Luke Ford

Amanda Alexander’s chapter, Lenin at Nuremberg, in the 2021 book Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 analyzes how the codification of “Crimes Against Humanity” was driven by a specific anti-imperialist narrative influenced by the Bolshevik Revolution. This analysis challenges the standard liberal view of the Nuremberg trials as a purely Enlightenment-driven victory of “Reason over Power.”

The Shift from Profane Vengeance to Sacred Peace (Jeffrey Alexander)

Jeffrey Alexander’s model highlights how events move from the mundane or “profane” to a “sacred” level of normative violation. In the orthodox liberal narrative, Nuremberg is a purification ritual where international law represents civilization standing against “lawlessness”. However, Amanda Alexander identifies a different sacred hierarchy at work in 1945.

The trials moved the discussion from the profane level of individual murders to the sacred level of “Crimes Against Peace”. Aggressive, imperialist war was sacralized as the “crime of crimes”—the ultimate pollution of the center of international order. By framing aggressive war as the “parent” of all other horrors, the delegates triggered a generalization of consciousness: they argued that an international legal regime condoning such wars was so ethically misguided it had to be radically purified.

Alliance Theory and the Anti-Imperialist Pretext (David Pinsof)

Alliance Theory suggests that morality is a tool used by diverse groups to coordinate against a common enemy. Amanda Alexander argues that the “Crimes Against Humanity” label was a secondary focal point used to drag horrific state actions into a legal framework that was primarily focused on aggressive war.

The anti-imperialist narrative provided the necessary pretext for an alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. By defining the Nazis as “rapacious and piratic imperialists,” the Soviet jurist A.N. Trainin created a signal that Western leaders like Robert Jackson and William C. Chanler could adopt. This shared language allowed a temporary alliance to synchronize their actions, even though they held fundamentally different underlying interests—the Soviets seeking to dismantle global capitalism and the Americans seeking to “forestall Bolshevik influence” by promoting their own version of self-determination.

Expertise as the Foundation of Legal “Closure” (Stephen Turner)

Stephen Turner’s analysis of expertise explains how a specialized class creates “liberal property” to establish an authoritative closure of a field. The chapter shows how jurists like Trainin, Lauterpacht, and Quincy Wright acted as the “high priests” of this new legal order.

They used their specialized knowledge to redefine what was “criminal” in international law, often bypassing existing legal precedents. Trainin’s work was described as a “godsend” because it provided the technical vocabulary needed to justify the prosecution of “Crimes Against Peace,” despite the fact that aggressive war was not formally criminalized at the time. This expert-led closure ensured that the trials could proceed under a facade of legality, even while the “priests” themselves admitted they were “instituting customs” that would only later become law.

The “Everything is Bullshit” Framework (David Pinsof)

Finally, applying the “Everything is Bullshit” framework reveals the adaptive deceptions embedded in the Nuremberg Charter. The insistence on linking “Crimes Against Humanity” to “Crimes Against Peace” (Article 6(c)) served a strategic purpose that the liberal narrative often obscures.

The high-minded rhetoric of “universal humanity” was often “bullshit” used to mask the strategic need to avoid scrutinizing the Allied powers’ own colonial violence or internal affairs. By requiring a connection to the war, the legal cartel ensured that the “humanity” being protected was only that which had been violated by the specific “polluter” (the Nazis), thereby preserving the reputations and sovereign immunity of the Allied alliance. The “history” produced at Nuremberg was thus a curated narrative designed to maintain the status of the winners as the “pure” defenders of reason while concealing the profane geopolitical interests that truly drove the proceedings.

ChatGPT says:

1. Alliance Theory. Nuremberg as a temporary anti-imperialist coalition

Alexander’s core intervention is to show that Nuremberg was not born as a liberal-humanist project, but as a fragile alliance between liberal victors and anti-imperialist, Marxist ideas about war.

At Nuremberg, the dominant elite coalition was unstable.

On one side were Western liberal states that wanted to punish Nazi leadership while preserving the legitimacy of imperial power and state sovereignty.
On the other were Soviet and anti-imperialist actors who understood aggressive war itself as the crime of crimes, rooted in capitalism and imperial exploitation.

The alliance compromise was juridification.

Instead of prosecuting imperialism as such, the tribunal translated anti-imperialist critique into criminal categories. Crimes against peace absorbed Leninist ideas about imperialist war without endorsing revolutionary politics.

Alliance Theory predicts this move exactly. When elites must cooperate across incompatible worldviews, they convert political critique into legal form. Law becomes the lowest-conflict coordination language.

Nuremberg did not defeat imperialism. It neutralized its most radical critique by legal translation.

2. Alexander’s sacralization model. How aggressive war became the sacred violation

Alexander’s chapter tracks a precise sacralization process.

Profane baseline

Before World War II, war was a sovereign prerogative. Brutal, tragic, but legally ordinary.

Normative shock

The scale of destruction and fascist aggression produced a crisis of meaning. War itself threatened to delegitimize the international order.

Sacralization move

Aggressive war is elevated into a supreme moral violation. “Crimes against peace” become foundational. War is no longer just politics. It is a moral rupture.

Pollution of the center

Imperial aggression is framed as contaminating civilization itself. This allows prosecution without indicting colonialism as a system.

Ritual of purification

The Nuremberg trials function as a liminal ritual. History is bracketed. Nazi leaders are isolated as moral monsters. The international community purifies itself through judgment.

Symbolic classification

Aggressive war planners are absolute evil. Victors are lawful guardians. Colonial violence disappears into the background.

Alexander’s crucial insight is that anti-imperialist meaning survives only in sacralized, depoliticized form.

3. Pinsof. Why Lenin appears without revolution

Pinsof’s signaling logic explains the strange structure Alexander identifies.

At Nuremberg, elites wanted to signal moral seriousness without signaling revolutionary sympathy.

Endorsing Lenin openly would have signaled ideological danger.
Rejecting anti-imperialism outright would have signaled moral emptiness.

So the solution was symbolic absorption.

Lenin’s critique of imperialist war is present, but stripped of class struggle, capitalism, and revolution. It survives only as a legal principle condemning aggressive war.

This is classic “everything is bullshit” logic. Not because actors lied, but because speech was optimized for alliance safety.

The tribunal says: war is criminal, but the system that produces war remains intact.

That is elite signaling equilibrium.

4. Turner. Expertise replaces political judgment

Turner’s framework explains the lasting consequences.

By translating imperialism into criminal law, Nuremberg transferred judgment from politics to experts. Judges, prosecutors, historians, and lawyers now define which wars are criminal and which are legitimate.

Revolutionary critique is no longer voiced by peoples or movements. It is adjudicated by courts.

Once aggressive war becomes a legal category, only professionals can invoke it credibly. The masses lose standing. Anti-imperialism becomes a courtroom argument, not a political project.

Turner would say this is authority laundering. Radical moral claims are made safe by professionalization.

How the four tools fit together

Alliance Theory explains why Lenin appears at Nuremberg at all.
Sacralization explains how war becomes morally absolute.
Pinsof explains why the critique is hollowed out.
Turner explains why revolutionary politics never returns.

The central takeaway

Alexander’s chapter shows that Nuremberg did not betray anti-imperialism.

It contained it.

Lenin was allowed into international law only as a ghost. His critique of imperialist war was preserved just enough to legitimate the new legal order, but not enough to threaten it.

Crimes against peace survive.
Imperialism survives.
Revolution is juridified out of existence.

That is the lasting legacy Alexander is exposing.

This 2016 paper by Amanda Alexander examines how the cultural narratives and legal absence of the interwar period prepared the way for the aerial bombardment of civilians in World War II. Using my four favorite analytical tools, we can decode how the concept of the “civilian” was sacralized, managed by experts, and used as a strategic coordination point.

The Shift from the Profane to the Sacred

In Jeffrey Alexander’s model, a crisis begins when an event shifts from the “profane” level of mundane politics to a “sacred” level of normative violation. Amanda Alexander shows that after World War I, the “trench poets” sacralized the suffering of soldiers, portraying them as “murdered” boys sacrificed by an “impure” home front.

This created a generalization of consciousness where the safety of civilians was no longer a profane administrative detail but a moral “pollution”. The literary canon established a binary: the “pure” suffering soldier versus the “impure,” indifferent civilian. This moralization anticipated and justified the extension of war to the entire population as a form of “fairness” or “justice”.

Alliance Theory and the Civilian “Polluter”

David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory suggests that moral outrage is a tool for coordination. The interwar narrative of civilian culpability served as a focal point for a new military-political alliance. By framing civilians as “active enemies” who “sent the young men out to be murdered,” military strategists and air force leaders coordinated a new doctrine of aerial warfare.

Under this framework, the “outrage” at the slaughter of soldiers in the trenches allowed diverse groups to synchronize around a “short, sharp” war directed at the “seat of the opposing will”—the civilian population. The civilian was reclassified from a “private citizen” outside the conflict to a “polluter” who shared the “inhumanity” of war.

Expertise as the Foundation of Absence

Stephen Turner’s analysis of expertise explains how the “legal cartel” of the time maintained power through a “closure” of the field. International lawyers in the interwar period did not advocate for civilian protection because they were trapped by their own disciplinary conventions and histories.

These experts act as “priests” who define the boundaries of the possible. Between the wars, legal experts shared a “deeply pessimistic” history of the failure of law in the Great War. They used their specialized knowledge to argue that international law was “vague, inadequate, and certain to be broken”. By claiming that law must “reflect reality”—a reality they defined as “totalitarian”—they ensured that no strong legal or ethical objections to bombardment could reach the “sacred center” of international discourse.

The “Everything is Bullshit” Framework

Finally, applying Pinsof’s “everything is bullshit” framework reveals that the high-minded debate between “positivism” and “natural law” was often an adaptive deception. While the world “dared to dream about the triumph of legal process” in areas like trade and territorial waters, this enthusiasm masked a strategic “lack of interest” in the protection of the civilian.

The “bullshit” narrative of a “Good War” as a war that protects civilians is a modern creation. In the interwar period, the “Good War” narrative was ironically used to justify bombardment as a “more humane” way to conclude a conflict with less bloodshed for soldiers. The legal absence was not a failure of law, but the “realization of the prevailing story” that allowed the elite alliance to pursue total war while maintaining its reputation for strategic rationality.

ChatGPT says: Alexander shows that civilians became legitimate targets not because law collapsed, but because a cultural narrative redefined what a “good war” was, and international law followed that narrative rather than resisting it.

1. Alliance Theory. How elites coordinated permission for civilian bombing

Alexander’s paper is fundamentally about elite alliance convergence across three domains.

• military strategists
• political leaders
• international lawyers

After World War I, these groups converged on a shared story: civilians were no longer innocent bystanders but morally implicated participants in war.
This narrative solved an alliance problem.

Modern war required national mobilization, industrial production, and civilian morale. Targeting only soldiers was strategically insufficient. The alliance needed a moral framework that allowed total war without shattering legitimacy.

Alliance Theory predicts this exactly. When elites face strategic constraints, they align narratives that expand permissible action. Law does not constrain power here. It coordinates it.

International lawyers did not resist. They adapted, because their authority depends on remaining relevant to elite practice rather than vetoing it.

2. Alexander’s sacralization model. Rewriting the “Good War”

This paper is almost a textbook application of Jeffrey Alexander’s model, even though it is historical rather than contemporary.

Profane phase

World War I begins with civilians still formally outside war. Bombing them is morally ambiguous.

Normative shift

By the late 1920s, a new narrative hardens. Civilians are blamed for sending soldiers to die while remaining safe. This reframes immunity as moral unfairness.

Pollution reversal

Civilians are no longer sacred. They become morally polluting. Their safety is framed as unjust privilege.

Generalization

The “good war” is redefined. A fair war must touch the whole nation. Total war becomes ethically legible.

Ritual legitimation

Strategic bombing doctrine, air force planning, and legal silence function as purification rituals. The practice becomes normalized before World War II even begins.

The key insight Amanda Alexander gives is devastating. The sacred/profane boundary flipped before the bombs fell.

3. Pinsof. Why lawyers could not say “this is wrong”

Pinsof’s logic explains why international lawyers behaved the way Alexander documents.

Lawyers were not cynically evil. They were signaling alliance membership.

To insist on strong civilian immunity would have signaled:
• detachment from strategic reality
• moral naïveté
• professional irrelevance

So instead, lawyers adopted ambiguity. They treated bombardment as unsettled rather than prohibited. That is a classic signaling move. It preserves status while avoiding direct endorsement.

Pinsof’s rule applies perfectly here. The behavior was not about belief. It was about not breaking ranks.

Alexander explicitly shows lawyers constrained by disciplinary conventions and cultural narratives, not by lack of awareness.

4. Turner. Expertise as moral anesthetic

Turner’s framework explains why this moral transformation happened without democratic revolt.

War planning, air power doctrine, and international law were treated as expert domains. Civilians were conceptually present but practically excluded from judgment.

Experts redefined killing civilians as:
• strategic necessity
• future deterrence
• unfortunate but rational

Once expertise framed the issue, moral intuition was sidelined. Democratic publics were not asked whether civilians should be bombed. They were told experts had decided this was unavoidable.

This is exactly Turner’s warning. Expertise did not inform democratic judgment. It replaced it.

How the four tools fit together

Alliance Theory explains why elites converged.
Sacralization explains how civilians lost moral immunity.
Pinsof explains why professionals complied.
Turner explains why resistance never crystallized.

Alexander’s paper shows that mass civilian death was not an accident of modern war. It was a culturally prepared outcome.

The key insight

The most disturbing conclusion of the paper, when decoded through your tools, is this:

International law did not fail to stop civilian bombing.
It helped make it thinkable.

That pattern should feel very familiar to you.

In her chapter from 2023’s book Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law, Amanda Alexander deconstructs the narrative that the Vietnam War was a unique “legal crisis” that shattered a previously stable consensus on the laws of war. By applying my four favorite tools, we can see how the “Revolutionary War” (specifically Vietnam) was used to move international law from a profane state-centric model to a sacred humanitarian one.

The Shift from Profane Reciprocity to the Sacred Humanitarian

Jeffrey Alexander’s model explains that a crisis begins when an event shifts from the profane level of routine politics to a sacred level of normative violation. Amanda Alexander argues that before the 1960s, the laws of war were “profane”—a set of technical, reciprocal rules designed for conventional conflicts between states.

The Vietnam War triggered a generalization of consciousness that transformed these rules into “International Humanitarian Law”. The war was sacralized as a “Good War” for human rights, moving the discourse away from the profane interests of sovereign states toward the sacred protection of the individual. This created a binary symbolic classification: the “pure” humanitarian vision that protects all participants versus the “impure,” outdated model that only recognized state soldiers.

Alliance Theory and the Revolutionary Focal Point

David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory suggests that moralized language is a tool for synchronization. The “Revolutionary War” in Vietnam provided a new focal point for an alliance of Third World states, the ICRC, and Western legal activists. They used the “outrage” over the exclusion of guerilla fighters from legal protection to coordinate a challenge against the traditional Great Power alliance.

In the “Everything is Bullshit” framework, the narrative that the 1977 Additional Protocols were a “victory for humanity” is an adaptive deception. This moralized story allowed the new alliance to pursue its strategic interest in legitimizing revolutionary struggles while maintaining a reputation for pure altruism. The “humanitarian” label was the signal that allowed these diverse groups to synchronize their attack on the old state-centric order.

Expertise and the Authoritative Closure of IHL

Stephen Turner’s analysis of expertise explains how a specialized class creates “liberal property” to bypass democratic or organic legitimacy. Alexander notes that the “humanitarianization” of the law was led by a specific class of experts—international lawyers and ICRC officials.

These experts act as the “priests” of the new IHL paradigm, creating an authoritative closure of the field. They replaced the profane, state-based “usage” and “practice” with their own expert-led “humanitarian” interpretations. By claiming that the law must be truly “humanitarian” to be legitimate, they ensure that only those with their specialized credentials can define the rules of modern warfare, effectively silencing the “profane” arguments of military practitioners.

The Ritual of the “Vietnam Crisis”

Applying Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of the “ritual of purification,” the post-Vietnam legal reforms functioned as a liminal experience. The legal cartel framed Vietnam not as a profane political failure but as a “crisis of the law” that required ritual renewal.

The 1977 Additional Protocols acted as the ritual that re-anchored the “sacred center” of international law. By “bracketing” the messy, particularist politics of the Cold War and anti-colonialism, the experts created a simplified drama of “humanitarian progress”. This ritual allowed the discipline to survive its own failure in Vietnam by declaring the old law “impure” and establishing a new, “pure” humanitarian center that remains the dominant framework today.

ChatGPT says:

1. Alliance Theory. Revolutionary war as an alliance stress test

Alexander shows that revolutionary war did not merely challenge Western militaries. It fractured the elite alliance that underwrote the traditional laws of war.

Before Vietnam and Palestine, the alliance structure was stable.

• Western states
• professional militaries
• international lawyers
• the ICRC

This alliance shared an image of war. Uniformed soldiers. Passive civilians. Clear battlefields. Law reinforced state monopoly over violence.

Revolutionary wars blew this up. People’s war erased the separation between population and army. Civilians were fighters. Fighters were civilians. Legitimacy flowed from mass participation, not state recognition.

Alliance Theory predicts the response.
Elites do not abandon monopoly claims. They reconfigure law to absorb the challenge.

Additional Protocol I is the alliance repair mechanism. Guerrillas are brought inside the law as combatants sometimes. Civilians are sacralized as protected always. The state remains central. Revolutionary violence is neutralized by juridification.

The law does not endorse people’s war. It domesticates it.

2. Alexander’s sacralization model. How civilians replaced sovereignty as the sacred object

This chapter traces a full sacralization cycle.

Profane baseline

War is openly political. Civilians are enemy nationals. They may be harmed if militarily useful.

Normative shock

Vietnam, Palestine, and decolonization produce mass civilian suffering that delegitimizes imperial power in Western consciousness.

Pollution of the center

Counterinsurgency that targets civilians is framed as morally contaminating. Not just wrong. Civilization-threatening.

Generalization

Debate shifts from tactics to universal values. Humanity. Innocence. Protection. War is judged not by victory but by civilian harm.

Ritual of purification

Diplomatic conferences. UN resolutions. Additional Protocol I. These are liminal rituals where a new moral order is declared.

Symbolic classification

Revolutionary fighters are partially purified as combatants. Imperial counterinsurgents are polluted as violators. Civilians become sacred figures whose suffering authorizes legal reform.

Alexander’s key insight is sharp. Civilians become sacred precisely because revolutionary war made them unavoidable participants.

3. Pinsof. Why incoherent law survived and spread

Pinsof explains why everyone accepted a deeply contradictory settlement.

The new law says:

• civilians must be protected
• guerrillas may be civilians
• civilians may participate in hostilities
• yet distinction remains foundational

This is conceptually unstable. But it is signaling-stable.

Affirming civilian protection signals moral modernity.
Affirming guerrilla legitimacy signals anti-imperial virtue.
Affirming distinction signals legal continuity.

No actor needs to fully believe the framework. They need only signal alliance membership.

Western states abstain instead of voting no. Lawyers call provisions “customary” despite novelty. Everyone survives reputationally.

This is pure “everything is bullshit” logic. Speech is optimized for coalition safety, not coherence.

4. Turner. Expertise absorbs revolutionary politics

Turner’s framework explains how revolutionary claims were neutralized without suppression.

People’s war challenged law at the level of politics. It said legitimacy comes from popular struggle.

International humanitarian law responds by translating that challenge into expert categories.

Combatant status. Distinction during deployment. Direct participation in hostilities. Proportionality.

Once translated, revolutionary violence loses its political meaning. It becomes a compliance problem.

Experts now decide who is a fighter, when, and with what rights. The people are no longer authors of legitimacy. They are objects of classification.

Turner would say this is authority laundering. Law converts mass politics into technical judgment.

How the four tools fit together

Alliance Theory explains why the law had to change.
Sacralization explains what became morally untouchable.
Pinsof explains how contradiction persisted.
Turner explains who gained control.

The core takeaway

Alexander’s chapter shows that international humanitarian law did not arise to restrain revolutionary war.

It arose to survive it.

The law absorbed the moral force of people’s war while stripping it of political autonomy. Civilians became sacred. Guerrillas became regulated. States retained control.

Revolutionary war reshaped humanitarian law.
Humanitarian law then reshaped revolutionary war.

That is the historical loop Alexander is exposing.

The 2023 article Filling the Gaps: The Expansion of International Humanitarian Law and the Juridification of the Free-Fighter by Amanda Alexander examines the historical expansion of international law to govern “free-fighters” and irregular combatants. By applying my four favorite tools, we can decode how this expansion functioned as a strategic “juridification” that replaced alternative moral codes with a state-centric legal framework.

The Shift from Profane Freedom to Sacred Juridification

In Jeffrey Alexander’s model, a crisis occurs when a subject shifts from the profane to the sacred. Originally, “free-fighters” existed in a profane space outside the state’s legal status. They were governed by their own will and internal moral codes rather than formal law.

The expansion of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) triggered a generalization of consciousness that reclassified this “unregulated” space as a dangerous “gap”. By framing the inclusion of irregular fighters as a “humanitarian shift,” the legal cartel moved the issue to the sacred center of global order. This created a binary symbolic classification: the “pure” universalism of formal law versus the “impure” and unpredictable nature of the unregulated free-fighter.

Alliance Theory and the Coordination of State Interests

David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory suggests that moralized language is a tool for synchronization. The expansion of law to include free-fighters served as a focal point for an alliance of states and international institutions. While often presented as a humanitarian triumph over state power, this shift actually synchronized state interests by bringing all participants of conflict under a single, manageable legal umbrella.

In the “Everything is Bullshit” framework, the narrative that this expansion is a “victory for humanity” is an adaptive deception. The true driver is the strategic interest of the state-centric system in eliminating “alternative codes” of conduct that exist outside its control. Juridification ensures that the only “pure” way to fight is the way defined by the state and its interlinked legal interests.

Expertise and the Juridification of the Free-Fighter

Stephen Turner’s analysis of expertise explains how a specialized class creates “liberal property” to bypass democratic or organic legitimacy. Amanda Alexander argues that the expansion of law required the replacement of organic “moral codes” with a “renewed and extended range of formal legal criteria”.

International lawyers act as the “priests” of this system, creating an authoritative closure of the field. They use their specialized knowledge to define the exact criteria for legal combatant status, effectively “capturing” the free-fighter within a state-synonymous language. This expertise creates a silence around alternative ways of understanding freedom and struggle, ensuring that only the “particular language” of the legal cartel is recognized as legitimate.

The Ritual of the “Victory” over Irregularity

Applying Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of the “ritual of purification,” the extension of law into the realm of the “free-fighter” functions as a liminal experience. Case studies like the Targeted Killings Case act as rituals that demonstrate a “victory over those who rise up against the law and the state”.

These legal proceedings bracket the messy, profane political origins of irregular warfare to create a simplified drama of “law vs. lawlessness”. By performing these rituals, the legal system re-anchors the sacred center of the state, demonstrating that “true freedom” can only exist within the boundaries of formal legal criteria. The “ritual renewal” of IHL in these gaps ensures that the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence is reaffirmed through the very language intended to regulate it.

ChatGPT says:

1. Alliance Theory. Law expands to absorb threats to state monopoly

Alexander’s core claim is that the expansion of international humanitarian law did not weaken the state. It strengthened it.

At The Hague and Geneva, elites deliberately left “free-fighters” outside the law. These figures were admired, even romanticized, but precisely because they existed outside state authority. Heroism, patriotism, and autonomous violence were treated as morally real but legally ungovernable.

Alliance Theory predicts this arrangement. Early modern states needed a clean boundary:

• inside the law = disciplined, bureaucratic, state violence
• outside the law = free, heroic, but illegitimate violence

That boundary preserved the state’s monopoly.

The problem came later. Decolonization, guerrilla war, terrorism, and transnational conflict produced armed actors who were too powerful to ignore but too illegible to assimilate. Leaving them outside the law became destabilizing.

So elites did not concede moral legitimacy to free-fighters. They juridified them.

International law expanded not to liberate violence from the state, but to drag all violence back under state-like criteria. Organization. Command. Distinction. Deployment. Participation in hostilities.

The alliance solution was universalization. Everyone is governed by law. No one is free.

2. Alexander’s sacralization model. From heroic outside to polluted gap

This paper traces a full sacralization arc, but with a twist.

Profane baseline

Irregular fighters exist outside law. They are morally ambiguous but narratively romantic. Law is openly limited.

Normative anxiety

Wars of liberation, people’s war, and terrorism destabilize the system. Extra-legal violence proliferates. The “gap” becomes frightening.

Pollution of the center

Zones outside law are reframed as intolerable. Guantánamo. Unlawful combatants. Black holes. The existence of non-law becomes a moral threat to the legal order itself.

Generalization

The language shifts from technical gaps to universal claims. There must be no legal voids. Law must apply everywhere, to everyone, always.

Ritual of purification

Courts intervene. Treaties are reinterpreted. Doctrines multiply. “No black holes” becomes a sacred mantra. The Israeli Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court act as priests of re-incorporation.

Symbolic classification

Free-fighters lose their romantic status. They are recoded as civilians taking direct part in hostilities. Still killable, but now legally so.

Alexander’s devastating insight is that sacralization here protects law, not people. The sacred object is not the civilian or the fighter. It is the universality of legal authority.

3. Pinsof. Why juridification feels moral but functions as control

Pinsof’s logic explains why this legal expansion is so persuasive.

Saying “there must be no gaps in the law” signals:

• moral seriousness
• modernity
• opposition to barbarism

Saying “some violence exists outside law” signals danger, irresponsibility, or sympathy for terror.

So elites adopt universalist legal language even when it produces incoherence. Civilian. Combatant. Direct participation. Deployment. These categories stretch until they blur, but the signaling payoff remains high.

Crucially, juridification allows elites to reject both extremes:

They can deny that free-fighters are heroes.
They can deny that the state acts lawlessly.

Everything is absorbed into law, which is presented as neutral even as it authorizes killing.

This is classic “everything is bullshit” territory. Not because actors are lying, but because the discourse is optimized for coalition safety, not conceptual clarity.

4. Turner. Expertise completes the enclosure

Turner’s expertise thesis explains how this transformation occurred without democratic contestation.

The expansion of law happens through:

• diplomatic conferences
• specialist courts
• expert committees
• interpretive doctrines

Ordinary moral judgment is displaced. The question is no longer whether violence is just, liberatory, or oppressive. The question is whether criteria are met.

Once violence is juridified, only experts can adjudicate it. The free-fighter loses not only freedom, but voice. Even revolutionary violence must now be translated into expert categories to be recognized at all.

Turner would say this is not the triumph of law over violence. It is the triumph of professional authority over political judgment.

How the four tools lock together

Alliance Theory explains why free-fighters had to be absorbed.
Sacralization explains how gaps became intolerable.
Pinsof explains why universal law feels morally irresistible.
Turner explains why this happened without popular consent.

The central takeaway

Alexander’s paper shows that the expansion of international humanitarian law is not a humanitarian victory.

It is the final domestication of freedom.

The free-fighter once represented a space where violence could challenge the state on moral grounds. Juridification did not humanize that violence. It neutralized it.

Law did not fill the gaps to protect people.
It filled them to ensure that nothing exists outside its authority.

The 2021 article The Ethics of Violence by Amanda Alexander deconstructs the contemporary humanitarian paradigm as a contingent “regime of truth” that manages rather than eliminates violence. By applying your four favorite tools, we can decode how this regime maintains its sacred status while enabling specific forms of force.

The Shift from Profane Regulation to the Sacred Humanitarian Paradigm

Jeffrey Alexander’s model explains that a crisis of meaning occurs when a subject moves from the profane level of mundane interests to the sacred level of universal values. Amanda Alexander argues that contemporary international law has undergone a generalization of consciousness, where war is no longer framed as a profane struggle between states but as a sacred “humanitarian” endeavor.

This paradigm creates a symbolic classification that sorts violence into a binary: “pure” humanitarian force, which seeks to protect and minimize suffering, versus “impure” and senseless violence. By framing the current legal regime as the only ethical way to wage war, proponents move it to the “sacred center” of global order. This makes any critique of the system feel like a normative violation, as it appears to attack the very concept of humanity itself.

Alliance Theory and the Strategic Moral Pretext

David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory suggests that moral language acts as a signal for elite coordination. In this context, the “humanitarian” label serves as a focal point that allows an alliance of Western states, NGOs, and international lawyers to synchronize their actions.

The framework reveals that the “outrage” over human rights violations or civilian suffering is a tool for coordination. It provides the necessary pretext for an alliance to intervene or exercise force while maintaining its “pure” reputation. In the “everything is bullshit” framework, the claim that this regime is an objective arc of moral progress is an adaptive deception. This narrative masks the concrete strategic interest of the alliance in “enabling and concealing particular forms of violence” that serve their dominant position.

Expertise as the Foundation of Ethical Closure

Stephen Turner’s analysis of expertise explains how a specialized class creates “liberal property” to establish an authoritative closure of the political field. Amanda Alexander notes that the current regime is a “paradigm of ethical violence” constructed by a specific class of experts.

These lawyers and academics act as the “priests” of the humanitarian order. They use their specialized knowledge to define what constitutes “proportionality” or “military necessity”. By asserting that only those with proper credentials can navigate the “problems and snares of the humanitarian paradigm,” they remove the ethics of violence from the profane public sphere and place it in a bracketed space of expert consensus. This ensures that the state’s exercise of violence remains “encompassing” and “hard to escape” from expert-led humanitarian arguments.

The Ritual of the “Humane” War

Applying Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of the “ritual of purification,” modern military campaigns often function as liminal experiences. These actions are framed as rituals designed to restore a “sacred center” of human rights and stability.

The legal and ethical justifications for these wars bracket the messy, profane history of geopolitical interests to create a simplified drama of “humane” intervention. By performing these rituals, the elite alliance demonstrates its commitment to sacred values, even when the actual outcome involves significant destruction. The “ritual renewal” of the humanitarian system allows it to survive its own failures, as each new crisis is met with a call to further refine and “purify” the paradigm rather than questioning its underlying “bullshit” foundations.

ChatGPT says: Alexander is mapping the emergence of a dominant elite moral alliance around what she calls the “humanitarian paradigm.” This alliance spans international lawyers, NGOs, diplomats, academics, journalists, courts, and liberal states. Its core achievement is not peace, but control over the classification of violence.

The key alliance move is monopoly over legitimacy. Violence is not eliminated. It is redistributed. Certain actors are authorized to kill under humanitarian justifications, while others are delegitimized as criminal, genocidal, or terrorist. The alliance defines who counts as political, who counts as innocent, and who counts as killable.

Crucially, Alexander shows that this alliance is historically contingent and negotiated. The Geneva Conventions, genocide law, civilian protection, and humanitarian intervention were not moral discoveries. They were political bargains shaped by great powers, colonial interests, Soviet strategy, and reputational pressure inside elite diplomatic forums.

Once stabilized, the alliance becomes self-reinforcing. To challenge it is to risk expulsion from the moral center. That is why even critics remain trapped inside humanitarian language. They cannot exit without losing standing.

Alexander’s sacralization model applied reflexively

Alexander’s paper is itself about sacralization, even if she does not frame it explicitly that way.

The shift from profane to sacred occurs when war moves from being about power and conquest to being about innocence, humanity, and universal crime. War is no longer “just politics.” It becomes a moral drama.

Pollution of the center happens when certain violences are framed as existential threats to humanity itself. Genocide becomes the archetypal crime. Terrorism and crimes against humanity follow. These are not just wrong acts. They are contaminations of the moral order.

Generalization of consciousness is visible in how legal categories crowd out political explanation. Conflicts are redescribed in terms of victims, monsters, and rescue imperatives. Structural causes and agency are bracketed.

Rituals of purification appear through tribunals, interventions, humanitarian reporting, anniversary commemorations, and legal reviews. These rituals reaffirm the moral center while allowing controlled violence to continue.

Symbolic classification is relentless. Innocent civilian versus political actor. Humanitarian intervener versus criminal aggressor. Law versus barbarism. Alexander shows that these binaries are not descriptive. They are tools of governance.

Her most important contribution is showing how hard it is to escape once sacralization is complete.

Pinsof’s signaling logic and “Everything Is Bullshit”

Alexander’s argument fits Pinsof almost perfectly, even though she comes from a very different intellectual tradition.

Humanitarian law and ethics function as elite signaling systems. To speak the language of innocence, protection, and universal crime is to signal moral fitness. To question it is to signal danger.

The obsession with protecting innocents is not just moral. It is reputational. Innocence is the highest-status victim category. Being able to claim it unlocks sympathy, funding, intervention, and legitimacy. This incentivizes depoliticization of victims and theatrical moral framing.

Human shields, genocide claims, and humanitarian emergencies are not just strategic tools on the battlefield. They are signaling devices in global moral markets.

Alexander shows that even critical scholars continue to signal allegiance by reaffirming civilian protection, despite demonstrating that the concept is incoherent. That is Pinsof’s core point. Truth loses to coalition safety.

Everything is bullshit not because actors are lying, but because accuracy is subordinate to alliance maintenance.

Turner’s expertise and authority thesis

Alexander’s paper is devastating for the sociology of expertise, even if quietly so.

International humanitarian law presents itself as technical, neutral, and expert-driven. Alexander shows instead that expertise is socially produced, politically constrained, and insulated from falsification.

Legal categories like genocide, civilian, and proportionality persist not because they work, but because they authorize institutions and sustain expert authority. Failures do not discredit the system. They justify more refinement, more law, more experts.

Turner’s insight explains why humanitarian expertise expands even as violence persists. Expertise is not solving a problem. It is governing a domain.

Alexander’s most unsettling claim is that even critics cannot escape this authority structure. They diagnose the trap, but still reproduce it. Expertise critiques itself without surrendering power.

Alexander is not arguing that humanitarian law is hypocritical. She is arguing something more disturbing.

She shows that the contemporary regime of ethical violence is a closed moral system that reallocates violence, sanctifies authority, depoliticizes victims, and stabilizes elite power. It is contingent, dangerous, and nearly impossible to exit.

That is why the paper feels bleak. It is not offering reform. It is exposing a moral order that sustains itself by defining what moral speech is allowed.