Amanda Alexander (b. 1976) is an Australian legal scholar whose work examines the historical construction of international humanitarian law, the shifting meaning of civilian status, and the cultural foundations of legal consciousness. She works across international humanitarian law, legal history, critical legal theory, and law and literature. Rejecting triumphalist accounts of legal progress, she treats international law as a contingent product of political conflict, institutional adaptation, technological change, and cultural imagination. She argues that the categories at the center of modern humanitarian law did not emerge from universal moral consensus. War, empire, bureaucracy, and competing visions of political order assembled them.
Alexander has held senior academic leadership at the Thomas More Law School at Australian Catholic University, including service as Interim Dean. Her position reflects the wider rise of interdisciplinary legal scholarship in the Australian academy, scholarship shaped by intellectual history, postcolonial studies, and critiques of liberal legal universalism. She treats legal categories as historical artifacts shaped by narrative, institutions, and changing assumptions about violence and humanity.
Her best-known work concerns the historical emergence of the civilian as a protected legal category. In articles and longer historical studies she argues that the line between civilian and combatant held neither stability nor self-evidence across history. The category of the civilian hardened during the industrial wars of the twentieth century. Technological advance, aerial bombardment, economic mobilization, and ideological warfare blurred earlier lines between military and non-military populations. Modern states came to treat whole societies as elements of war-making capacity, and that move unsettled the classical legal assumptions inherited from earlier European models of interstate conflict.
This orientation appears in her 2015 article “A Short History of International Humanitarian Law,” published in the European Journal of International Law. There she challenges the habit of portraying humanitarian law as the culmination of a timeless moral tradition running from antiquity to Geneva. The term “international humanitarian law” emerged recently, she argues, largely during the 1970s, through institutional struggles among the International Committee of the Red Cross, legal academics, postwar international organizations, and competing geopolitical blocs. By stressing discontinuity and contingency she aligns herself with critical schools of legal historiography skeptical of narratives of inevitable humanitarian progress.
Her work on the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions extends the argument. The modern legal definition of civilians emerged from political compromise, not moral consensus. Alexander analyzes the disputes among Western powers, post-colonial states, and advocates of national liberation movements over the legal status of guerrilla fighters and irregular warfare. The protocols, in her account, formed an unstable settlement among actors trying to fit nineteenth-century categories to the realities of decolonization and revolutionary conflict. Legal doctrine here is the outcome of jurisdictional conflict among states, institutions, and rival models of political legitimacy.
The transformation of international law during the era of total war runs through her scholarship. She examines the intellectual crisis that international lawyers faced in the 1930s and 1940s as industrialized warfare dissolved older assumptions about limited conflict between professional armies. Mass conscription, strategic bombing, economic mobilization, and propaganda forced legal thinkers to confront a war that implicated whole populations. Humanitarian law, she suggests, adapted itself to the management of industrial populations mobilized for war, and so drew legal scholarship toward the administrative needs of the twentieth-century state. Her work meets broader traditions concerned with biopolitics, state administration, and the management of populations under modernity.
Her studies of aerial bombardment show her interdisciplinary range. Looking at World War I and its aftermath, she explores how literature, journalism, strategic theory, and public discourse normalized the expectation that future wars would target civilians. She does not separate military doctrine from culture. Narratives about technological inevitability and national survival reshaped the limits of legal permission long before treaties codified the change. Law and culture, in her treatment, make each other.
This attention to culture sets Alexander apart from more traditional doctrinal scholars. Legal historians, she argues, must move past treaties, court decisions, and diplomatic archives to grasp the formation of legal consciousness. Her method draws on science fiction, popular media, military memoirs, philosophical writing, and literary narrative as sources that reveal how societies imagine violence, humanity, and political order. Reading cultural archives alongside legal texts, she shows how the imaginative conditions for legal change often arrive before institutional codification. The approach places her within a wider movement that joins cultural study, intellectual history, and legal analysis.
Her engagement with speculative literature reflects a deeper concern with the limits of the liberal humanitarian imagination. Fictional narratives, she has shown, create alternative conceptions of humanity, sovereignty, and conflict that expose the contingency of modern legal assumptions. This interest in narrative form and legal imagination connects her to developments in critical international legal studies, where scholars examine the symbolic and aesthetic foundations of legal order rather than doctrine and procedure alone.
Her academic formation combined legal training with intellectual history and jurisprudence. She earned a BA(Hons)/LLB from the University of New South Wales, then took a Master of Laws in Legal Theory and History at University College London through a Commonwealth Scholarship. She completed a PhD at the Australian National University on the historical construction of civilian identity within international law. The trajectory helps explain the synthesis in her work among legal analysis, historical inquiry, and theoretical reflection.
She has also helped shape critical legal scholarship in Australia. Alexander served as editor and secretary of the Australian Feminist Law Journal and joined scholarly networks devoted to the history and theory of international law. These roles set her within academic movements that sought to widen legal scholarship past technical doctrine toward historically and culturally grounded critique.
Her scholarship marks a broader shift within international legal studies over recent decades. Earlier humanitarian lawyers often framed international law through the language of universal morality, postwar institutional consensus, and progressive global order. Alexander belongs to a cohort shaped by critical legal studies, postcolonial historiography, and skepticism toward liberal teleology. In this setting humanitarian law looks less like the natural expression of ethical progress and more like a contingent vocabulary shaped by industrial warfare, decolonization, bureaucratic administration, and competing political projects.
Her work stops short of reducing law to a disguise for power. She does not dismiss humanitarian law as fraudulent or empty. She asks instead how legal systems become thinkable through narrative, historical crisis, institutional pressure, and cultural change. Her scholarship sits between doctrinal legalism and total relativism. The result combines archival rigor, theoretical depth, and cultural analysis, and it marks her as an important figure within contemporary critical approaches to international humanitarian law.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974), in The Denial of Death, holds that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot live with the knowledge. Every culture hands him a hero system, a scheme that lets him earn the feeling that he counts beyond his body and outlasts it. Heroism answers the terror of death. Otto Rank (1884-1939), whom Becker follows, names a second terror beneath the first, the terror of life, the dread of standing alone, separate, free, with no large thing to merge into. A man builds against one terror and falls toward the other. The hero system holds him in the middle.
Two terrors govern the field Amanda Alexander works in, and they sit on opposite sides of one wall.
The first belongs to the humanitarian lawyer who tells the story of progress. He looks at the bombed cities and the camps and the mobilized millions of the twentieth century, and he needs the killing to mean something other than the last word on man. So he builds a hero. The civilian becomes a sacred category that humanity discovered. The Geneva Conventions become conscience written down. Law bends toward mercy across the centuries, antiquity to Nuremberg to the Additional Protocols, a rising line. The lawyer who serves that line serves a thing that will outlast him. He fears that man kills without limit and that civilization runs thin over the killing. His hero answers the fear by calling the thin layer the ground.
Alexander carries the opposite dread. She fears the dupe’s fate, the fear of living inside a comforting story and mistaking it for the world, of taking a settlement that power assembled and calling it a moral order the species earned. Her hero is the historian who sees through the story. She earns her standing by refusing the consolation the first man cannot live without.
This is why the two cannot hear each other. The first man’s floor is the second’s abyss. Tell Alexander the progress story and she hears a fairy tale. Tell the progress lawyer that the civilian hardened into a category during the industrial wars and took its modern shape from a political compromise in 1977, that the term surfaced in the 1970s through fights among the Red Cross, the academy, and rival blocs, and he hears the floor give way. Each man’s comfort is the other’s terror. They argue about history. They fight about which terror they can bear.
Her hero runs on a subtraction story. Strip the teleology, strip the talk of universal morality, strip the myth of a tradition running unbroken from the ancients to Geneva, and what remains is the thing underneath: contingency, conflict, bureaucratic adaptation, the imaginative work culture does before treaties catch up. She offers the cleared ground as reality with the superstition removed. The progress story was the bias. Take it away and the history stands plain.
Becker stops her here. The cleared ground is not a clearing. It is another hero system. Disenchantment consoles too. The man who sees through every myth has found his own way to count, and his way is lucidity. He is never the fool. He stands outside the story watching the believers, and that standing-outside is his immortality, his proof that he met the world without flinching. Alexander’s subtraction does not deliver her to bare reality. It delivers her to the place of the one who is not deceived, and that place is a hero’s place like any other. The mutation reads to her as a clearing.
Her sacred values come into focus against the rival. She holds contingency holy. The progress lawyer holds permanence holy. She prizes the courage to historicize the sacred, to show that men made the civilian. He prizes the courage to defend the sacred, to treat the civilian as found, a thing the species uncovered, because a thing men made they can unmake. She reads science fiction and military memoirs and strategic theory beside the treaties, and she shows that culture imagined civilian death long before the law allowed it. He reads the treaties and the case law and the diplomatic record, and he builds the doctrine that keeps the imagining in check. She wants the truth about how law becomes thinkable. He wants the law to keep working as a brake. Both men believe they serve the civilian. She serves him by telling the truth about his origins. He serves him by guarding the story that protects him.
How much of this does she see? Her work shows one kind of awareness and lacks another. She knows the abyss her method opens, and she steps back from it. She declines to call humanitarian law a fraud or a mask for power. She holds a place between doctrine and pure relativism, which means she feels the danger of the cleared ground and refuses to live at the bottom of it. That is honest. What she does not turn on herself is the method she turns on everyone else. She historicizes the believer’s hero and leaves her own alone. The critical historian dissolves every hero system but the one she stands in, the one that scores her a point each time she shows a sacred thing was assembled. Her ledger runs on truth against comfort. It never asks what her own truth comforts.
Three coordinates fall out of this. The shape of her hero is the disenchanter, the one who is not fooled, who earns the right to count by showing the construction behind the doctrine. The rival she fights without naming is the progress lawyer, the keeper of the rising line, and she fights him on every page that shows the line got drawn late and got drawn by interests. The cost her ledger cannot price is the one Becker puts first. The story she dissolves might be doing work. The belief that the civilian is sacred and found, false as it reads to her, might stay a soldier’s hand or a minister’s order in the hour when the contingent version hands him a permission slip. She scores truth. She does not enter the body on the other side of the truth, because her hero system keeps no column for it. A man who needs the story to hold the killing back pays for her clarity, and the bill never reaches her desk.
Becker does not ask her to lie. He asks her to see that the choice of truth over comfort builds a hero like any other, and that the hero, any hero, throws a shadow he prefers not to count. Her work holds because she comes within a step of seeing it. She walks up to her own myth, the myth of the man with no myth, and turns back one step short.
Stephen Turner’s frame asks one question of any belief: does its hold come from its truth or from its convenience to the group that carries it. The beliefs need not be false. A convenient belief can be correct. What marks it is that you can explain its persistence by what it does for the believer, the status it confers, the work it justifies, the rivals it disqualifies, without reference to whether it is true. The test is insulation. A convenient belief tends to resist disconfirmation, because giving it up would cost the holder something he is not prepared to pay.
Alexander aims the tool at the humanitarian law profession, and on that target it works. The guild believes its categories descend from a timeless moral tradition running from antiquity to Geneva. That belief is convenient. It makes the modern lawyer the heir to a noble lineage rather than a recent functionary. It dresses negotiated compromise as discovered moral truth. It insulates the work from the charge that it serves power, because a tradition that old must answer to conscience rather than to states. The belief in the natural, self-evident civilian does the same job. If the line between civilian and combatant is given by nature, the lawyer reads it off reality. If the line was assembled in committee in 1977, the lawyer made it, and could have made it otherwise, and made it to suit the actors at the table. Alexander shows the term itself is a product of the 1970s and the category a settlement among blocs. The lineage is invented. On her targets the frame lands, and the targets are not hard to hit. The guild’s beliefs are the kind any profession holds about its own dignity.
The reflexive turn asks what beliefs are convenient for the critical legal historian, and Alexander does not run the test on herself.
Start with contingency. The claim that legal categories are contingent products of power, conflict, and culture is the premise of her whole enterprise. It is also the belief that creates her job. If the categories were natural, the doctrinalist who reads them off the treaties would suffice, and the historian would have nothing to add. Contingency makes the demystifier indispensable. Notice the insulation. Any apparent continuity in the law can be re-described as a later projection backward, so evidence of stability never counts against the thesis. The belief cannot lose. That is the signature Turner teaches you to look for.
Take anti-teleology next. The refusal of progress narratives reads as hard-won sophistication, and it separates her from the naive liberal who thinks the law is getting kinder. Skepticism is the coin of the realm in critical legal studies and postcolonial historiography. Holding the pose pays in citations, in hiring, in the regard of the cohort she names as her own. The belief tracks her market.
Then the cultural archive. Her insistence that legal historians should read science fiction, memoirs, journalism, and literature expands her jurisdiction. It converts breadth into qualification and recasts the doctrinalist’s narrow training as a limitation rather than a discipline. The claim that law and culture make each other is close to unfalsifiable, since it licenses reading any text as evidence of the legal imagination. A belief that lets you treat everything as data is convenient for a scholar who wants the widest possible warrant.
Alexander investigates how law becomes thinkable. That restraint reads as scholarly maturity, and it might be. It is also the position that keeps her employable in both rooms. Full relativism would discredit her in the legal academy and saw off the branch she sits on, since a law that is only power has no history worth writing. Pious legalism would lose her the critical wing. The middle holds her standing on both sides at once. Turner would ask whether the calibration answers to the evidence or to the seating chart.
The jurisdictional frame asks what territory a claimant is trying to seize and from whom. It treats a field as contested ground, a set of tasks and categories that rival guilds fight to control. The prize is authority over a domain. The frame fits Alexander twice. Her subject is a jurisdictional war, and she is a combatant in one.
Her subject first. The civilian is not a fact she reports. It is a category that states, the ICRC, legal academics, and liberation movements fought to control, and the right to define it carried the right to license killing. To hold the pen on the civilian/combatant line is to decide who may be bombed and who may not, which is the highest authority a law can grant. Across the industrial wars the older claimants, the European states and their professional armies, lost their monopoly on that line. New claimants pressed in. The 1977 Protocols are the treaty record of that contest. Decolonization seated post-colonial states and national liberation movements at the table, and they demanded a law that recognized the guerrilla, the partisan, the fighter who hides among the population. The Western powers wanted a line that kept their bombing lawful and the irregular fighter outside protection. The Protocols are the truce that resulted, a settlement none of the claimants fully won, which is why Alexander reads them as unstable. She is describing a jurisdictional war over a single category, fought among guilds with incompatible interests, ended by a compromise that satisfied no one. That account maps onto the series without translation, because it is the series, set in Geneva.
Now place her inside it. Alexander is a claimant too, and the territory she contests sits inside the legal academy. The doctrinalist controls the law by reading treaties, cases, and the diplomatic record. That is his jurisdiction, and his training is the title to it. Alexander says you cannot understand the law from those sources, that you must read the history, the institutions, and the culture that made the categories thinkable before any treaty codified them. The claim transfers authority. It moves the law out of the doctrinalist’s hands and into the historian’s, because if the imaginative conditions precede codification, the cultural historian gets there first and the lawyer arrives late to a category already formed. Her method is a bid to govern the field.
The cultural archive is her weapon in that bid. When she rules science fiction, memoirs, journalism, and literature admissible as legal evidence, she widens the boundary of what counts as legal scholarship, and every widening of the boundary enlarges the territory she commands and shrinks the value of the doctrinalist’s narrow warrant. The lawyer trained only in treaties now looks under-equipped for his own subject. The law and literature posture, the feminist law journal she edited, the postcolonial framing she adopts, all push the same boundary outward. Abbott would call this a claim over a task domain. Alexander makes the claim by redefining the domain so that her training fits it and her rival’s does not.
Her institutional record reads as the campaign behind the claim. A deanship, even an interim one, is control of hiring, curriculum, and the standards that certify the next generation. An editorship is control of what enters the record as scholarship. These are the footholds a claimant secures to hold ground after the argument is made, the difference between winning a debate and holding the territory. The critical wing of the legal academy has spent decades trying to wrest the narration of the law’s history from the profession’s own house chroniclers, the official ICRC histories and the textbook lineages, and Alexander is an officer in that campaign. Her anti-teleology is a jurisdictional claim about who gets to tell the story, the critical historian or the guild’s in-house mythographers.
Alexander fights the same kind of war she anatomizes, a contest among rival guilds over who controls a category and the authority that rides on it. The civilian was the prize in Geneva. The law itself, who may narrate it and from which archive, is the prize in her own work. And like the settlement she studies, her bid is unsettled. The doctrinalists still hold the courtrooms, the treaty drafting, the bar. She holds the seminar, the journal, the dean’s office of one law school. The cultural turn has not captured the field. So she narrates an old jurisdictional truce from inside a newer jurisdictional war that has not ended and that she has not won.
Read the 1977 Protocols as an alliance structure. Western powers, post-colonial states, and national liberation movements sit at the table, and the contested moral standard is the line between civilian and combatant, which decides whose violence the law blesses. The Western bloc wants its aerial bombing lawful and the guerrilla left outside protection. That is the perpetrator bias at work, the rationalizing of an ally’s harms as collateral, regrettable, forced by necessity, where the ally is the uniformed state army. The post-colonial bloc wants the irregular fighter shielded and the colonial order arraigned. That is the victim bias, the embellishing of the liberation fighter’s grievance and the long harm of empire. Each side attributes the other’s killing to malevolence and its own to need, which is the attributional bias carried into law. The civilian that emerges is the patchwork settlement of incompatible coalition interests, not the discovery of a moral truth about human vulnerability.
Alexander historicizes the contingency. She locates it in the particular crisis of decolonization meeting industrial war. Pinsof naturalizes it. He claims the contingency she finds in 1977 is the standing condition of every legal category in every society, because humans build categories to serve alliances and have done so since the species shared the trait with chimpanzees and dolphins. So the frame tells her that the assembled, negotiated, interest-bound character of the civilian is not a feature of the modern total-war moment but the permanent logic of how law forms. Where she might read the contingency as a historical finding, Pinsof reads it as a law of the animal. This removes her implicit contrast between an assembled modern category and some earlier, cleaner age of legal reasoning. There was never a cleaner age.
Alliance Theory collapses the distance between mass politics and the politics of everyday life, office politics, academic politics, the cliques and friendships and rival stories of any institution including the legal academy.
Locate her allies. Critical legal studies, postcolonial legal history, law and literature, and the feminist legal scholarship she served as editor and secretary of the Australian Feminist Law Journal. Locate her rivals. The doctrinalists who read the law off treaties and cases, the liberal humanitarian progressives who narrate the law as moral advance, and the in-house chroniclers of the ICRC who keep the guild’s origin story. Now her beliefs sort as propagandistic tactics for that coalition. Her contingency thesis and her refusal of progress narratives are the patchwork narrative that rallies her allies and attacks the rival’s founding myth, the claim that humanitarian law descends from a timeless conscience. Pinsof would call the demystification an assault on a rival coalition’s legitimating story, which is what coalitions do to one another’s stories.
Similarity drew her toward scholars who share the method and the words, critique, contingency, power, the cultural archive. Transitivity placed her with the postcolonial framing against the Western liberal legal order, the enemy of my enemy logic that lets a scholar in Australia take the side of decolonization’s claimants against the guild that wrote the older law. Interdependence binds her to the coalition that supplies the citations, the editorial posts, the hiring, the deanship, the standing that a lone position cannot generate. Her attributional pattern is the self-serving bias turned outward onto allies and rivals. She attributes the humanitarian guild’s categories to bureaucracy, empire, and historical accident, the external and discrediting causes, while she attributes her own coalition’s reading to rigor, breadth, and historical sophistication, the internal and crediting causes. People excuse and elevate their allies and debit their rivals.
The doctrinalist defends the coherence of the law because the law and its guild are his allies. Alexander attacks that coherence because the guild is her rival. Pinsof’s wager is that neither reasons from disinterested truth, that both run the same biases toward opposite targets. The frame then predicts that Alexander cannot turn her contingency thesis on her own position, cannot read her own anti-teleology as itself a contingent product of her coalition’s interests, because doing so would disarm the coalition. A partisan does not historicize his own side’s convictions while the fight is on. He historicizes the other side’s.
A limit. Alliance Theory is a coalition’s belief, the evolutionary psychologists’ story about why everyone else’s stories are interested. A consistent application asks whom that story serves and which rivals it disqualifies, the moralists and the value theorists it casts as naive.
Alliance Theory says contingency is permanent rather than modern, and it converts her from the historian who exposes the guild’s interested categories into a partisan whose own anti-teleology is an interested category, advanced for a coalition, defended with the same biases she diagnoses in others.
‘Revolutionary War and the Development of International Humanitarian Law’ (2023)
Alexander tells a story most lawyers prefer not to tell. The conventional account holds that international humanitarian law slowly extended protection to civilians as humanity advanced. Alexander demolishes that account. She shows the protections we now treat as timeless and customary emerged from a fight, and the winners were Third World states and national liberation movements, not the Western jurists who later claimed the doctrine as their own.
The ICRC and many commentators claimed there were longstanding principles protecting civilians and only a regrettable gap in the law on guerrilla warfare. Alexander calls this a misrepresentation. The truth runs the other way. Before the 1970s the law on irregular warfare was clear and harsh. Combatants had to distinguish themselves, carry arms openly, follow responsible command. Citizens who fought outside these rules could be executed, and the rest of the population could face reprisals. What did not exist was protection for civilians against bombardment, starvation, scorched earth, or aerial attack. The 1949 Geneva Convention IV protected occupied populations from Nazi-style depredations but added nothing on aerial warfare or reprisals, and it conditioned even that protection on civilians staying passive. So the received history inverts the record. The settled law punished guerrillas and exposed civilians. The reformers had to build civilian protection almost from scratch.
Alexander claims that law follows imaginaries of war. The Hague and Geneva regimes rested on a picture of orderly soldiers in uniform and a subdued, demilitarized civilian population. Mao supplied a rival picture, the people’s war, where farmer and fighter are the same man and the army swims in the population. Vietnam made that picture vivid, and Palestinian movements adopted it by casting their struggle as a second Vietnam. Once Western opinion came to see these wars as just, the counterinsurgency tactics used against them, the strategic hamlets, the napalm, the bombing, lost legitimacy. As they lost legitimacy they began to look illegal. Alexander tracks how the antiwar critics moved from calling the tactics immoral to calling them unlawful, often without much basis in existing law. Telford Taylor, no friend of the war, admitted there was nothing in Nuremberg or the laws of war confirming that bombing civilians was illegal. The claim of illegality ran ahead of the law and then helped remake it.
Her account of the 1974 to 1977 Diplomatic Conference shows that the recognition of wars of national liberation as international armed conflicts passed because decolonized states now held the votes. Western delegations disliked the provision. They feared a distinction between just and unjust wars would wreck the apolitical structure they prized. They considered walking out. They did not, partly because they judged the practical effect small and partly, as Mantilla argues and Alexander repeats, because they did not want to appear racist or to share the pariah status of Israel and South Africa. So they abstained and restated their concerns about neutrality. The provision passed with one vote against. That is a story about coalition and vote-counting, not about the moral progress of mankind, and Alexander does not pretty it up.
The supporters of people’s war wanted guerrillas treated as prisoners of war without meeting the old conditions. North Vietnam went further and questioned the principle of distinction itself, asking whether a fighter who must operate at night to survive modern weapons should be required to wear a uniform. Aldrich, head of the US delegation, had sympathy for the point and later wrote that a rule forcing a guerrilla to distinguish himself at all times makes him an outlaw, like telling him to walk around with a target on his chest. His fix required combatants to distinguish themselves only during military engagement and deployment, and the word deployment meant nothing settled, which is why it passed. Alexander names the ambiguity for what it is, a deliberate vagueness that bought votes.
Additional Protocol I blurred the line between civilian and combatant, letting a man be peasant by day and fighter by night, while at the same time defining the civilian for the first time and granting civilians broad new protection. These two moves sit in tension. The law tried to honor the symbiosis of people and army that the revolutionary writers celebrated, and also to protect the civilian population that such symbiosis endangers. The result was a treaty many parties called a flawed compromise, and the paradox now lives inside customary law because the Protocol drifted into customary status over the following decades despite continued US and Israeli objection.
A few criticisms. The chapter leans on the revolutionary literature itself, Mao, Lin Piao, Giáp, Truong Chinh, and on the antiwar tribunals, Russell and Sartre, more than on the people who fought the wars from the other side, so the picture of the people’s war comes mostly from its champions. Alexander knows the romance is partly self-presentation, and she flags that guerrilla warfare gets depicted as heroic, but she could press harder on the gap between the revolutionary self-image and what these movements did to civilians who declined to support them. Her one open dissent from her sources, where she says the description of population resettlement as a technique of liberal empire overstates the liberal aspect, suggests she has more skeptical instincts than she always uses. I would have liked more of that skepticism turned on the revolutionary side.
Alexander traces the spectacle of Western international lawyers losing an argument and then absorbing the result into the canon as though they had written it. Hays Parks fought Article 51 as an unacceptable new restriction on air power aimed at Israel and the superpowers. He lost. The provision was acclaimed as a codification of customary law it plainly was not, and within a generation the whole Protocol was customary. The men who lost the vote, or their professional heirs, became the custodians of the doctrine. Alexander shows the seam before the cloth was woven over it.
‘The Ethics of Violence: Recent Literature on the Creation of the Contemporary Regime of Law and War‘ (2023)
Alexander saves her own move for the last third, and it lands: the laws of war never aimed to protect innocent civilians. They aimed to keep the state’s monopoly over violence and political action. Civilians earn protection by staying passive, not by being good. That reframe cuts through most of the confusion in the rest of the literature she surveys.
The synthesis is honest about its sources. Hirsch on the Soviets at Nuremberg, van Dijk and Mantilla on the Geneva negotiations, Moses and Meiches on the narrowing of genocide from Lemkin’s broad conception down to a ban on racial killing. Each shows the same thing from a different angle: the categories we treat as universal moral facts came out of horse-trading among states protecting their colonial and sovereign interests. Alexander threads these together well. The point about genocide getting restricted to stable, “objective” groups, with no one explaining why those groups count as objective, is the kind of detail that does the work.
Her best contribution is the trap. She catches the critics, Levy, Gordon and Perugini, even Moses, returning again and again to innocence as the standard against which they measure the system, after they have spent whole books showing innocence is a constructed category. They demolish the idea and then keep using it to grade the law. That loop is the most useful thing in the essay, and she names it on herself too, which keeps her honest.
Now the weak points.
The piece leans on one reading and never tests it hard. The state-monopoly thesis explains a great deal, but Alexander treats it as the buried truth the humanitarians cannot face rather than as one account among several. She does not argue against the humanitarian reading on its own ground. She reframes it from underneath. That is a rhetorical advantage, not a refutation, and a careful reader will notice she has not closed the door she wants closed.
The First World War soldier-poet point is the live wire. She raises the possibility that the politically active civilian is a legitimate target, the way the soldiers blamed the home-front civilians who cheered the slaughter, then she pulls back. She calls the position unspeakable in this kind of literature and leaves it there. That retreat is candid, but it leaves her own normative stance unstated. She gestures at a system where states have less power and active civilians have more scope, then admits she cannot say what that freedom looks like. The essay ends in a question because she will not pay the price her own logic demands.
There is also a slippage. The literature she reviews keeps using the word “political” as both description and verdict. To say a category is political means it was made by interested actors, fine. But the move from “this was politically constructed” to “this is therefore suspect” smuggles in the assumption that a constructed thing is less binding. Almost everything in law is constructed. The construction does not by itself indict the result. Alexander mostly avoids this trap, but the authors she summarizes fall into it, and her summary sometimes carries their tone along.
Moyn comes out as the one writer who pays full freight. He drops humanitarianism, questions the focus on the innocent, and says the evil is war itself, not the manner of waging it. Alexander admires this and cannot follow it. That tension is the real subject of the piece, more than genocide or human shields. The honest title might be: why I cannot stop using a concept I no longer believe in.
The Set
Amanda Alexander works inside the critical international law world, and that world has a shape, a hierarchy, and a set of loyalties as clear as any guild.
Her people are the scholars who refuse the happy story about international law. The happy story says humanitarian law grew from conscience, that the world looked at war and slowly built rules to spare the innocent, that the International Committee of the Red Cross carried the torch and states followed. Alexander rejects that account. She treats humanitarian law as a young and contingent field, assembled by particular men at particular conferences out of war, empire, bureaucracy, and competing visions of order. She argues the law is not an ahistorical code managed by states and promoted by the Red Cross, but a recent and contingent field shaped by many actors. The civilian, the category at the center of her doctoral work, did not fall from heaven. Someone made it.
The patron saint of her set is Martti Koskenniemi (b. 1953), the Finnish scholar whose From Apology to Utopia showed that legal argument swings between sovereignty and community and never settles. After him come Anne Orford in Melbourne, David Kennedy and his New Approaches network out of Harvard, and the Third World Approaches scholars who read international law as the long afterlife of colonial domination. Alexander sits in the antipodean wing of this network. She trained at UNSW and ANU, took a master’s at University College London on a Commonwealth Scholarship, and her early career touched the Laureate Program in International Law that Orford built. The European Journal of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and the Melbourne Journal of International Law are her home pages. The ANZSIL conference is her local circuit.
What this set values is the unmasking. The admired move is to take a category everyone treats as natural and show its seams. You find the conference where the language got fixed. You find the political fight hidden under the technical compromise. Alexander does this with the 1977 Geneva Protocol I, and she does it with care. She shows the delegates fought over some changes, equivocated over others, and accepted still others without even seeing them as change. Her sharper claim is that the most successful legal changes followed shifts in language and thought that had already happened outside the law. The hero in this world is the demystifier, the one who declines comfort and reads the law as rhetoric, as literature, as the residue of power. Alexander’s interest in narrative and aesthetic form puts her close to the law and humanities turn, the line that runs through Robert Cover (1943-1986) and the idea that legal worlds are imagined before they are enforced.
The status games follow from this. Lineage counts. Who supervised you, whose program you passed through, whether Koskenniemi or Orford cites you. There is a low caste and a high caste. The black-letter doctrinal lawyer who recites treaty text and tribunal holdings ranks low, seen as a technician who has not noticed the water he swims in. The theory-inflected critic ranks high. And there is a long border war with the historians, who accuse the legal scholars of anachronism, of dragging present concerns into the past. Orford embraces the anachronism on purpose. The historians call it sloppy. That fight is a contest over who owns the past, and Alexander’s archival care reads partly as an answer to it, a way to claim historical rigor while keeping the critical payoff.
Her institutional home adds a wrinkle her secular peers do not carry. She rose to interim Dean at the Thomas More Law School at Australian Catholic University, a faculty named for Thomas More (1478-1535). A critical international lawyer running a Catholic law school is a placement worth noticing. It gives her a base outside the sandstone secular schools and a different set of pressures and patrons than a Melbourne or a Sydney post.
The normative claim under all of it is deflationary. If the civilian was built, then the moral authority of the regime is thinner than its champions claim, and the law can be remade. The politics that rides along is left and anti-imperial: suspicion of Western humanitarian intervention, attention to the colonized and the irregular fighter, sympathy for the postcolonial states that pushed Protocol I.
Now the essentialist claims, where the set contradicts itself. Officially it denies essences. Nothing is natural, every category is made, the civilian has no timeless core. That is the anti-essentialist creed. But the creed is selective. They deconstruct sovereignty, neutral humanity, and the civilizing mission, the things they distrust. They leave standing power, empire, and the authentic voice of the global South, the things they need. Power gets treated as real and everywhere. Domination gets treated as a structure that persists across centuries. So the essentialism hides in the choice of what to take apart and what to leave whole. Alexander’s craft is to dissolve the categories of the strong while keeping firm the moral weight of the weak.
The world she lives in is small, learned, and proud of its skepticism. It rewards the elegant genealogy and punishes the naive believer. Alexander has earned her standing in it by writing the history of a category most lawyers never thought to question.
The Voice
Amanda Alexander writes a clean, declarative academic prose that owes more to narrative history than to doctrinal legal scholarship. The voice is calm, patient, and quietly skeptical. She does not raise her own volume. She lets the strangeness of her material do the work.
The diction is plain. She favors short Anglo-Saxon verbs over Latinate legal jargon. Delegates “forget” the law, they “erase” it, they “fill in” a gap with “what was assumed to be obvious.” When she reaches for a stronger word, she has earned it: a debate turns “virulent,” provisions become “paradoxical,” a treaty section reads as a document that the military states “shunned” before it “survived as a resource.” The technical vocabulary of her field, ius in bello, ius ad bellum, levée en masse, customary law, sits inside ordinary sentences without swelling them. She translates the law into human terms. A combatant under the new rules “can be a peasant by day and a guerrilla by night.”
The rhythm runs long, then short. She builds a paragraph of qualified, subordinated clauses, then snaps it shut with a flat declarative. After pages on the wrangling over civilian status she writes that henceforth people “would be both vulnerable and valuable.” After the long account of the combatant compromise she lands on the bare claim that the article holds “one of the greatest paradoxes” of the Protocol. The short sentence carries the argument. The long one carries the evidence.
Her rhetoric works by accumulation and irony rather than assertion. She rarely says a thing is wrong. She shows the delegates saying one thing while the record says another, then steps back and lets the gap speak. “This was, of course, the intention of the laws,” she writes of rules the delegates pretended did not exist. That dry “of course” is her signature move. She quotes a delegate at length, then undercuts him in a sentence. She treats the conference as theater and reads the script for what the players could not say aloud.
The governing idea shapes the manner. She argues that the law changed because the available language changed first, that lawyers could only say what the wider culture had already made sayable. So her prose attends to speech, to “the discursive possibilities,” to “what lawyers could say about law.” She watches words move. This makes her a historian of sensibility more than a doctrinal analyst. Her authorities run to Fanon, Césaire, Sartre, and Koskenniemi alongside the treaty commentaries.
She keeps herself almost out of frame. The first person appears to mark argument, “I argue,” “I show,” “I have described elsewhere,” then withdraws. She does not editorialize about the morality of torture or bombing. She reports how the moral language got built and how it hardened into law. The restraint reads as confidence. She trusts the reader to feel the weight she declines to name.
The speaking manner, in lectures and conference papers, follows the same pattern: measured, exact, willing to sit with a paradox rather than resolve it fast. The work rejects triumphant stories of legal progress.