Luke Ford

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a binary symbolic classification: the “pure” humanitarian vision that protects all participants versus the “impure,” outdated model that only recognized state soldiers.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.