally economists (Milton Friedman, Ludvig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard). Economics is the central science in helping you understand that so much of what the state does is unhelpful. It's the intellectual discipline in which libertarianism is most respectable. Anyone who understands economics is going to have a strong libertarian streak. Government can't do anything without taking things. It's not a wealth-creating institution.

"Milton Friedman's son David is an anarchist. He explains how things like courts, police and national defense could be met in a free market."

Luke: "I didn't realize that libertarianism was like a religion for some people. That there's so much heretic-hunting, just as much as in Orthodox Judaism."

Brian: "Any intellectual movement that works in the shadows… Until the 1980s, most libertarians were thought of as freaks. This schisming provides much of the drama and comedy in the book. If you were going to be a libertarian up until the 1980s, you had to be a cussed and individualistic character… Freud talks about the narcissism of small differences. The heretic drives you crazy because they are so much like you, but they are missing that one thing. Ayn Rand was the queen of this. She ended up kicking out of her life pretty much everybody."

Luke: "It was nuts for libertarianism, as small as it was, to be so eager to kick people out."

"One of the first things people think about libertarianism is sexual freedom. Libertarians believe that prostitution should be legal. Yet you do not discuss this in your book."

Brian: "Because I tried to make it a character-centered story… There hasn't been a big name libertarian who has made that sexual freedom stuff their main focus. We've won most of the battles on the sex thing."

"You're not offending the average person's mores by arguing for getting out of the U.N. or cutting taxes or decreasing business regulation… Sexual stuff is psychologically fraught with danger. Sexual morality affects people on a deeper level than questions of regulatory policy. A lot of libertarian thinkers might think that there's no point in shoving people's face in this aspect…"

Luke: "How is pornography John Stagliano regarded in Cato circles? I know they take his money, but…"

Brian: "I don't know anyone who has a problem with how he makes his living. I know John. He's a generous funder of libertarian causes. At Reason magazine, he's a valued contributor. It's an honor to have his support and to have him around."

"Many libertarians are libertine but many are not. I do approve of the existence of pornography."

"For various sociological reasons, if you are going to be an active libertarian, you have to share the standard [commitment to decriminalizing prostitution and the like]… I don't meet many people who have old fashioned problems with other people's sexual behavior."

Luke: Who are the most famous libertarian apostates?

Brian: I don't know of any. "Libertarianism propagates well to the next generation."

"There's no market for a book by a libertarian turncoat. If you change your mind about libertarianism, nobody cares."

Luke: "Who were you the most excited to meet in the course of your research?"

Brian: "Barbara Branden. She was Ayn Rand's right-hand woman. She was a lot more warm and welcoming a figure than her ex-husband Nathaniel. Rand is such a goddess on the hill to libertarians. To get close to people who were close to her was exciting…"

"Most of my friends are libertarian… I long ago stopped enjoying arguing about politics."

"The kind of stuff that somebody is going to come up with verbally in a social situation is going to be stupid, and that includes me. I am not at my best verbally. When we hang up, I'm going to think of a million ways I could've better expressed things."

Luke: Have there been flourishing libertarian communities?

Brian: "There have been various attempts… Most libertarians want to be fully engaged in the larger market, so segregating yourself based on ideology is going to impoverish you. On a libertarian standard, L.A. is nightmarish with its taxes and regulations, but it's Los Angeles. It's worth it."

Luke: A lot of critics would say that libertarianism does not work because it has never been shown to work for a community. I remember Marxists arguing that marxism had never been tried.

Brian: "It is true that libertarianism has never been tried."

Luke: "A problem with libertarianism is the difficulty of assessing the externalities to a transaction. The costs to a wife and kids of a husband using prostitutes. The damage to the family structure from legalized prostitution."

Brian: "On the whole, the world will be a better place if people are free. The externalities created by government are far worse than the occasional externality produced by the free market."

Luke: "Is there a compelling psychological portrait of the libertarian?"

Brian: "A pre-existing work of literature or art that in my mind provides a full and true account of the libertarian mindset? In some ways, I hope my book provides one, without me trying to judge—I hope the stories of the lives, actions, and ideas I tell about the major libertarian figures of the 20th century–and I hope I show more than tell–provides such a portrait. In literature, I cannot recommend ILLUMINATUS! by Robert anton Wilson and Robert Shea highly enough—it presents compelling libertarian characters, libertarian ideas, and is inherently libertarian in its wild style and refusal to lock the reader into one interpretation of events or ideas imposed by the author."

Luke: "Does your book break new ground?"

Brian: "Most of the material in the book is from original research."

Luke: "What things in your book will surprise an educated libertarian?"

Brian: "My favorite story in the book that almost no libertarians know about is the connection between early libertarian financiers and early psychadelic drug culture."

Luke: "Is there a libertarian view of human nature? Do libs view us as basically good or basically bad? Does one's view of human nature affect one's commitment to libertarianism? For instance, if one views humans as tending towards moral entropy, does that necessarily mean one wants less human freedom (at least in some things)?"

Brian: "The libertarian mistrust of government—which is mistrust of what people will do when given unrestricted power over people–is rooted in understanding of a side of human nature that inclines people to benefit themselves at other's expense. Most significantly, libertarians understand that people react to incentives (that's one of the reasons why economics is such a key part of the libt intellectual tradition–economics is the soical science most mindful of incentives) and that free markets do the best job in funneling people's desire to benefit themselves into ways that benefit others, whereas the state gives people a weapon to benefit themselves at others expense. See discussion in the book on diff between "economic" and "political" means to survival…"

On Jan. 20, 2007, I posted: “I Want A Book Party For Brian Doherty‘s Latest – Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. This is an important book and it deserves a soiree with lots of hot women. I’m thinking the L.A. Press Club. Or Stephen S. Wise.”

Feb. 13, 2007, I email Brian Doherty: “Do you ever think about Taiwan? Without US support, it would fall to the commies… Israel would not exist either…” He replies: “Sometimes I think about Taiwan, Luke, and I cry. It is not the mission of the U.S. government to save the world, nor can it succeed in doing so.”

On Mar. 22, 2007, Brian Doherty wrote for Reason magazine:

Los Angeles-based journalist Cathy Seipp—best known in the blogosphere for her excellent Cathy’s World blog and her National Review Online columns–died yesterday of cancer.

She was an occasional Reason contributer and a full-time Friend of Reason–she helped organize a wonderful L.A. Press Club event for Nick Gillespie’s Choice: The Best of Reason anthology and my own This is Burning Man .

Most importantly, especially for those of us in L.A. lucky enough to know her, she was every bit as funny, lively, and unpredictable in person as she was in her writing. Her wit and enormous capacity for friendship drew around her the most interesting swirling nexus of L.A. writers, politicos, and characters one could ever hope to meet.

I was only ever a peripheral member of her circle, but I enjoyed every moment, and the opportunity to be part of a world, strange and vast and bound together pretty much only by Cathy, including porn industry reporter and Jewish world chronicler the inexplicable Luke Ford ; the fiery defender of common decency and courtesy, advice columnist Amy Alkon; superpolitical journalist Mickey Kaus; leading lawblogger Eugene Volokh; French journalist (and wife of our old colleague Matt Welch) Emmanuelle Richard; and almost everyone who was interesting and fun and smart in the many worlds of L.A. journalism, most of which would not have intersected but for her.

I’ll always treasure particularly the memory of an afternoon learning gun safety, loading and aiming techniques with her and Professor Volokh and a pack of her wonderful friends. Los Angeles, and the world of journalism, will be duller and sadder without her. For people wishing to honor her memory, she has requested donations to the Humane Society in her name.

In 2008, a friend emailed me: “I hadn’t realized you’d interviewed Brian Doherty re. Radicals for Capitalism. I’m just irredeemably to Brian’s left about some issues, but, as a funny kind of leftie, I’m sympathetic with principled movement libertarians on a number of matters–civil liberties and war (three cheers on this to Brian’s wife), of course, but also monopolies, licenses, subsidies–and the state.”

On Aug. 23, 2010, Brian posted on my FB wall during my chat with photographer Lane Hartwell: “This is one of the more curious “two people I know knowing each other and I can’t image whys” of the Facebook era. Hello to both of you, while I’m interrupting….”

Lane shot photos for Brian’s story on Burning Man.

On Dec. 12, 2014, I post about how I want my own media company just like I was promised when I converted to Judaism. It does not have to be a magazine, it could be a vertically integrated digital-media company. What’s important is that I get what’s coming to me as a Jew.

Chaim Amalek: “IF this stands, what next – Indians running Goldman Sachs? Big beefy gentiles making goy-friendly movies in Hollywood? Hashem send us Moshiach already so that we can regain control over the New Republic!”

Brian Doherty:

Well, Luke, I hope you get it, but be warned that apparently if upon getting this publication you dare fire an editor (after having fired ANOTHER editor to hire that editor, but apparently the first firing was OK) you will be vilified as a force of cultural destruction and one of the worst (somethings) in America by an echo chamber of privileged professionals living in the past.

This story is about staff departures at The New Republic is presented as the death of journalism, like anybody cared about TNR anymore anyway (maybe five times a year I’d hear somebody talk about something in there, about as often as I heard someone remark on a new essay in Hustler).

Brian Doherty:

Luke—I suggested that before posting about this controversy, you should have to answer 5 multiple choice Qs first about articles the Hughes TNR ran, then about 5 articles run in the decade before Hughes took over. You note that NO ONE asserts that anything about the Hughes TNR has been disgraceful or destroyed TNR’s vaunted traditions—-basically, this is all about firing ONE editor (who edited it before, then didn’t, then did again–the mag survived) then everyone else allegedly dedicated to its traditions quitting. If anyone “killed TNR” it is all of them. (Oh, wait, he hired someone who talked tech jargon and acted like something more than trad print journalism was necc. in the 21st century.)

And everyone writes about it as if Hughes is to blame, as if HE purged the mag. They purged themselves.

Over the course of my life, I’ve blurted out many things that I later regretted so intensely that I shuddered and flinched upon remembering them (in 2023, I was diagnosed with ADHD and getting on medication diminished the emotional instability that drove me to frequently say and do things I quickly regretted). Around 2005, I told Brian, who had a beautiful wife (their marriage didn’t last long) at NPR, that his Mrs. was so fine that he didn’t deserve her and she should be with me instead as he’s a pervy libertarian while I’m a respectable conservative whose behavior is governed by God’s immutable law.

I felt so embarrassed by that jokey remark whenever I thought about it that I apologized to Brian about five years later (many things I say and do seem fine to me until I get depressed and frightened about my prospects and then my old provocative ways appall me in ways they don’t do when I feel strong) via Facebook on July 7, 2010 after he accepted my friend request. He responded: “Luke—You are forgiven. In reality, I took it to be an interesting/amusing aspect of the way you chose to communicate, and was never offended by it. Good to hear from you again. Since Cathy’s death I’ve had no entree into those old social circles in which we were likely to run into each other. I hope you are well.”

On March 23, 2026, the New York Times said:

Brian Doherty, a writer who colorfully chronicled the libertarian movement in articles and books, most notably a sweeping history that covered eminent founding figures like the novelist Ayn Rand and the economist Milton Friedman as well as obscure oddballs with an anarchist streak, has died in Sausalito, Calif. He was 57.

Mr. Doherty was found dead on March 13 in Golden Gate National Recreation Area. His brother, Jim, said he fell the night before from a steep overlook of San Francisco Bay during a walk with friends who were scouting a site for an art performance. He had a leg injury and walked with a cane.

Mr. Doherty produced an eclectic body of work that had as a common thread his fascination with how bands of outsiders on the cultural and intellectual fringes infiltrate the mainstream. He was especially interested in movements with no central authority.

Besides libertarianism, he wrote books about 1960s underground comics and the Burning Man hippie-art-tech festival in the Nevada desert. For magazines, he covered seasteading, the notion of dwelling on the high seas beyond any national jurisdiction, and the Free State Project, which seeks to entice libertarians to move to New Hampshire and influence the state’s politics….

Mr. Doherty and a partner, Angela Keaton, called themselves husband and wife but, consistent with his disdain for government authority, never legally wed. The relationship ended in a separation around 2012.

He and another partner, Meghan Ralston, bought a home together in Cathedral City, Calif., near Palm Springs, but they also went their separate ways, in 2018, while remaining friends.

Mr. Doherty was living in Cathedral City at the time of his death. Besides his brother, he is survived by his mother.

“He was just passionate about oddballs, mystics, creative types, loners,” Ms. Ralston said in an interview. “People with real exuberances.”

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power in the History and Practice of International Humanitarian Law

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Luke Ford

Nobody in international humanitarian law says they want power over the definition of legitimate violence. They say they protect the vulnerable, humanize war, or fill gaps in the law. That is the move. Interpretive authority is a status claim wrapped in humanitarian language, and Amanda Alexander’s scholarship strips that claim down to its structural components. Read together, her essays on the civilian, the laws of war, and the Nuremberg trials describe a system in which each expansion of humanitarian protection also expands the jurisdiction of those who claim to interpret it, and each new framework discards something from the one it replaces without acknowledging the discarding as a choice. The question that runs beneath all of it — the one her work raises but does not answer directly — is what was lost when crimes against humanity were severed from crimes against peace, and whether the humanitarian paradigm that replaced the anti-imperial one at Nuremberg has diminished civilian suffering or merely changed who controls the answer.
Alexander’s core argument runs against the standard progressive narrative. The expansion of international humanitarian law from the Hague Conventions through the 1977 Additional Protocols is usually told as a story of moral progress: more people protected, more violence constrained, the state’s monopoly on force slowly checked by the growing reach of humanitarian norms. Alexander argues the opposite. Each expansion of the law absorbed what had previously existed outside it, replacing alternative codes of legitimacy, heroism, and revolutionary justice with formal legal criteria. The free-fighter became a regulated subject. The just cause became a belligerent nexus. The heroic partisan became a combatant assessed against neutral, external standards. What looks like humanitarian progress is, underneath, the steady victory of state-centered legal expertise over every rival form of authority.
The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 make this visible. Delegates from Switzerland and Belgium spoke with genuine admiration for patriots who fought outside formal structures, for the old men and women who took up arms against invaders. The German and Dutch delegations held firm: soldiers also have rights, and combatants must distinguish themselves, follow responsible command, carry arms openly. The Martens clause resolved the dispute by declaring that heroic acts simply exist outside the law. A heroic nation, Martens said, is like heroes, above codes, rules, and facts. This sounds like a concession to moral autonomy. In practice it meant that irregular fighters had no legal protection and could be executed. Admiration without legal recognition is not a compromise. It is exclusion dressed in praise.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions repeated the same move. When Denmark, the Soviet Union, and Israel argued that civilians defending themselves against illegal, genocidal aggression should receive prisoner of war status, the British delegation replied that the distinction between combatants and non-combatants had to be maintained even in the face of clear injustice. Formal, neutral law had to remain synonymous with the state. Individual or unorganized acts by civilians could not be countenanced. The law could expand to include partisans, but only partisans who resembled regular forces, organized under responsible command, attached to a recognized government, distinguishable from the surrounding population.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory illuminates what is happening beneath the surface of these debates. Every coalition presents its preferred definition of legitimate law as the obvious description of what humanitarian regulation requires. The state-centric formalists claim that without discipline and distinction, law dissolves into chaos. The humanitarian expansionists claim that without reaching irregulars and civilians, law abandons its moral purpose. The revolutionary movements claim that formal law serves imperial states and that justice requires recognition of people’s war. Each claim recruits allies, expands the defining coalition’s jurisdiction, and presents that expansion as the natural acknowledgment of how serious regulation works. None acknowledges that institutional interests shape the definitions. All present them as moral necessities.
The 1977 Additional Protocols represent the apparent triumph of the humanitarian expansionist coalition. National liberation conflicts were recognized as international armed conflicts. Combatant status was extended to guerrillas who did not distinguish themselves at all times, only from the point of deployment. The PLO was admitted to the Diplomatic Conference. Revolutionary movements that had operated outside the law were brought inside it. This looked like a victory for Third World states and anti-colonial movements. Alexander’s analysis shows it was something more complicated. The extension of the law did not change the character of the law. Article 44 on combatant status was written in legalistic language, ostensibly objective, deliberately obfuscatory. The word deployment was chosen precisely because its ambiguity made it acceptable to more delegations. What the revolutionary movements got was not recognition of their moral legitimacy but absorption into a framework of formal legal criteria that would govern them on the same terms that governed everyone else. The heroic outsider became a regulated insider. The just cause became a set of compliance conditions.
Stephen Turner would identify this as juridification, the spread of formal legal reasoning into domains that previously had their own systems of meaning. Turner argues that what looks like expanded protection is often expanded expert jurisdiction. Every gap identified in the law creates an opportunity for legal elites to declare themselves competent to fill it. The category of the civilian, which Alexander traces to World War One propaganda that simultaneously framed non-combatants as helpless victims and legitimate strategic targets, is not a timeless principle. It is a historically contingent construction that gave international lawyers a new domain of authority. The distinction between civilian and combatant is not a description of a pre-existing moral reality. It is a legal artifact that organizes elite attention around a particular way of seeing people, and that framing expands the jurisdiction of those who claim to interpret it.
The Israeli Supreme Court’s Targeted Killings Case demonstrates where this logic leads. President Barak declared that there are no black holes in international law: every person and every conflict falls within its reach. Terrorists who do not qualify as lawful combatants must be civilians. As civilians who take a direct part in hostilities, they lose protection for such time as they do so. The determination of what counts as direct participation, what direct causation means, what proportionality requires, all of this opens into a field of indeterminate legal argumentation that can be extended indefinitely. The state’s fight against terrorism, Barak concluded, is also law’s fight against those who rise up against it. The expansion of the law to cover everyone does not constrain the state. It enmeshes the state’s enemies in a juridical web from which there is no exit that is not itself defined by the law.
What makes this system so durable is the sincerity of its participants. Humanitarian lawyers believe they are protecting civilians. ICRC delegates believe they are filling genuine gaps that leave people exposed to violence. Academics who critique proportionality rules believe they are making the law more humane. Turner would note that this sincerity is precisely what allows the status game to run beneath the surface of the moral commitment, invisible to the players. The expansion of expert jurisdiction feels like humanitarian progress because the experts genuinely care about the outcomes they claim to pursue. The incentives of the game operate in the dark, sheltered by the conviction that the work is good.
The uncomfortable truth Alexander surfaces is that the humanitarian paradigm enables and conceals particular forms of violence even as it claims to constrain them. Civilians who cannot be depicted as innocent and passive lose their protection. Political actors, people who support armed resistance or feed intelligence to enemy forces, fall outside the category that the law protects. The law’s insistence on depoliticized innocence as the condition of protection means that those who exercise political agency in situations of extreme oppression become, by legal definition, legitimate targets. The expansion of law to cover everyone has produced a world where the determination of who counts as protected is controlled by legal elites whose formal criteria absorb every rival claim to legitimacy without ever acknowledging the absorption as a choice.
Understanding how that control was secured requires going back to the category itself.
Before 1914, the relevant legal subject was the citizen, not the civilian, and the citizen was understood as a political being bound to the fate of the state. Private individuals warranted some protection, but only conditionally, only insofar as they remained genuinely passive, and always subject to the overriding needs of military necessity. The citizen could become an enemy at any moment. The Hague Conventions reflected this. Article 25 prohibited bombardment of undefended towns not because the people inside them had inherent rights but because no military purpose required attacking them. Protection followed from military logic, not from the status of the person.
What the First World War did was sever that connection. Allied propaganda, responding to the German invasion of Belgium, needed to establish German guilt, and it did so by insisting that the Belgian population was innocent, passive, feminized, and helpless. The image of women and children shot down like rabbits, of babies bayoneted, of nuns raising their hands to heaven while towns burned, was not simply a description of events. It was a legal argument dressed in the language of outrage. If the population was genuinely passive and genuinely helpless, then the German reprisals were not the suppression of a franc-tireur resistance but atrocities against people who could not possibly have deserved them. The propaganda worked in part because the legal framework was flexible enough to absorb it. A population that was passive and innocent looked different from the citizen that the Hague negotiators had imagined, and the difference created space for a new legal category.
Aerial warfare completed the transformation. The bomber could not distinguish a fortified from an unfortified town. The old categories broke down when applied to an aircraft at altitude. The commission of jurists that produced the 1923 Hague Draft Rules needed a new organizing principle, and they found it in the military-civilian distinction that propaganda had made available. The civilian entered international law not as a discovery of pre-existing moral reality but as a legal solution to a technical problem, shaped by the particular image of the non-combatant that the war had produced.
That image was paradoxical from the start, and the paradox has never been resolved. The civilian was at once a primary military target, since the entire population served the industrialized war machine, and a protected innocent, since protection required the fiction of passivity. The civilian is defined not by any positive attribute of the person but by negation: whoever is not a combatant. That definition is indeterminate at its edges, and the edges are exactly where the hard cases live. The munitions worker. The family that feeds intelligence to resistance fighters. The farmer who stores weapons. The 1923 Rules already acknowledged that munitions workers were military targets. The encoding of both sides of the paradox was there from the beginning, and it has never been undone.
This matters for understanding what NGOs took authority over in the 1990s. When Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International declared themselves competent to assess civilian casualties and apply the principle of proportionality, they were not entering a settled legal field with clear categories. They were entering a field built on a category that has always required someone to decide who counts as innocent and who has forfeited that status through political agency or proximity to military activity. The sorting authority is what the field has always been about.
The displacement of states as the primary authors of international humanitarian law did not happen through treaty revision or formal institutional reform. It happened through a shift in who got to speak authoritatively about what the law already said. That distinction matters. States negotiate, sign, ratify, and sometimes refuse to ratify. NGOs do none of those things. What HRW and Amnesty did instead was something more subtle and, in the long run, more consequential: they declared the law settled at a moment when lawyers who had spent careers arguing about it knew perfectly well that it was not.
Alexander’s account of the Kosovo commentary makes this visible with unusual clarity. The legal literature on the Gulf War had been dominated by military lawyers who treated proportionality as a permissive principle, vague by design, weighted toward the operational needs of states. That was not a fringe position. It reflected decades of negotiating history, the explicit reservations of major powers at the Diplomatic Conference, and the considered judgment of commentators who had read the drafting record carefully. When HRW published its report on NATO’s air campaign, it cited none of that history. It stated that Additional Protocol I represented customary law binding on all states, offered no authority for the claim, and then applied the Protocol’s proportionality standard in a form stricter than the text required. Amnesty International did the same. And academic lawyers, writing about Kosovo, followed their footnotes.
What made this possible was a generational and cultural shift in who populated the field. The skeptical military lawyers of the early 1990s gave way to a cohort drawn to international humanitarian law by humanitarian concern rather than operational expertise. They came from human rights backgrounds. They trusted human rights organizations. They shared a sensibility that made HRW’s conclusions feel not just correct but obvious, and they treated the Office of the Prosecutor’s more cautious proportionality analysis as evidence of bias rather than professional judgment. The paradigm, as Alexander puts it in Kuhnian terms, had shifted. Working outside it no longer counted as doing law.
Turner’s analysis of expert jurisdiction helps explain the mechanism. Expertise is not just knowledge. It is a social relationship in which some speakers get treated as authoritative and others do not, regardless of the underlying quality of their arguments. What changed between the Gulf War and Kosovo was not the text of Additional Protocol I, which had not been amended, and not the state practice, which remained deeply inconsistent. What changed was the community of people whose pronouncements on the law were taken seriously, and that community had reorganized itself around humanitarian values in a way that made NGO reports legible as legal authority while making military legal analysis look like special pleading.
The circuit closed. NGOs cited the law; academics cited the NGOs; the NGOs cited the academic commentary in subsequent reports; and the whole structure presented itself as the settled consensus of the field. What this displaced was not just the military lawyer’s version of the law but the state’s formal role as the engine of legal development. States make law through the slow, contested, politically exposed process of negotiation and ratification. That process leaves a record. Reservations get filed. Delegations explain their votes. Disagreements stay visible in the drafting history. The NGO path to norm-setting leaves almost none of that. A report gets published, lawyers repeat its conclusions, the conclusions harden into orthodoxy, and the moment of choice disappears. By the end of the 1990s, the contested, nearly two-decade struggle over Additional Protocol I’s authority had been rewritten as a long tradition of humanitarian principle that any serious lawyer simply acknowledged.
The uncomfortable implication is that this mode of norm-setting is structurally less accountable than the one it replaced. A state that refuses to ratify a treaty takes a visible, attributable position. The NGO that declares customary law without citation, and the academic who repeats the declaration without scrutiny, leave no comparable record of choice. The law appears to develop by recognition rather than decision, by the gradual acknowledgment of what was always already true rather than by the exercise of power. That appearance is the point. It is what allows interpretive authority to function as humanitarian service rather than as the jurisdictional claim it is.
The NGO reports resolved the indeterminacy of the civilian category not by eliminating it but by transferring custody. They narrowed the category of legitimate targets and widened the category of protected persons. But they did not and could not eliminate the need for someone to sort the passive from the active, the uninvolved from the complicit. By insisting that any attack causing civilian casualties must satisfy a demanding proportionality standard, they transferred the question of who counts as protected from the definition of civilian to the assessment of anticipated harm. Someone still has to decide what counts as excessive. The NGO reports changed who gets to sort. They did not change the fact of sorting.
What persists, underneath both the military and the humanitarian readings, is the original contradiction: the civilian is defined as passive and innocent, but modern war has always known that populations are neither. The post-1923 law offers full protection on the ground of innocence. But the definition of innocence is not self-executing. Those who exercise political agency in situations of extreme oppression, who support resistance movements, who feed and shelter fighters, who work in industries that serve the war effort, fall outside the protection on the same logic that always governed the field. The humanitarian paradigm made the protection of civilians a legal imperative. It did not change who counts as a civilian.
It also, in a way that requires a longer historical lens to see clearly, narrowed the question it was willing to ask.
The interwar period shows how the civilian category can be run in reverse, made to justify targeting rather than protection, when the surrounding culture supplies the right moral logic. The trench poets did not write in favor of bombing civilians. Their work expressed horror at war, grief for the dead, contempt for the old men who sent the young to die. But the moral structure of that literature, the identification of the home front as complicit, the civilian population as guilty bystanders who owed something to the soldiers they had sacrificed, quietly prepared the ground for a different conclusion than the poets intended. If the people behind the lines bore responsibility for the war, then bringing the war to them was not cruelty. It was fairness. Fuller said it plainly. Douhet said it with strategic precision. Liddell Hart, the liberal among them, said it with reluctance but said it nonetheless.
International lawyers of the interwar period absorbed this narrative without much resistance. They did not need to be told that bombing civilians was permissible. They had already accepted the underlying premise: that in a modern, industrialized, total war, the distinction between combatant and civilian was dissolving, that munitions workers were legitimate targets, that anyone who contributed to the war effort had forfeited the protection of non-combatant status. This was not a fringe position among militarists. It was the mainstream view of liberal internationalists writing textbooks and drafting codifications. Garner said the category of non-combatant would be greatly reduced in future wars. Oppenheim, whose name anchored the field, said the combatant-civilian distinction was seriously threatened and offered no strong argument that it should survive.
Their disciplinary pessimism reinforced the cultural narrative. Conventions that lacked ratification did not bind states. Custom reflected actual practice, and practice was brutal. The 1923 Hague Draft Rules on Aerial Warfare were described as abortive almost immediately. Law, in this account, was not a check on violence. It was a description of what states were willing to do, lagging slightly behind events and carrying no independent moral weight. This professional self-understanding matters because it forecloses the kind of move that NGOs would make in the 1990s. When HRW declared Additional Protocol I customary law binding on all states, it made a claim about what the law required independent of state practice. That argument was not available in the 1930s. The theoretical options of the interwar period required law to track either state consent or actual custom, and neither produced anything useful for the protection of civilians under aerial bombardment. The NGO ascendancy was possible only because that conception had been replaced by one in which law could run ahead of practice, in which the aspirational statement could become the authoritative statement.
The humanitarian paradigm that produced that possibility was not, however, a simple continuation of what Nuremberg had started. It was a replacement built on a different moral foundation. And that is where the most consequential displacement in Alexander’s account occurs.
The standard complaints about the International Military Tribunal are familiar. The trials were victors’ justice. Crimes against humanity were oddly subordinated to crimes against peace. The Holocaust was distorted into a preparation for aggressive war rather than treated as the central atrocity it was. Victims’ voices were marginalized. These failures are usually attributed to political constraints on the prosecutors or to the retrospective quality of the law, as if the IMT had the right moral compass but could not quite reach what it was pointing toward.
Alexander argues instead that the IMT was not failing to do what it intended. It was succeeding at something different from what later observers assumed it intended. The trials told a story about aggressive, imperialist war as an economic institution, and they told that story with considerable coherence. The connection between crimes against humanity and crimes against peace that bewilders later commentators was, for the delegates at the London Conference, not a puzzle at all. It was obvious. War was the product of imperialism. Imperialism was the organized extraction of resources and labor from subject peoples through colonial domination. The persecution of the Jews, in the prosecution’s account, was part of the preparation for that kind of war, a clearing of the home front for the colonial campaign ahead. Jackson said it directly: you cannot take neighboring lands from their tenants without committing crimes against humanity. Shawcross said it from the other direction: these things occur when men embark on total war for aggressive ends.
The source of this narrative ran from Lenin through Trainin to Jackson by way of a shared anti-imperial sensibility that crossed the boundary between Soviet doctrine and Western liberal thought. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism as monopoly capitalism seeking colonies, markets, and raw materials was not merely a Marxist proposition. Du Bois made the same argument about Africa in 1915, a year before Lenin published. Leonard Woolf made it about economic imperialism more broadly. Quincy Wright and Lauterpacht, both of whom advised Jackson, described colonialism in terms that tracked the economic critique. Chanler, the obscure American lawyer who helped convince Roosevelt to support the aggression prosecution, wrote that the age of imperial expansion had destroyed the distinction between just and unjust wars and that restoring that distinction meant leaving the imperial era behind. The language was different in each case, but the underlying framework was the same: war comes from imperialism, imperialism is economic, and any legal order that tolerated imperial war was ethically bankrupt from its foundation.
The IMT successfully translated this framework into law. What the trials told was a history of aggressive colonial war motivated by economic logic — the seizure of territory, raw materials, and labor — and the crimes they described were shown as the direct expressions of that logic. Slave labor was a colonial and economic project. The planned starvation of Soviet populations was the consequence of a war for grain and raw materials. The persecution of the Jews was, in the prosecution’s account, preparation for the kind of national consolidation that colonial war required. These were not individual acts of cruelty. They were the outputs of a system.
The post-Cold War humanitarian paradigm that displaced this framework is built on different ground. It centers on the civilian as a protected category and understands civilian deaths as the primary legal harm, regardless of whether the war itself is aggressive or defensive, just or unjust. The shift from the IMT’s framework to this one was not a simple evolution. It required discarding, or at least marginalizing, the anti-imperial narrative that had made crimes against peace thinkable in the first place.
The cost of that discarding is real. When crimes against humanity were detached from their connection to crimes against peace and became freestanding violations, they gained juridical purity. They no longer depended on proving aggressive war. But they also lost the structural analysis that had animated them. The IMT’s account, for all its distortions, named colonialism as a crime. It understood the mass murder of civilian populations as the direct expression of an economic logic, not merely as an excess of individual cruelty. The civilian protection framework that replaced it treats civilian deaths as the problem to be minimized and asks whether the attacker took precautions and whether the harm was proportionate. It does not ask whether the war itself served the economic interests of the attacker at the expense of the attacked. That question, which Lenin and Trainin and Chanler all considered the central one, has no place in the framework HRW and Amnesty built when they declared Additional Protocol I customary law and rewrote the proportionality standard for Kosovo.
Turner’s analysis of expert jurisdiction and Pinsof’s Alliance TheoryNuremberg argument adds something they do not quite capture: the way a legal framework can succeed in translating a particular narrative into law, and then be replaced by a different framework that treats its predecessor’s achievements as incomplete rather than as choices. The IMT successfully juridified the anti-imperial critique of aggressive war. The post-Cold War humanitarian paradigm successfully juridified the protection of the passive civilian. Each displaced what came before it without acknowledging the displacement as a choice. Each presented itself as the natural continuation of humanitarian progress. Each carried, underneath that presentation, a particular theory of what causes suffering and who bears responsibility for it.
The anti-imperial framework blamed structural economic forces and the states that prosecuted colonial wars. The civilian protection framework blames individual commanders who fail to take precautions. One names the system. The other regulates its conduct. That difference is not a technical refinement. It is the question the field has stopped asking.

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The Most Lopsided War I Can Remember

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Luke Ford

Three weeks into the war, a question keeps surfacing: why has Iran’s retaliation been so underwhelming? The pre-war simulations imagined something far more devastating. Iran had missiles, drones, proxies across the region, and decades of asymmetric doctrine. What the simulations did not model was the destruction of the human architecture that makes any of that usable.
Stephen Turner‘s critique of expertise offers the clearest explanation for what has actually happened. Knowledge, Turner argues, is not inventory. It does not sit in a warehouse waiting to be deployed. It lives in people, routines, relationships, and stable environments. Destroy those conditions and the capability does not simply diminish. It fragments, losing the coordination that made it dangerous in the first place.
Operation Epic Fury understood this, whether intentionally or not. The opening strikes on February 28 did not just hit silos and launchers. They hit launch crews, mobile operator teams, and the IRGC’s command and coordination nodes. Within the first week, estimates suggest sixty to ninety percent of Iran’s missile launchers were destroyed or rendered inoperable. More importantly, the mid-level coordinators who knew how to sequence a sustained campaign, who carried the tacit knowledge of timing, targeting, and inter-unit communication, were dead, in hiding, or cut off from functioning communications. What remained was not a degraded version of the same capability. It was a different thing entirely: individuals trying to mimic a practice they no longer had the infrastructure to execute. Launch rates collapsed from roughly 180 missiles on the first day to single digits in the weeks that followed. That collapse is not primarily a story about hardware. It is a story about the destruction of a community of practice.
Turner’s framework also illuminates why the coalition’s defense has performed better than many expected. The integration of Israeli Arrow and David’s Sling systems with American THAAD and Aegis platforms, and elements like South Korea’s Cheongung II deployed in the UAE, represents something more than interoperability. It is a shared logic, a practiced coordination between institutions that have trained together, developed common procedures, and built the tacit understanding required to function under pressure. When Iran fired cluster-warhead variants of its Khorramshahr-4 missiles at Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan on March 18, killing an elderly couple and causing localized damage, the defense layers held. Tragic at the human level. Strategically negligible. The contrast with what Iran intended is not a matter of luck. It reflects the difference between a defensive system whose tacit coordination is intact and an offensive system whose tacit coordination has been systematically destroyed.
Iran’s response is also constrained by what might be called an alliance trap. The regime cannot simply fire everything it has left, because doing so risks triggering the complete destruction of its remaining oil infrastructure and whatever state capacity survives. So it fires enough to demonstrate to a domestic audience that it still exists and can still strike, but not enough to provoke annihilation. The result is a bounded retaliation strategy that looks, from the outside, like weakness, and from the inside, like the only available option. Hezbollah, once Iran’s most capable external arm, faces simultaneous pressure from Israeli strikes and Lebanese government politics. The Gulf states have shifted from nominal neutrality toward active cooperation with the coalition. The Axis of Resistance, as a functioning network, has been largely sidelined. Iran is not just firing fewer missiles. It is firing them alone, without the coordinative depth that made its forward defense doctrine coherent.
The cluster munition strikes on residential areas near Tel Aviv are particularly revealing through Turner’s lens. Precision targeting requires intact command and control, functioning intelligence feeds, and operators who understand the system well enough to distinguish military value from symbolic gesture. When that knowledge is gone, what remains is the capacity to launch something in a general direction. The shift from precise military targeting to dispersed strikes on civilian areas is not a deliberate escalation strategy. It is the signature of a force that has lost the interpretive capacity required for anything more sophisticated. They are not choosing to hit apartment buildings. They are hitting apartment buildings because they can no longer hit anything else with confidence.
The asymmetry of this war, then, is not simply a matter of hardware counts or sortie rates. It runs deeper than that. The United States and Israel are operating an integrated, high-functioning system whose tacit coordination, built across decades of joint exercises, shared doctrine, and institutional relationships, remains largely intact. Iran is operating the ruins of a system, firing what survives through operators who lack the practiced knowledge to use it well. The damage Iran has inflicted is real. Dozens dead across Israel and the Gulf states, disruption to shipping and energy markets, American equipment losses in the billions. But it is underwhelming relative to what the pre-war fear scenario assumed, and the reason is not Iranian restraint or Western good fortune. It is that the most dangerous thing about Iran’s military was never the missiles themselves. It was the coordinated human practice that made those missiles a coherent instrument of strategy. That practice has been broken, and broken practices do not reassemble quickly. Iran is not regrouping. It is improvising, which is what you do when the knowledge required to do anything better no longer exists in the people who remain.

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Gurri’s Avalanche Has No Blueprint

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Luke Ford

Martin Gurri’s column arrives like the Category 5 hurricane he invokes. The post-Cold War rules-based order was never rules or order, he argues. It was a polite fiction masking American decline and elite self-preservation. Trump has torn the fiction away. The world will never be the same.
That thesis is partly right. But the essay does two things at once, and the second is more interesting than the first. Gurri is not merely describing a shift in world politics. He is prosecuting a status war, and understanding it as such reveals both what he gets right and what he leaves dangerously unexamined.
Gurri sets up two rival coalitions with surgical clarity. On one side stand the transnational grandees of the rules-based order: UN secretaries-general, EU presidents, Davos regulars, Obama-era foreign policy veterans. Their prestige derives from what Stephen Turner would call rituals of competence. Consultations, proclamations, joint statements, and the specialized dialect of de-escalation, process, and international law. These are not primarily tools for solving problems. They are membership badges. To speak the language is to belong. To demand outcomes is to be gauche.
Opposing them is the coalition Gurri champions: Trump, Milei, Bukele, and the broader populist-nationalist network that prizes decisiveness, disruption, and measurable results over procedural theater. Gurri’s rhetorical strategy is deliberate. He reframes deliberation as paralysis, restraint as cowardice, and multilateralism as a euphemism for free-riding. The British Navy reduced to 63 ships, most in dry dock. Von der Leyen prioritizing her weekend over a regional emergency. Starmer’s Diego Garcia reversal dictated by domestic Muslim vote calculations. Carney’s support offered with regret. These are not policy failures in Gurri’s telling. They are public unmaskings. The old elite’s expertise exposed as performance, their authority as illusion.
Turner’s analysis of expertise supplies the deeper diagnosis Gurri only half-articulates. The rules-based class did not possess transferable, scientific knowledge of global systems. What they possessed was tacit, environment-specific know-how: habits of slow-motion crisis management, institutional continuity, and negotiated ambiguity. Those habits were adapted to a world of frozen conflicts and deferred consequences. The Oslo peace process that produced the Second Intifada. The JCPOA that bought Iran time to boast about eleven bombs. When Trump introduces rapid escalation, targeted pressure, and regime-level stakes, the old routines become not merely ineffective but incomprehensible. The elites are de-skilled in real time. Their Zoom calls and joint statements are the muscle memory of a vanished environment.
Gurri is therefore right that something irreversible has occurred. The interpretive monopoly is broken. Legitimacy is no longer conferred by fidelity to process. It is now contested between process-based and outcome-based claims, and that contest will not be resolved by proclamation.
But here Turner’s caution, underplayed by Gurri, demands a hearing. The new coalition is not immune to the fragility of expertise. It excels at breaking systems and forcing outcomes under uncertainty. It is far less practiced at the harder task: reproducing stable coordination once the old scaffolding is gone. Scouring the swamp and declaring a world open for business assumes that American preponderance plus willpower can manage what follows. Turner would warn that the knowledge required to stabilize second-order effects, new alliance architectures, long-term reconstruction, the tacit norms that prevent entropy from hardening into permanent disorder, is itself fragile and easily overestimated. A revolution in who counts as an expert changes who gets believed. It does not automatically confer better knowledge on the believers.
Gurri’s own earlier work, The Revolt of the Public (2018), supplies the cultural backdrop his column assumes but does not state. The digital age empowered networked publics to challenge elite narrative control. Trump’s second-term foreign policy is that revolt projected onto the global stage: a populist vanguard rejecting the priestly class that presumed to manage history on its behalf. The Iran war, in this reading, is not merely a military campaign. It is the moment the priestly class’s claim to superior wisdom gets empirically tested in public view, with consequences that cannot be papered over by a Monday crisis meeting.
The honest question Gurri leaves hanging is whether the shift from process legitimacy to outcome legitimacy improves the quality of decisions or merely accelerates the cycle of illusion. Both coalitions operate with partial maps. The old guard overestimated its ability to manage stability through deliberate paralysis. The new coalition may overestimate its ability to control what instability produces. Gurri celebrates the avalanche. Turner would remind us that avalanches do not consult blueprints.
The rituals of the rules-based order have been desacralized. What replaces them will be decided not in Brussels or Davos but by who can actually navigate the high-entropy environment now unfolding. If the Trump-aligned coalition delivers a world that reflects American power without descending into wider chaos, its status claim will harden into new orthodoxy. If not, the public, now permanently awake to elite failure in both its old and new forms, will not be patient with the new priests any more than it was with the old.
Gurri has sounded the trumpet. The rest requires watching, analytically sober, as consequences become the judge. Neither coalition holds a monopoly on wisdom. Both are improvising. The only certainty is that the public, having tasted revolt once, will not easily accept new fictions as a substitute for results.

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The Three Layers: Stephen Turner, Tacit Knowledge, and the War in Iran

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Luke Ford

Stephen P. Turner spent his career arguing against a comfortable assumption in the social sciences: that knowledge is a thing people possess, store, and transfer. His critique of practice theory cuts deeper than most readers realize. Knowledge is not a stable property sitting inside individuals or institutions waiting to be passed on. It is a fragile, context-bound performance, reproduced continuously through habit, routine, shared expectation, and local environment. Remove any of those conditions and the knowledge does not migrate cleanly. It degrades, distorts, or simply stops working.
The war in Iran is a live laboratory for that argument. But before getting to Turner, it is worth asking why expert commentary has been so slow to reckon with what is happening on the ground.
When analysts like Alex Vatanka at the Middle East Institute and Nate Swanson at the Atlantic Council describe Iran as “comfortable” in a long war, they make a claim that is defensible at one altitude and misleading at another. The doctrinal argument is real. Iran designed its forces for exactly this kind of grinding, attritional conflict. It has proxies, geographic leverage, oil market pressure, and a revolutionary ideology that frames endurance as victory. Vali Nasr at Johns Hopkins has made the same case: Tehran believes time is on its side, that the United States lacks the political stamina for a prolonged conflict, and that survival itself constitutes a form of winning. That is a coherent strategic logic. The trouble is that doctrine and execution are not the same thing, and the gap between them is precisely where Turner’s framework operates.
There is also a structural reason why experts resist updating. Status in the field rises when the actors you study look like sophisticated strategic players. If Iran is a cool chess player executing a long game, you are a brilliant decoder of regional strategy. If Iran is a wounded regime scrambling to hide its commanders under highway bridges, you are a witness to chaos, which requires far less interpretive skill. The same logic shaped sports journalism. Cover the 1980s San Francisco 49ers and your byline travels. Cover a team losing badly and explaining why proves less rewarding. Experts covering Iran have spent decades building reputations around the regime’s durability and strategic patience. Pivoting to “the machinery is cracking” carries a professional cost that “they are comfortable in a long war” does not. So the framework persists past its expiration date, and the analyst sounds increasingly like the Black Knight insisting it is just a flesh wound.
Turner would say the experts are measuring the wrong layer. Doctrine is explicit. It sits in manuals, strategic planning documents, and the public statements of leaders. What Turner tracks is the tacit layer underneath: the habits, routines, personal relationships, and shared expectations that make any doctrine executable. That layer does not show up in force structure assessments or historical precedent. It shows up in whether a Basij commander can actually coordinate a neighborhood security operation when his headquarters are rubble, his superior is dead, and a civilian on his street is feeding his location to an Israeli drone.
But Turner’s own recent reply to a reading of this framework pushes the analysis one level deeper still. When asked whether this account of expertise and tacit knowledge was fair, he confirmed it was, then added something that reframes the entire argument. He pointed to the tacit ways different cultures respond to authority, and offered two examples. In Japan, he noted, mothers physically force infants’ heads into bows before those children have any conscious understanding of hierarchy. The body learns its place before language forms. Then he turned to Islam. Confucian deference, he argued, has a hard road because it operates through cultural inheritance and social expectation. Islam puts even that to shame. The submission built into Islamic practice is not merely theological. It reproduces itself daily through prayer, posture, and the physical orientation of the body toward Mecca. Salat is not a reminder of obedience. It is a rehearsal of it, five times a day, from childhood, installed in the body long before any political command is issued.
This means the framework has three layers, not two.
Doctrine is what analysts see and debate. It survives almost anything. Kill commanders and the doctrine still exists in speeches, plans, and ideology. The second layer is organizational tacit knowledge: the routines, command relationships, and communities of practice inside the IRGC, the Basij, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the judiciary. This is the layer Israel has been systematically shredding. The third layer is embodied tacit knowledge, the population’s deep, somatic habit of vertical deference, drilled through ritual and hierarchy from childhood. It sits in posture and reflex. It predates conscious thought. It is what Turner means when he says these are not metaphors for obedience but training regimes that install readiness to submit.
Iran draws on all three layers simultaneously, which is what makes it both more durable and more distinctively vulnerable than most analyses account for.
The first lesson Turner offers is that killing individuals does not equal destroying knowledge. A nuclear scientist or IRGC planner is not a USB drive. What they know is embedded in habits, teams, physical environments, and repeated interaction. Remove the person and you do not get a clean deletion. You get distortion. The system improvises around the gap, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, always unevenly.
Where targeted killing bites hardest, in Turner’s framework, is at the moment of transmission. Tacit knowledge requires apprenticeship. It passes through imitation, shared experience, and prolonged proximity. It does not survive intact in manuals or org charts. So when Israel destroyed the headquarters, then the fallback muster points at sports complexes, then the checkpoints, then the individual commanders hiding in tents and under bridges, it was not simply removing capability. It was breaking the chain through which that capability would have reproduced itself. The strikes on Azadi Stadium, where hundreds of security personnel died in a single operation, were particularly significant for this reason. Those were not just personnel losses. They were the destruction of a community of practice, the setting in which tacit knowledge about crowd control, coordination, and internal security lived and got passed on.
Now bring the embodied layer into this. The people inside Azadi Stadium were not only trained in organizational routines. They were also the products of decades of somatic conditioning, bodies habituated to hierarchy through prayer, ritual, and a culture of submission that Turner argues runs deeper in Islamic societies than almost anywhere else. That depth is precisely what makes their absence so significant. They were not interchangeable parts. They were fully formed nodes in a system where doctrine, organizational habit, and embodied deference had fused into something that looked like institutional coherence. Destroy enough of those nodes and you destroy that coherence, even if the ideology and the population’s baseline deference survive intact.
The case of Esmail Khatib illustrates a second Turner point: expertise is never purely technical. It is socially and politically enacted. Khatib was not simply a spy chief. He was the figure who held the interpretive framework together, the person who translated across the fragmented worlds of the IRGC, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the Judiciary. He provided what Turner calls a common language, a shared way of seeing that allowed institutions with different cultures and competing interests to act as a single machine. Without that, the institutions retreat into their own logics. The MOIS reads a street protest one way. The IRGC reads it another. Neither has the practiced habit of reconciling the two. The result is inconsistency, over-reaction, under-reaction, and the slow accumulation of errors that look minor until they are not. The reported refusal of the IRGC to share blood supplies and ambulances with wounded regular army soldiers is not just an operational failure. It is what Turner’s framework predicts when the coordinating figures who maintained inter-institutional trust are gone.
Ali Larijani’s death compounds this at the diplomatic level. Larijani ran the Supreme National Security Council and served as Iran’s lead interpreter for the region. That role was not interchangeable. It rested on forty years of social capital, personal relationships with counterparts in Oman, India, and the Gulf, and a practiced feel for calibrating Iranian interests against external costs. India’s informal arrangements for LPG tanker passage through the Strait of Hormuz were not written down anywhere. They were a personal coordination, a tacit understanding that Larijani could maintain because the other side trusted him to understand the stakes. A successor can occupy the title. He cannot inherit the relationships or the feel. A junior IRGC commander in the Strait might seize a ship because he lacks the embodied understanding of the diplomatic cost that Larijani would have weighed automatically. The system becomes lossy in ways that are invisible from outside until something goes wrong.
This is where Turner’s observation about the body clarifies what would otherwise look like mere dysfunction. The junior commander is not undisciplined. He is, if anything, overdisciplined in the wrong direction. His body knows how to obey. His reflex is vertical. But without the coordinating figure who once translated that deference into calibrated external behavior, the obedience has nowhere precise to go. He acts on the logic closest to hand, which is not the logic of the diplomatic cost Larijani once carried in his bones. The result is not insubordination. It is the wrong kind of obedience, confident and wrong.
What reporting on the ground captures is exactly the pattern Turner’s theory predicts. The Islamic Republic is not collapsing in any clean sense. It still controls the streets through raw violence. But the fragile, half-invisible processes that make a coercive system function are visibly scrambling. Forces that once operated from fixed stations with established routines are hiding in stairwells, buses, and civilian buildings. Commanders who knew how to manage a neighborhood from a precinct house do not automatically know how to operate while being hunted across shifting locations with degraded communications. The tacit knowledge was tied to the stable environment. Remove the environment and the knowledge does not travel with the person.
And yet the population has not become horizontal. People do not suddenly shed the postural habits of a lifetime. The body still expects hierarchy. People still look upward. Turner’s point about Islamic deference cuts both ways here. The regime retains a reservoir of compliance that most coercive systems cannot access because it is pre-political, installed through ritual before any political loyalty was ever formed. That explains why the system does not collapse cleanly even when it is visibly damaged. It does not need the organizational layer to maintain basic street-level submission. The body does that work on its own.
But embodied deference does not generate coordination. It creates readiness to obey, not knowledge of what to do or who to obey when the chain of command is unclear. When the organizational layer is intact, the three layers align: doctrine gives direction, organizational routines give scripts, and embodied habits supply willing bodies. Strip the middle layer and the alignment breaks. People look upward and find no reliable signal. The result is not rebellion. It is a distinctive failure mode: overcompliance in some units, paralysis in others, arbitrary local authority filling gaps, contradictory actions across a system whose members all want to obey but cannot agree on what obedience looks like right now.
The WSJ reports (updated March 18):

The Journal reviewed the contents of one call between a senior Iranian police commander and an agent of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service.

“Can you hear me?” a Mossad agent can be heard, speaking in Farsi. “We know everything about you. You are on our blacklist, and we have all the information about you.”

“OK,” the commander said in the recording.

“I called to warn you in advance that you should stand with your people’s side,” the Mossad agent said. “And if you will not do that, your destiny will be as your leader. Do you hear me?”

“Brother, I swear on the Quran, I’m not your enemy,” the commander said. “I’m a dead man already. Just please come help us.”

The recording of the senior police commander pleading with a Mossad agent captures something Turner would recognize immediately. Expertise provides confidence. It allows people to act without constantly recalculating, because they trust the system around them to behave predictably. Once that trust collapses, once commanders cannot trust their comms, their locations, their colleagues, or their chain of command, coordination breaks down before capability does. The “I’m a dead man already” is not just despair. It is the sound of someone whose embodied know-how has been rendered useless by the destruction of the environment that made it work. The habits are intact. The world those habits were calibrated for is gone.
This is the distinction the “comfortable” analysts miss. Vatanka and Swanson describe doctrinal comfort: the regime is executing the strategy it planned for. Turner points to operational agony underneath: the regime is being hollowed out while it executes that strategy. A system can maintain its formal structure, its chain of command on paper, its official rhetoric of defiance, while the tacit substructure that makes any of it work degrades beyond recovery. The indicators that formal expertise tracks, doctrine, force structure, historical precedent, do not register that kind of damage in real time. The indicators that matter, hesitation, poor coordination, fear-driven improvisation, the collapse of local initiative, show up in stairwells and stolen cars that nobody can retrieve because there is no one left at the police station who knows the procedure.
The experts are not wrong because they are foolish. They are wrong because their tools do not register the layer where the real damage is happening. Experts are trained to read what can be formalized. They are weaker at tracking tacit coordination. They are nearly blind to what is embodied, because embodied knowledge does not appear in data at all. It lives in gesture, posture, the felt sense of what a situation demands. You cannot see it in a force structure chart. You see its absence only when something that should have worked does not.
Turner would resist two tempting conclusions. The first is that this campaign will produce clean collapse. Tacit systems degrade unevenly, and Iran retains coercive capacity and the deep reservoir of embodied compliance that no amount of targeted killing can reach directly. The second is that the expert consensus was simply wrong. It was not wrong. It was operating at the wrong altitude, tracking the explicit layer while the tacit layer crumbled underneath. That is not incompetence. It is a structural limitation of how expertise works, which is, as Turner would note, precisely the kind of thing that experts are worst equipped to see in themselves.
The Islamic Republic is therefore neither collapsing nor stable. It is something more unstable than either category captures: a system where the doctrine still says endure, the body still knows how to bow, but fewer and fewer people know how to turn that posture into coordinated action. The body remembers. The organization forgets. And the gap between those two facts is where the real story of this war is being written.

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