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.