The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power in the American Medical Association

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

High-status actors in the American Medical Association do not compete for authority by openly saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as protecting patient welfare, safeguarding public health, and upholding the integrity of the medical profession. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In the AMA, the dominant vocabulary is patient safety, evidence-based medicine, professional ethics, health equity, and access to care. These terms do not merely describe goals. They create a framework in which authority claims become inseparable from care itself. The organization does not merely represent physicians. It protects patients. Whoever controls the definition of that protection controls the most powerful legitimating language available.
The American Medical Association presents itself as a professional body dedicated to advancing the science and art of medicine and improving public health. In practice it is a structured arena of elite competition organized around specialty societies, state delegations, the House of Delegates, and a network of councils and committees that shape policy. Rival coalitions do not reject the AMA’s stated mission. They compete to define what patient welfare requires, who has the authority to interpret medical evidence, and which institutional priorities should follow. The structure channels this competition toward the House of Delegates and leadership positions that influence policy agendas, making resolutions and committee control the highest-stakes battlegrounds.
Three institutions concentrate this struggle more than any others. Clinical and ethical authority, the professional regulation and scope-of-practice system, and the public policy and advocacy platform are the AMA’s master domains. Whoever governs them governs standards of care, the boundaries of the profession, and the public voice of organized medicine. What looks like debate over guidelines, licensing rules, or health policy positions is, underneath, a contest over who defines what it means to practice medicine and what obligations that practice entails.
The clinical and ethical authority system is the first and most fundamental arena because it governs the terms on which every other competition is conducted. The traditionalist-clinical autonomy coalition, concentrated among practicing physicians and many specialty societies, uses the language of physician judgment, clinical expertise, and the doctor-patient relationship. Its claim is that medical decisions must remain in the hands of trained physicians exercising professional discretion. External interference, whether from government, insurers, or bureaucratic guidelines, is framed as a threat to patient care. By framing physician judgment as uniquely capable of protecting patients, this coalition claims authority over clinical decision-making. The policymaker who imposes standardized rules is not improving care. He undermines it.
Turner’s essentialist diagnosis applies directly. The traditionalist coalition presents clinical judgment as stable and transferable expertise grounded in training and experience. But medical knowledge is constantly evolving, unevenly distributed, and subject to disagreement. What counts as best practice is shaped by institutional incentives, research trends, and professional norms. The claim of stable expertise masks the variability and contestation within medicine itself.
The AI question has forced this tension into a new configuration. By March 2026, over eighty percent of physicians report using AI in their professional work, double the rate from 2023. The AMA’s response has been to officially rebrand AI as augmented intelligence. The vocabulary is a coalition technology. By framing AI as a tool that enhances rather than replaces human judgment, the AMA ensures that the physician remains the ultimate arbiter of clinical truth. The organization pushes simultaneously for clear liability frameworks, arguing that physicians cannot trust these tools if they bear responsibility for algorithmic errors they cannot audit. The moral claim is patient safety. The jurisdictional claim is that the physician must remain in the loop. Turner’s framework reads this as a social construction under pressure. As AI becomes more integrated into triage and diagnosis, the essential difference between a machine’s data processing and what the AMA calls the physician’s clinical judgment becomes harder to specify and easier to contest.
The evidence-standardization coalition, associated with academic medicine and policy-oriented physicians, uses the language of data, outcomes, and evidence-based guidelines. Its claim is that variability in physician practice produces harm and that standardized protocols improve outcomes. The traditionalist coalition frames this as bureaucratic overreach. The standardization coalition frames it as necessary discipline. Both claim to protect patients. A pragmatic-clinical bloc occupies the middle, arguing that guidelines must inform but not replace physician judgment.
The professional regulation and scope-of-practice system is the second master domain, the one that defines who is authorized to provide medical services. In 2026 this remains the top priority for eighty-nine percent of state medical societies. The physician-protection coalition uses the language of training, safety, and quality, arguing that only physicians possess the depth of knowledge required for complex medical decisions. Expanding the scope of practice for nurse practitioners, physician assistants, or pharmacists gets framed not as a turf war but as a risk to patients. By framing scope restrictions as safety measures, the coalition converts professional boundary maintenance into moral necessity. Critics who argue for expanded roles are not proposing efficiency. They endanger patients.
The AMA manages the access-expansion coalition’s challenge partly by supporting licensure modernization for internationally trained physicians. This increases the supply of doctors without conceding authority to non-physicians. The language of the physician-led team performs the same function, presenting hierarchical professional structure as an organizational necessity rather than a boundary protection strategy. The access-expansion coalition responds with the language of care deserts and workforce crisis, arguing that rigid professional boundaries limit availability precisely where patients need it most. Each side reconstructs the same evidence on healthcare outcomes to support its preferred map of who should be allowed to do what.
The 2026 Match Day results gave the AMA a specific set of data points for this fight. The Specialties Matching Service reported that eight subspecialties filled fewer than half of their offered positions, with geriatric medicine filling only thirty-seven percent. The AMA frames these figures as an existential threat to the most vulnerable patients and uses the language of generational neglect to argue that the current system is failing its moral obligation. By converting a recruitment and compensation problem into a public safety emergency, the organization recruits allies among senior advocacy groups and child welfare organizations. The underlying issue, that cognitive and time-intensive specialties pay significantly less than procedural ones, reflects internal AMA income distribution among its own members. The organization focuses instead on the 1997 Congressional cap on Medicare-supported graduate medical education, an external target that produces a clear, unified advocacy demand without requiring physicians to address their own specialty pay hierarchy.
The advocacy around the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act follows the same logic. Using AAMC projections of an eighty-six-thousand-physician shortage by 2036, the AMA frames the bill’s fourteen-thousand new residency slots as an eschatological necessity for the aging population. The rural residency emphasis secures bipartisan support by translating a professional workforce expansion into a language of forgotten communities and health professional shortage areas. The public service framing converts institutional resource acquisition into a selfless act of workforce development.
The 2026 Primary Care Scorecard amplifies this across the reimbursement landscape. The report shows that national spending on primary care remains below five percent of total health expenditures despite an incremental expansion in the training pipeline, and that twenty-seven percent of adults now lack a usual source of care. The AMA uses these figures to frame the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule as an irrational system built on procedural bias, paying more for a fifteen-minute surgery than a forty-five-minute geriatric consultation. The language of true medicine converts a technical debate over relative value units into a structural indictment. The push for site-neutral payments, which would eliminate the premium Medicare pays hospital-owned clinics over independent physician offices for identical services, gets framed not as a cut to hospitals but as a leveling of the playing field. The anti-consolidation narrative presents independent practice as an essential safeguard for the doctor-patient relationship, which lets the AMA position hospital acquisition of physician practices as a threat to patients rather than a competitive outcome driven partly by physician choices.
The public policy and advocacy platform is the third master domain. The advocacy coalition uses the language of public health, social determinants, and systemic reform, arguing that medicine has an obligation to address conditions that affect health including economic inequality and access to care. Following legal challenges to DEI programs in late 2025, the AMA’s equity coalition pivoted to a vocabulary of structural marginalization and targeted universalism, a legally sanitized framework designed to achieve similar reformist goals without relying on race-conscious language that courts have restricted. By framing health equity as a scientific necessity for a multiracial democracy, the AMA converts a social justice mission into a core professional standard, making it difficult to attack the policy without appearing to attack the science of medicine itself.
The neutrality-restraint coalition uses the language of professional focus and institutional credibility, arguing that overt advocacy on contested social issues risks politicizing the organization. Each side claims to defend the profession’s integrity. Each defines that integrity differently. Both reconstruct the same institutional history to support the conclusion that theirs is the authentic version.
The overall pattern holds across all three domains. Every coalition claims authority by asserting possession of something essential. Clinicians claim judgment and experience. Academics claim evidence and data. Regulators claim safety and standards. Reformers claim access and equity. Advocates claim responsibility for public health. None presents its position as interest. All present it as necessity grounded in care.
What the AMA case shows in 2026 is a guild managing technological disruption, professional boundary pressure, and a hostile federal environment through the same mechanism it has always used. It translates institutional interest into moral language and moral language into policy demand. The physician remains essential because the AMA controls the definition of what essential means. The residency cap becomes a patient safety crisis. The site-neutral payment fight becomes a rescue plan for the vulnerable. The augmented intelligence framework keeps the algorithm subordinate. The jurisdictional struggle continues through committees, scorecards, and congressional testimony, determining who defines patient care and who has the standing to speak in its name.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power in the American Bar Association

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

High-status actors in the American Bar Association do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as defending the rule of law, protecting the integrity of the legal system, and serving the public interest. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In the ABA, the dominant vocabulary is the rule of law, judicial independence, professional responsibility, access to justice, and constitutional values. These terms do not merely describe ideals. They create a framework in which authority claims become inseparable from civic virtue. The organization does not merely represent lawyers. It safeguards the legal order. Whoever controls the definition of that safeguard controls the most powerful legitimating language available.
The American Bar Association presents itself as a voluntary professional organization dedicated to improving the law and the administration of justice. In practice it is a structured arena of elite competition organized around sections, committees, the House of Delegates, and a dense network of policy-making bodies. Rival coalitions do not reject the ABA’s stated mission. They compete to define what the rule of law requires, who has the authority to interpret that requirement, and which institutional priorities should follow. The structure channels this competition toward the House of Delegates and the leadership that shapes its agenda, making policy resolutions and committee influence the highest-stakes battlegrounds in ABA life.
Three institutions concentrate this struggle more than any others. Normative authority over legal standards, the accreditation and professional-regulation apparatus, and the policy-advocacy platform are the ABA’s master domains. Whoever governs them governs legitimacy, entry into the profession, and the public voice of organized law. What looks like debate over resolutions, ethics rules, or accreditation standards is, underneath, a contest over who defines what it means to be a lawyer and what the legal system ought to serve.
The normative authority system is the first and most fundamental arena because it governs the terms on which every other competition is conducted. The institutionalist-rule-of-law coalition, concentrated among senior practitioners, judges, and leadership figures, uses the language of neutrality, legal integrity, and constitutional order. Its claim is that the law must remain above politics, that professional norms must be preserved, and that the ABA’s role is to defend those norms against erosion. The Model Rules of Professional Conduct are treated as expressions of enduring principles rather than contested constructions. By framing these norms as neutral and foundational, this coalition claims authority over interpretation. The critic who argues that legal standards embed political choices is not offering an alternative perspective. He undermines the rule of law. The language of neutrality converts contested judgments into necessary ones.
Turner’s essentialist diagnosis applies directly. The institutionalist coalition presents legal norms as stable and transmissible across generations of lawyers. But these norms are continuously interpreted, revised, and selectively enforced. What counts as professional responsibility or judicial independence is shaped by institutional incentives, historical context, and internal debate. The claim of neutrality masks the work required to sustain agreement around these concepts.
The dispute over Standard 206, the diversity and inclusion accreditation mandate, makes this visible at full institutional scale. In February 2026, the Council of the Section of Legal Education extended the suspension of the standard through August 2027. The ABA framed this not as a retreat from values but as a defense against extreme hardship, protecting law schools from losing federal funding under executive directives targeting DEI programs. The language recruits allies among deans who fear financial penalties while buying time to reframe the underlying mandate. The proposed replacement strips away references to diversity and inclusion in favor of access to legal education and the profession, pursuing similar demographic goals through socioeconomic, first-generation, and geographic criteria. A vulnerable identity-based standard gets converted into a holistic framework that is harder to challenge under the SFFA v. Harvard precedent.
Turner’s framework reads this precisely. The current administration claims that the essence of equality is colorblindness. The ABA reconstructs that essence to mean individual adversity and socioeconomic background. Both sides draw from the same constitutional materials. Each presents its selection as the only faithful reading. What looks like a technical revision to an accreditation standard is a jurisdictional repositioning designed to survive the present political environment and re-emerge with the same objectives under a different name.
The reformist-access-to-justice coalition, concentrated among public interest lawyers, younger members, and some academics, uses the language of equity, systemic reform, and inclusion. Its claim is that the legal system does not function neutrally in practice and that the ABA must address structural inequalities in access and outcomes. The institutionalist coalition frames resistance to change as defense of stability. The reformist coalition frames change as necessary to fulfill the law’s promise. Both claim to serve justice. Both select different aspects of the legal tradition to support their positions. A professional-pragmatic bloc occupies the middle, using the language of competence, client service, and practical governance to argue that ideological conflict must be balanced against the realities of practice.
The accreditation and regulatory apparatus is the second master domain, the one that translates normative authority into control over the profession itself. The accreditation-aligned coalition uses the language of quality, rigor, and professional readiness. Its claim is that maintaining high standards protects both the profession and the public. Accreditation becomes a gatekeeping mechanism that determines who can enter the legal field. By framing this as protection rather than exclusion, the coalition converts control over entry into a moral necessity. Critics who argue that accreditation standards raise costs or limit access are not merely proposing reform. They risk the integrity of the profession.
The February 2026 decoupling of the Council of the Section of Legal Education from the broader ABA House of Delegates amplifies this. The Board of Governors approved giving the Council greater power to change its own bylaws without House approval. If the broader ABA becomes a target for federal oversight, the accreditation arm can claim it operates as an independent, neutral regulatory body, separating the political advocacy of the ABA from the technical regulation of law schools. The move is presented as an administrative modernization. Its jurisdictional logic is to create a firebreak.
The Law School Admission Council operates within this domain as a parallel power center. Recognizing that a test-optional world threatens its primary revenue, LSAC has reframed the LSAT not as a barrier but as a validity tool that protects students from enrolling in schools where they might fail. Through its LawHub platform, offering readiness courses and outcome analytics, LSAC has repositioned itself as a professional journey manager whose data schools cannot function without even if they stop requiring the test itself. The credential assembly service, the admissions data reports, and the predictive validity studies all maintain institutional dependence regardless of whether the exam remains mandatory. LSAC claims the LSAT measures the essential DNA of a successful lawyer, a stable aptitude with demonstrated predictive validity since 1945. Schools pursuing test-optional pathways argue that lawyerly aptitude includes life experience, resilience, and judgment that no logic game can measure. Both sides reconstruct the authentic applicant from the same pool of candidates, selecting the metrics that justify their own institutional role.
Under the 2026 Student Tuition and Transparency System, graduates’ median earnings must exceed those of a typical bachelor’s degree holder or the school faces loss of access to federal loan programs. The institutionalist and accreditation-aligned coalitions use the language of consumer protection and financial accountability to frame the closure of low-performing schools not as reduced access but as a quality floor. Law schools counter by invoking the citizen lawyer, arguing that a public defender’s contribution to society cannot be captured by a federal earnings metric. The language of total value converts an economic test into a broader measure of civic return. Each side claims to protect the student. Each positions its preferred metric as the necessary one.
The policy-advocacy platform is the third master domain. The public-voice coalition uses the language of civic responsibility, democratic norms, and constitutional governance. Its claim is that the ABA must take positions on issues that affect the rule of law. Silence is abdication. The neutrality-restraint coalition uses the language of nonpartisanship and institutional credibility, arguing that overt advocacy risks politicizing the organization. Each claims to defend the same core value and interprets it differently.
In early 2026, the primary battleground is a proposed Department of Justice rule that would allow the Attorney General to sideline state bar ethics investigations into federal lawyers. The DOJ frames state bar investigations as political weaponization by activist lawyers and proposes a right of first review, moving ethics jurisdiction from independent state bars to an internal DOJ process. The ABA and local bars invoke the language of state licensing authority, arguing that the power to discipline a lawyer is a non-federal process essential to protecting the public. ABA President Michelle Behnke framed DEI at the February midyear meeting not as a political preference but as a rule of law necessity, arguing that a legal system that does not reflect its people loses legitimacy. The ABA has filed a federal lawsuit against the administration naming seventy agencies and officials, accusing them of a law firm intimidation policy aimed at punishing firms that represent disfavored clients.
The ethics charges against DOJ Pardon Attorney Ed Martin filed by the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility illustrate how this conflict reaches the level of individual lawyers. Martin stands accused of using his official capacity to coerce Georgetown University Law Center by threatening its federal funding over DEI policies. Disciplinary counsel uses the vocabulary of the oath of office to frame what might appear to be a policy dispute as a fundamental violation of legal ethics. Martin’s reported attempt to contact judges directly to demand the investigation be dismissed generated additional charges. A political conflict gets translated into a professional responsibility matter, and a professional responsibility matter gets answered with what the charging authority calls interference with the administration of justice.
The adoption of Resolution 100 in February 2026 shows how the same coalition structure operates in the technology domain. The reformist coalition framed AI as a moral imperative for closing the justice gap, arguing that overstretched legal aid attorneys need a force multiplier and that failing to adopt these tools is an abdication of the ABA’s mission. The institutionalist and pragmatic blocs countered with Model Rules 1.1 and 5.3, insisting on human supervision and warning against a two-tiered system where the poor receive hallucinating algorithms while the wealthy receive human counsel. The final resolution supports AI expansion in pro bono services but requires licensed attorney review of every AI-generated output. The profession retains its gatekeeping role. Tech companies cannot offer legal aid AI directly to the public without lawyer oversight. What looks like a technical guideline is a jurisdictional barrier dressed as consumer protection.
The overall pattern holds across all three domains. Every coalition claims authority by asserting possession of something essential. Institutionalists claim neutrality and stability. Reformers claim justice and inclusion. Regulators claim quality and protection. Advocates claim civic responsibility. None presents its position as interest. All present it as necessity grounded in the nature of law.
What the ABA case shows in 2026 is a sophisticated institutional adaptation under pressure. The organization is not abandoning its reformist goals. It translates them into the language of professional competence, institutional integrity, and access, making them harder targets for opponents to hit. The standard changes its name. The mandate survives in a different frame. The jurisdictional struggle continues through committees, data systems, and federal litigation, determining who defines the rule of law and who has the standing to speak in its name for a profession whose authority depends on convincing two audiences at once, the lawyers it represents and the public it claims to serve.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power in Satmar

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

Orthodox Jews in the Satmar Hasidic community do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as fidelity to Torah, loyalty to the Rebbe, and uncompromising resistance to modern corruption, above all Zionism. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In Satmar, the dominant vocabulary is daas Torah, the authority of the Rebbe, the sanctity of separation, and the Three Oaths that forbid Jewish sovereignty before the messianic age. These are not merely beliefs. They create a framework in which authority claims become inseparable from cosmic obedience. The community does not merely exist to preserve tradition. It exists to survive exile faithfully. Whoever controls the definition of that faithfulness controls the most powerful legitimating language available.

Satmar presents itself as a unified Hasidic court grounded in strict adherence to halacha and the teachings of its founding leader, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum. In practice it is a structured arena of elite competition organized around dynastic leadership, communal institutions, and geographic strongholds in Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel. Rival coalitions do not reject Satmar’s core commitments. They compete to define what loyalty to the Rebbe requires, who has the authority to interpret his legacy, and how communal resources should be governed. The structure channels this competition toward control of the Rebbe’s court and its associated institutions, making succession and institutional governance the highest-stakes battlegrounds in Satmar life.

Three institutions concentrate this struggle more than any others. Dynastic authority centered on the Rebbe, the communal administrative network, and the education and welfare system are Satmar’s master domains. Whoever governs them governs interpretation, coordination, and the daily life of a large and insular population. What looks like disputes over succession, school policy, or municipal governance is, underneath, a contest over who defines authentic Satmar identity and therefore who belongs within the community.

The dynastic authority system is the first and most fundamental arena because it governs the terms on which every other competition is conducted. The Rebbe is not simply a leader. He is the living conduit of authority, the interpreter of Torah, and the embodiment of the community’s spiritual direction. The succession dispute between Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, based in Kiryas Joel, and Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum, based in Williamsburg, has produced two rival courts, each claiming to represent the true continuation of Satmar, each controlling a share of what observers estimate as a global institutional network worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The claim is not that one leader is more effective. It is that one is the rightful heir to a sacred chain.

Pinsof’s framework makes the jurisdictional move visible. By framing authority as dynastic continuity, each coalition claims exclusive jurisdiction over the founding Rebbe’s legacy. The rival is not merely mistaken. He is illegitimate. The appeal to lineage functions as a coalition technology that stabilizes authority by tying it to an inherited position rather than a contestable argument. Because New York courts have largely declined to rule on religious leadership, each coalition has built its own parallel master institutions, and the competition has settled into a stable equilibrium of total separation.

The Aaronim use the language of organizational growth and municipal sovereignty. The successful incorporation of the Town of Palm Tree in 2019, the first officially recognized ultra-Orthodox municipality in the United States, converted an administrative victory into a moral claim. Their leader provides the shield necessary for communal survival. Within Palm Tree, the language of daas Torah justifies high-density zoning and rapid construction. Opposing a building project the Rebbe directs is not a disagreement over urban planning. It is rebellion against the spiritual head of the community. By tying the most basic material need, shelter, to the Rebbe’s administrative authority, the coalition ensures that young families dependent on affordable housing become structurally loyal to the dynastic claim.

The Zalmanim counter with the language of historical custody. By holding the Rodney Street synagogue and the Der Yid newspaper, they frame themselves as guardians of the original Satmar essence, the physical and textual soil where the founding Rebbe lived, prayed, and wrote. Their claim is not institutional success but proximity to origins.

Turner’s essentialist diagnosis applies directly. Each faction presents its version of Satmar as the faithful transmission of a unified teaching. But the writings of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum are vast and internally complex. Each coalition selects different emphases while presenting that selection as the seamless continuation of a whole. The Aaronim emphasize his vision of communal sovereignty. The Zalmanim emphasize his rootedness in historic Brooklyn. Both claim the same man.

The communal administrative structure is the second master domain, translating spiritual authority into practical control. Satmar operates extensive systems of housing, welfare distribution, and local governance. In Kiryas Joel and Palm Tree, communal leadership overlaps with municipal authority in ways that make the distinction between religious governance and civil administration nearly invisible. The centralized-communal coalition uses the language of protection, separation, and communal survival. Governance becomes a form of spiritual defense. The autonomy-resistance coalition, emerging in response to perceived overreach, uses the language of fairness and internal justice. These disputes rarely challenge the principle of strong leadership. They challenge who exercises it.

The battle over New York State’s substantial equivalence laws for secular education in yeshivas runs through this domain with particular force. Satmar leaders frame any state mandate for math and English instruction as an existential threat to the soul of the Jewish people. They use the language of mesirah, the prohibition against informing on fellow Jews to outside authorities, to suppress internal dissent. Turner’s framework reads this clearly. The preservation coalition claims that the essence of Satmar is a total rejection of secular knowledge. But the founding Rebbe was more pragmatic than this framing admits. He navigated secular law and political alliances when necessary. The current insistence on total educational isolation is a selective reconstruction, chosen because it mobilizes the community against state interference and concentrates parental dependence on communal institutions.

A small but growing professionalized-pragmatic bloc uses the language of responsible citizenship and legal strategy to protect Satmar institutions through American constitutional frameworks, free exercise, parental rights, and administrative law. The traditionalist leadership manages this by framing such litigation as shtadlanus, the historic Jewish practice of intercession with gentile authorities. Speaking the language of the captors, the argument goes, is not compromise. It is the ancient art of protecting the holy sheep. The framing converts legal maneuvering into an act of fidelity.

The education and welfare network is the third master domain, where doctrinal authority and administrative control shape everyday life. Satmar schools enforce strict separation from secular culture and reproduce the community’s norms across generations. The insularity-preservation coalition uses the language of purity, modesty, and protection of the soul. The engagement-pressure coalition, arising from legal challenges and individual dissent, uses the language of rights and economic opportunity. It operates under severe constraint because the dominant moral vocabulary treats its claims as threats to communal integrity.

Technology has become the newest front in all three domains at once. The schism between the Aaronim and Zalmanim has extended into the digital realm, where each faction mandates different kosher filtering software to police internet access. In 2026 the choice of filter, such as those provided by the Technology Awareness Group, serves as a digital uniform. A parent in a Zalmanite school found using an Aaronim-approved filter commits not a technical error but an act of jurisdictional defection. The Acceptance Card system enforces this at the school gate. Parents seeking enrollment must sign an affidavit confirming their devices have been inspected and stamped by community technology enforcers. The school becomes a checkpoint for digital compliance, and the Rebbe’s jurisdiction extends into the pocket of every parent.

The double-phone economy persists. Businessmen carry one kosher device for communal visibility and a second, unmonitored phone for business. Leadership tolerates this as long as the private device does not produce public challenge to the Rebbe’s authority. The moral necessity of the kosher device governs the communal square. What happens in the private economy is managed rather than eliminated.

Generative AI has intensified all of this. In early 2026, leading rabbinical figures including Elya Ber Wachtfogel framed AI as a dire threat and a push by Satan to mislead the Jewish people before the Messiah’s arrival. A new vocabulary has emerged comparing AI to the biblical figure of Esau, who addressed Jacob as brother while planning his destruction. AI brings the knowledge of every secular university directly into the Jewish home, bypassing parental and rabbinical oversight. That framing converts an information technology into an eschatological weapon, and it recruits allies among parents already primed to fear the outside world.

Turner’s analysis applies here as directly as anywhere in this series. Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum died before the internet existed. The essence of total separation from secular information that his warnings are said to require is a reconstruction. The leadership maps his general cautions about secular books and newspapers onto 5G networks and large language models to maintain the appearance of continuous transmission. What is presented as faithful application of a timeless teaching is, in Turner’s terms, institutional work performed on materials that cannot speak back.

The response to AI has followed the same arc as the response to the internet a decade earlier. A total ban proved unenforceable. In 2026 several filtered large language models, KosherGPT and RavGPT among them, have been released with heresies, secular history, and immodest content removed. Rabbinical boards have shifted from trying to stop the technology to branding it. The community gains the productivity of AI while the essence of information remains under rabbinical jurisdiction. The January 2026 exposure of an AI-generated Hasidic rabbi named Menachem Goldberg on TikTok gave the leadership a gift. They used it to argue that AI is a fake prophet lacking human judgment and soul, which chilled reform-oriented attempts to use AI tools for pastoral counseling and reinforced the irreplaceable authority of the living Rebbe.

Anti-Zionism remains the most powerful stabilizing coalition technology across both courts. In recent addresses, Rabbi Zalman has referred to the State of Israel as this generation’s Amalek. The language does not merely describe a political position. It functions as a loyalty test. By forbidding members from accepting money from Zionist organizations or participating in Israeli elections, Satmar leaders ensure that followers remain entirely dependent on the community’s own welfare and education networks. Sacred separation launders institutional control as a requirement for cosmic redemption.

The overall pattern holds. Every coalition claims authority by asserting possession of something essential. Dynastic leaders claim authentic succession. Communal administrators claim the capacity to protect the group. Educators claim responsibility for transmitting purity. The pragmatic bloc claims legal competence in defense of the whole. None presents its position as interest. All present it as necessity grounded in Torah and survival.

What the Satmar case shows that the others in this series do not is a jurisdictional war that has already reached formal partition. The two courts do not compete to win each other over. They compete to monopolize the definition of Satmar for their respective territories. The filter is the fence. In a world where physical separation grows harder to maintain as economic necessity pushes members into contact with the outside, the smartphone filter, the Acceptance Card, and the approved AI tool are the new eruv, the boundary that defines who is in and who is out. The jurisdictional struggle continues not toward resolution but toward the consolidation of two parallel worlds, each claiming to be the only one.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power in Eastern Orthodox Christianity

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

High-status actors in Eastern Orthodoxy do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as fidelity to Holy Tradition, continuity with the Church Fathers, and preservation of the apostolic faith. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In Orthodoxy, the dominant vocabulary is Holy Tradition, apostolic succession, conciliarity, and the faith once delivered. These are not merely theological claims. They structure a world in which authority is inseparable from continuity. The Church does not develop doctrine in the modern sense. It preserves what has been handed down. Whoever controls the definition of that continuity controls the most powerful legitimating language available.
Eastern Orthodoxy presents itself as a unified communion grounded in shared doctrine, liturgy, and sacramental life. In practice it is a decentralized arena of elite competition organized around autocephalous churches, each governed by its own synod of bishops and none subordinated to a single earthly head. Rival coalitions do not reject this structure. They compete within it to define what fidelity to tradition requires, who has authority to interpret that tradition, and how jurisdiction should be exercised across national and transnational boundaries. What appears as theological disagreement or disputes over jurisdiction is, underneath, a contest over who speaks for Orthodoxy itself.
Three institutions concentrate this struggle more than any others. Doctrinal-traditional authority, the synodal system of governance, and the nexus of national churches and monastic-intellectual centers are Orthodoxy’s master domains. Whoever governs them governs continuity, coordination, and the interpretation of the faith across a global communion tied together without centralization. What looks like debates over councils, recognition of new churches, or relations with other Christians is, underneath, a contest over who defines the living tradition.
The doctrinal-traditional authority system is the first and most fundamental arena because it governs the terms on which every other competition is conducted. The traditionalist-conservative coalition, concentrated among senior bishops, monastic communities, and theologians rooted in patristic scholarship, uses the language of Holy Tradition, the Fathers, and fidelity to the ecumenical councils. Its claim is that Orthodoxy does not innovate. It transmits. The teachings of the first millennium are not historical artifacts. They are binding expressions of truth. To reinterpret them in light of modern conditions is not development. It is deviation.
Pinsof’s framework makes the jurisdictional move visible. By framing truth as already given and fully present in tradition, this coalition claims authority over interpretation. The theologian who introduces historical criticism or contextual adaptation is not offering a new perspective. He steps outside the tradition. The appeal to the Fathers functions as a coalition technology. It anchors authority in a past that cannot answer back, allowing present actors to speak in its name.
Turner’s essentialist diagnosis applies with particular force. The traditionalist coalition claims that a determinate body of truth has been faithfully preserved across centuries through apostolic succession and conciliar affirmation. But this transmission is mediated through human institutions, selections, and interpretations. The Fathers themselves disagreed. Councils resolved conflicts by excluding alternatives. What counts as the tradition is always a curated inheritance presented as a seamless whole.
The conflict between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate over Ukraine makes this visible at a scale that has not been seen in centuries. On January 6, 2026, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew framed his support for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine not as a political alignment but as an entirely ecclesiological duty, arguing that every sovereign state has the right to an independent local church. The language of spiritual justice converts a territorial grant into a canonical obligation. Moscow counters with a traditionalist-national vocabulary, framing the Ecumenical Patriarch as an instrument of foreign intelligence services. The Moscow Patriarchate uses the language of canonical violation to justify breaking Eucharistic communion, which forces every other autocephalous church to choose sides. A dispute over territory becomes a test of Holy Tradition. That transformation is Pinsof’s coalition technology in its most consequential form.
The reform-engagement coalition, often smaller and more regionally concentrated, uses the language of pastoral necessity, engagement with modernity, and the living character of tradition. Its claim is that fidelity requires discernment, not repetition. The tradition is alive and must respond to new conditions. The traditionalist coalition frames resistance to change as defense of the faith. The engagement coalition frames adaptation as faithfulness to the same faith in new circumstances. Both claim continuity. Both select different elements of the past to support incompatible conclusions.
The 2033 Jubilee, commemorating the bimillennium of the Redemption, has already become a target for this competition. In February 2026, leading figures including Cardinal Kurt Koch and several Orthodox theologians noted that Moscow refuses to attend ecumenical meetings where Constantinople is present. Proponents of unity use the language of visible unity, pointing to joint Sunday of Orthodoxy services in the United States, to argue that the world must see a church that holds together. The Moscow bloc answers by framing that unity as betrayal, arguing that communion with what it calls schismatics in the OCU has placed the Ecumenical Patriarchate itself outside the tradition. Each side selects from the same historical inheritance. Each presents its selection as the only faithful reading.
A pastoral-synodal bloc occupies the middle position. It uses the language of unity, conciliarity, and balance to argue that tensions must be managed through councils rather than resolved through unilateral assertion. Its claim is that Orthodoxy survives precisely because no single authority can impose a final interpretation. This bloc is strongest when conflicts threaten schism and weakest when rival coalitions push for decisive recognition or exclusion. The death of Patriarch Ilia II of Georgia in early 2026 removed one of its most significant figures. Ilia II served as a bridge between the Greek and Slavic worlds, and his absence forces the Georgian Church into a succession contest that will function as a proxy battle between the pro-Constantinople and pro-Moscow coalitions. Every candidate for the Georgian patriarchal throne will frame his platform not as a political choice but as the only path that preserves the balance of the Holy Synod.
The synodal governance structure is the second master domain. Authority resides in councils of bishops rather than a single head, with each bishop governing his own diocese while remaining in communion with others. The ecumenical patriarch holds the position of first among equals, a title of honor without direct authority over other churches. By framing authority as conciliar rather than centralized, Orthodoxy converts fragmentation into legitimacy. Disagreement is not failure. It is evidence that no single actor can claim total control. The language of conciliarity presents distributed power as fidelity to early Christian practice.
The jurisdictional-national coalition operates within this structure using the language of canonical territory, historical continuity, and national identity. Its claim is that each autocephalous church has rightful authority over its geographic and cultural domain. The struggle has expanded into the Baltic states, where the Ecumenical Patriarchate is drawing parishes away from Moscow’s jurisdiction. In early 2026 the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service published a text using sacred language to frame this church contest as a national cause, calling the Ecumenical Patriarch an antichrist in a cassock. The move raises the cost of defection for Moscow-aligned clergy. Both sides claim to represent the true canonical order in the region. Moscow points to centuries of historic oversight. Constantinople points to its role as the Mother Church with a unique right to mediate and restore peace. Each selects the historical documents that support its current map of jurisdiction. Turner’s framework reads this as the standard operation: two coalitions mining the same archive for incompatible conclusions, each presenting its selection as faithful recovery of the whole.
The transnational-ecumenical coalition responds to all of this with the language of unity and global coordination. Its claim is that fragmentation along national lines undermines the universal character of the Church. The tension between these positions reflects a structural feature that no amount of coalition maneuvering can dissolve. Orthodoxy is both universal and national at once, and each coalition emphasizes one pole while claiming fidelity to both.
The monastic and intellectual network is the third master domain, where doctrinal authority and spiritual prestige intersect. Monastic communities, particularly those associated with Mount Athos, carry immense symbolic authority as guardians of spiritual authenticity. The ascetic-traditional coalition uses the language of holiness, prayer, and spiritual purity. Its claim is that true authority comes not from administrative position but from spiritual formation. The academic-theological coalition, linked to seminaries and universities, uses the language of scholarship, historical understanding, and theological clarity. Each side claims access to what Orthodoxy truly is. Each reconstructs that essence from shared materials while presenting its version as the one that has not been distorted by interest.
The overall pattern holds. Every coalition claims authority by asserting possession of something essential. Traditionalists claim fidelity to the Fathers. National churches claim canonical legitimacy. Ecumenical actors claim universal unity. Monastics claim spiritual authenticity. Theologians claim interpretive clarity. None presents its position as interest. All present it as necessity grounded in the nature of the Church.
What distinguishes the Orthodox case in 2026 is not simply the Ukrainian schism but the broader theologizing of security and intelligence. What were once technical canonical disputes now travel in the language of counterintelligence and existential threat. The SVR cites ecclesiology. Patriarchal statements get read as geopolitical signals. This fusion makes the bridging work of the pastoral-synodal bloc nearly impossible, because the vocabulary of managed tension cannot compete with the vocabulary of civilizational survival. Eastern Orthodoxy is governed not by a single unified authority but by competing coalitions operating within a conciliar and decentralized system that has no mechanism for final resolution. The jurisdictional struggles continue across synods and patriarchates, determining who defines Holy Tradition and who has the standing to speak in its name for a communion that has no center and therefore no final arbiter.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power in the Southern Baptist Convention

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

High-status actors in the Southern Baptist Convention do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as faithfulness to Scripture, defense of the gospel, or stewardship of evangelistic mission. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In Southern Baptist life, the dominant vocabulary is biblical inerrancy, the authority of Scripture, the gospel, the Great Commission, religious liberty, and the autonomy of the local church. These terms do not merely describe beliefs. They structure a framework in which authority claims become inseparable from fidelity to God’s word. The convention does not merely exist to coordinate churches. It exists to proclaim the gospel and guard the truth. Whoever controls the definition of that truth controls the most powerful legitimating language available.
The Southern Baptist Convention presents itself as a voluntary association of autonomous churches united by shared confession and mission. In practice it is a structured arena of elite competition organized around an annual meeting, a dense network of seminaries, mission boards, and committees, and a system of trustee governance that determines institutional direction. Rival coalitions do not reject the basic Baptist commitments to local autonomy and cooperation. They compete to define what those commitments require, who has the authority to interpret them, and which institutional priorities should follow. The structure channels this competition toward the annual meeting, where messengers elect a president who appoints key committees that shape trustee selection. What appears as procedural voting is, underneath, a contest over long-term control of the convention’s institutions.
Three institutions concentrate this struggle more than any others. Confessional authority, the trustee system that governs national entities, and the seminary-mission network are the convention’s master domains. Whoever governs them governs doctrine, institutional leadership, and the allocation of resources across one of the largest Protestant bodies in the United States. What looks like debate over resolutions, bylaws, or public statements is, underneath, a contest over who defines Southern Baptist identity and therefore who belongs within its cooperative framework.
The confessional authority system is the first and most fundamental arena because it governs the terms on which every other competition is conducted. The conservative-confessional coalition, historically associated with the late twentieth-century conservative resurgence and its institutional heirs, uses the language of biblical inerrancy, doctrinal fidelity, and theological clarity. Its claim is that the Bible is without error and that the convention must be governed by those who affirm and defend this truth without compromise. The Baptist Faith and Message is treated not as a loose guideline but as a binding expression of orthodoxy. To reinterpret or soften these commitments in light of academic trends or cultural pressure is not development. It is capitulation.
Pinsof’s framework makes the jurisdictional move visible. By framing doctrine as fixed and grounded in the inerrant text, this coalition claims authority over interpretation. The theologian who introduces nuance, the pastor who emphasizes ambiguity, or the institutional leader who tolerates doctrinal diversity is not offering an alternative perspective. He weakens the foundation. The language of inerrancy functions as a coalition technology that draws a hard boundary. It converts interpretive disagreement into a test of faithfulness.
The Law Amendment battle makes this concrete. The proposed constitutional change would bar any church with women holding a pastoral title from participation in the convention. At the 2025 annual meeting, it received sixty-one percent of messenger votes but failed to reach the two-thirds supermajority required for constitutional change. Proponents used the language of clarity and integrity, arguing that the Baptist Faith and Message already prohibits women pastors and that the constitution should reflect this to guide the Credentials Committee. The conservative-confessional coalition presented the amendment not as a power consolidation but as an alignment of governing documents with settled doctrine. Those who opposed it, including Executive Committee CEO Jeff Iorg, deployed a counter-vocabulary of legal risk and institutional exposure, arguing that the amendment would hand authority to attorneys and insurance companies rather than theologians and pastors. That framing targeted the pastoral-pragmatic bloc, the group most sensitive to the costs of structural conflict, and tried to peel it away from the amendment’s supporters. Both sides claimed to be defending the convention. Neither framed its position as institutional interest.
Stephen Turner’s essentialist diagnosis applies directly. The conservative coalition claims that a determinate body of truth is clearly given in Scripture and can be faithfully transmitted through proper teaching and institutional control. Turner’s response is that even claims of scriptural clarity are mediated by interpretation, selection, and institutional reinforcement. What counts as the plain meaning of Scripture is never self-evident. It is constructed through preaching, seminary training, denominational literature, and shared habits of reading. The assertion of fixed meaning masks the work required to sustain that meaning across time.
The contextual-engagement coalition, concentrated among some pastors, seminary faculty, and younger leaders, uses the language of mission, cultural engagement, and gospel application. Its claim is that fidelity to Scripture requires contextual wisdom, that emphasis matters as much as formulation, and that the convention must adapt its posture to remain effective in a changing society. Debates over race, gender roles, abuse response, and political alignment illustrate this tension. The conservative coalition frames resistance to change as defense of truth. The engagement coalition frames adaptation as faithfulness to the gospel’s mission. Both claim biblical authority. Both select different passages, themes, and precedents to support their positions.
The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission sits at the center of this contested ground. Following the resignation of Brent Leatherwood in 2025, the agency operates under interim leadership as it shapes its 2026 policy agenda. Motions to abolish the ERLC entirely have come from the convention’s right flank, whose coalition argues the agency has misrepresented Southern Baptists on issues including gun policy and the criminal prosecution of abortion. The ERLC defends its existence by invoking religious liberty and human dignity, terms that carry deep roots in Baptist identity. By anchoring its 2026 agenda in the Baptist Faith and Message, the agency uses a confessional shield, arguing that eliminating the commission would silence the gospel in the public square. The move is characteristic. An institutional actor under pressure reaches for the most unassailable vocabulary available and presents its survival as a theological necessity.
A pastoral-pragmatic bloc occupies the middle position. It uses the language of cooperation, evangelism, and unity to argue that doctrinal conflict must be managed rather than escalated. Its claim is that the convention’s effectiveness depends on maintaining enough shared ground to support missions, church planting, and institutional stability. This bloc is strongest among leaders responsible for keeping churches connected to the cooperative program and least powerful when doctrinal or political disputes force clear alignments.
The trustee system is the second master domain, and the one that gives Southern Baptist politics its distinctive form. Trustees govern seminaries, mission boards, and other entities, selected through processes shaped by convention leadership. The centralized-influence coalition uses the language of accountability, stewardship, and doctrinal integrity. Its claim is that institutions must be protected from drift through careful selection of trustees who will guard orthodoxy. By framing trustee control as stewardship rather than power, this coalition converts institutional governance into moral responsibility. Those who seek broader representation or looser oversight are not merely proposing a different governance model. They risk doctrinal compromise. The language of accountability launders strategic control as faithful oversight.
The autonomy-emphasis coalition responds with the language of local church independence and Baptist identity. Its claim is that excessive centralization undermines the very principle that defines the convention. The distinction between cooperation and control is itself a jurisdictional claim, and the fight over who draws that line is never merely procedural.
The seminary and mission network is the third master domain, where doctrinal and administrative struggles translate into training, sending, and funding. The sexual abuse reform fight runs through all three domains at once. Messengers voted in 2022 to create a Ministry Check database, a centralized record of credibly accused ministers. As of 2026 the database sits effectively dormant, delayed by legal and financial obstacles. Institutional leaders have shifted the language from centralized accountability to equipping local churches, redirecting the emphasis toward training and existing criminal databases. The move preserves the surface commitment to safety while protecting local autonomy and limiting institutional liability. Leaders frame this as walking with the wounded. Turner’s framework reads it as the institutional apparatus selecting the version of reform that preserves its jurisdictional structure. The mission-driven coalition claims urgency. The professionalized-institutional coalition claims competence. Both reconstruct the same mandate from the same 2022 vote while reaching opposite conclusions about what it requires.
The overall pattern holds across all three domains. Every coalition claims authority by asserting possession of something essential. Conservatives claim fidelity to inerrant Scripture. Engagement-oriented leaders claim insight into effective mission. Institutional actors claim the ability to maintain doctrinal and organizational integrity. Advocates of autonomy claim fidelity to Baptist principles. None presents its position as interest. All present it as necessity.
What distinguishes the Southern Baptist case is the tension between formal decentralization and practical centralization. The convention insists on local church autonomy while simultaneously building powerful national institutions. Authority must therefore be exercised through elections, appointments, and influence rather than direct command, which channels conflict into procedural battles that determine who controls institutional mechanisms over time. The 2026 annual meeting in Orlando is the next equilibrium point. Every candidate for the presidency or the Resolutions Committee will present his platform not as a bid for power but as stewardship of the convention’s Great Commission soul. That is not cynicism. It is how the system works.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power Among the Mormons

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

High-status actors in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as faithfulness to revelation, loyalty to priesthood order, or responsibility for the gathering of Israel. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In Mormonism, the dominant vocabulary is priesthood keys, continuing revelation, sustaining the Brethren, the covenant path, eternal families, and the kingdom of God. These terms do not merely describe belief. They structure a world in which authority claims are inseparable from salvation. The church does not merely serve its members. It exists to administer saving ordinances and prepare a people for the return of Christ. Whoever controls the meaning of that preparation controls the most powerful legitimating language available.
The LDS Church presents itself as a unified global body grounded in restored authority and living prophets. In practice it is a structured arena of elite competition organized around the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles at its apex and extending downward through a tightly ordered hierarchy of seventies, area presidencies, stake presidents, bishops, and an extensive institutional network. Rival coalitions do not reject the core truth claims or the hierarchy. They compete to define what fidelity to the Restoration requires, who has the authority to interpret that fidelity, and which institutional priorities should follow. The structure channels this competition upward, making control over interpretation, emphasis, and enforcement at the top the decisive prize.
Three institutions concentrate this struggle more than any others. Prophetic-doctrinal authority, the centralized administrative system shaped by correlation, and the temple-family-education-welfare network form Mormonism’s master domains. Whoever governs them governs belief, coordination, and the deployment of resources across a global church. What appears as doctrinal clarification, handbook revision, or institutional policy is, underneath, a contest over who defines Mormonism and therefore who belongs to the covenant people.
The doctrinal authority system is the first and most fundamental arena because it sets the terms for every other dispute. The conservative restorationist coalition, concentrated in the apostolic center, orthodox teaching traditions, and much of the core membership, uses the language of priesthood keys, prophetic continuity, and revealed order. Its claim is that Mormonism is not an evolving theological project but a restored structure of authority and doctrine given through Joseph Smith and maintained through authorized succession. Change is legitimate only when it comes through the proper channels. To reinterpret doctrine from outside that chain is not development. It is departure.
Pinsof’s framework makes the jurisdictional move visible. By framing doctrine as revelation tied to priesthood authority, this coalition claims exclusive control over interpretation. The historian who emphasizes discontinuity, the intellectual who stresses cultural context, or the member who appeals to conscience against institutional teaching is not offering an alternative view. He steps outside the order that defines legitimate knowledge. Continuing revelation appears flexible, but it is tightly bounded. Revelation continues, but only through those who hold the keys. This preserves the possibility of change while protecting centralized authority.
Recent revisions to General Handbook Section 38.6.23 illustrate how this works at the policy level. By defining gender strictly as biological sex at birth, the centralized leadership reinforces a boundary that limits the jurisdiction of the contextual-developmental coalition. The policy frames social transitioning, changing pronouns, dress, or name, not as a personal or medical matter but as a violation of priesthood order, resulting in membership restrictions including loss of a temple recommend. The language of divine identity and biological sex recruits allies in the conservative base. The contextual-developmental coalition responds by arguing that ongoing revelation should allow a more expansive understanding of gender. The institutional center answers by framing the restriction as a defense of the Plan of Happiness, converting a policy decision into an eschatological necessity. That is the coalition technology at full operation.
Stephen Turner’s essentialist diagnosis applies with particular force. The conservative coalition claims that a determinate restored order has been transmitted from the founding moment to the present through a living chain of authority. Turner’s response is that all such transmission is mediated. Mormon doctrine is not a fixed deposit but a historically layered inheritance shaped by selection, emphasis, and institutional need. Early plural marriage, priesthood restrictions by race, shifts in temple practice, and changing public language all show that what is presented as continuity is always structured by interpretation. The claim to preserve an essence is itself a product of institutional work.
The temple endowment revisions of 2023 and 2024 make Turner’s point concrete. The ceremony was shortened by roughly twenty percent, redundant phrases removed, and the visual emphasis redirected toward Jesus Christ. The conservative coalition presents these as adjustments that return the ritual to its true purpose. Turner’s framework reads them differently. The removal of the requirement for women to veil their faces, and the excision of warnings against loud laughter, get framed as modern revelation. Beneath that framing, the changes serve the professionalized coalition’s need for institutional viability by making the endowment less jarring to contemporary sensibilities. The Jesus-centered pivot is the most elegant move. By linking every covenant explicitly to the Savior, the center uses a moral vocabulary that no coalition can openly oppose, which allows significant structural change while maintaining the appearance of static, revealed truth.
The contextual-developmental coalition, concentrated among scholars, intellectuals, and younger or more globally situated members, uses the language of ongoing revelation, historical awareness, and pastoral responsiveness. Its claim is that Mormonism has always adapted and that fidelity may require reinterpreting past teachings in light of new conditions. Questions about gender, sexuality, race, historical transparency, and the limits of dissent illustrate this tension. The conservative coalition frames resistance to change as fidelity to divine order. The developmental coalition frames change as the natural unfolding of a living church. Both claim the Restoration. Both draw from the same history while emphasizing different elements.
The garment policy announced in 2024, authorizing sleeveless and slip-style temple garments for hot and humid climates such as Kenya and Uganda, with a United States rollout planned for late 2025, shows the local-adaptive coalition winning a limited but visible concession. The centralized leadership frames the change not as a concession to fashion or comfort but as caring for the saints and mission-driven pragmatism. The garment is itself a coalition technology because it signals belonging. Altering its form creates tension for the conservative coalition, who treat the standard of modesty as a fixed essence. The leadership manages this by insisting that the covenant is the stable core while the clothing is the adaptive form. The distinction preserves the grammar of essentialism while making the practical accommodation the center had reason to make anyway.
A pastoral-pragmatic bloc occupies the middle position. It uses the language of unity, ministering, retention, and family stability. Its claim is that tensions must be managed rather than forced to resolution, that the church’s strength depends on holding together a diverse membership under a shared structure, and that both rigid enforcement and rapid change risk fragmentation. This bloc is strongest among local leaders and institutionally committed members who must make the system work in practice.
The centralized administrative structure is the second master domain. Correlation created a system in which curriculum, messaging, and organizational life are tightly coordinated from the center. The centralized leadership coalition uses the language of unity, order, and global consistency. Its claim is that a worldwide church cannot function if local variation undermines coherence. Unity is not simply efficient. It is evidence of divine governance. By presenting centralization as priesthood order rather than administrative preference, this coalition turns compliance into spiritual duty. Local experimentation, intellectual independence, or public dissent get framed not as alternative approaches but as threats to the integrity of the system. The language of sustaining leaders performs the same function, transforming institutional loyalty into moral obligation.
The temple-family-education-welfare network is the third master domain. Temples, missionary work, education systems, and welfare programs define Mormon life as a comprehensive form. The temple-family coalition uses the language of eternal families, sacred ordinances, and covenant identity. Its claim is that these institutions are not peripheral. They are the core of the faith, and all governance must align with them. The professionalized institutional coalition, strongest among administrators, educators, and global managers, uses the language of excellence, credibility, and institutional viability. Its argument is that the church’s institutions must function effectively in the broader world. Accreditation, legal compliance, and public reputation are not secondary concerns. They are conditions of influence and survival.
The overall pattern holds across all three domains. Every coalition claims authority by asserting possession of something essential. Restorationists claim fidelity to revealed order. Developmental thinkers claim access to the living process of revelation. Central administrators claim the capacity to coordinate a global church. Local actors claim contextual understanding. Institutional leaders claim either mission purity or functional excellence. None presents its position as interest. All present it as necessity.
What distinguishes the LDS case is the fusion of prophetic authority with bureaucratic control. Charisma and administration reinforce each other. This makes challenges to the system difficult to sustain internally. Disagreement gets redirected, muted, or pushed to the margins rather than resolved through open institutional contest. Continuing revelation serves as the final trump in every jurisdictional dispute because the First Presidency and the Twelve can invoke it to close an argument that no other mechanism can close. The recent policy moves on gender identity, temple ceremony, and garments are not random. They are calculated maneuvers in an ongoing jurisdictional contest, each one dressed in the language of divine guidance, each one serving the coalition interests that the language of divine guidance was always designed to protect.

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The Vocabulary of Order: Elite Moral Claims in the 2026 Iran War

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

Nobody in the foreign policy establishment says they want authority over how this war is understood. They say they are protecting civilians, managing escalation, defending the rules-based order, or preventing catastrophe. That is the move. In every crisis of this kind, moral vocabularies function as coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define who counts as a responsible actor, and justify control over the institutions that matter. The Iran war, now in its fourth week, has produced exactly the pattern that any careful observer of elite discourse would predict. Three overlapping contests are underway simultaneously — over how to define escalation, over who bears responsibility for civilian harm, and over what the war is ultimately for. The outcome of those contests will determine not just how this war is judged but who gets to do the judging.
The facts that the vocabulary must process are these. Israel struck first on 28 February, the opening day of Ramadan, killing Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian leaders in coordinated strikes on meetings that US and Israeli intelligence had located in advance. The United States followed. Iran has struck back militarily, closing the Strait of Hormuz and hitting targets including British bases in Cyprus. An energy crisis is spreading across importing economies. European governments have begun breaking with Washington. The UN Security Council passed a resolution condemning Iran’s retaliation while making no mention of the US-Israeli strikes that provoked it. No international legal body has moved against any party, despite a near-consensus among international law scholars that the strikes constitute a war of aggression, the supreme international crime under the Nuremberg framework.
One further fact sits at the center of everything and is handled differently by every coalition. On 27 February, the day before the strikes began, Oman’s Foreign Minister announced that a breakthrough had been reached in nuclear negotiations — that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium and to full IAEA verification. Talks were scheduled to resume on 2 March. The strikes began instead. The Omani foreign minister said afterward that active and serious negotiations had been undermined. Steve Witkoff, the US envoy, said Iran had been boasting that its enriched uranium could produce eleven nuclear bombs. Diplomats with knowledge of the talks said Witkoff had misrepresented the exchange. Into this factual dispute, every moral vocabulary has arrived carrying its preferred reading.
The escalation contest is where the authority stakes are highest, because whoever defines escalation controls the boundaries of permissible action going forward. The restraint-stability coalition, which includes most of the European foreign policy establishment, significant portions of the American think tank world, and the diplomatic services of states that depend on Hormuz shipping, speaks the language of risk containment, signaling theory, and the management of adversary perception. Its claim is that the central danger is not Iran but the uncontrolled expansion of the conflict. The Hormuz closure and Iranian military retaliation are not discrete events but steps in a sequence that the initial strikes set in motion. The responsible actor is the one who understands this dynamic, who can read the signals, who knows when pressure has reached the point of diminishing returns.
This is a jurisdictional claim dressed as analysis. By framing escalation management as a form of expertise, the coalition converts its preferred policy of restraint into the output of superior knowledge. That the strikes occurred during active diplomatic negotiations, at a moment the mediating party described as a breakthrough, is central to this coalition’s argument. Not because the coalition necessarily believes Iran was negotiating in good faith, but because the timing makes the alternative to military force maximally visible. There was an option that was not taken. That visibility is what the restraint coalition needs to sustain its authority claim.
The opposing coalition, concentrated among defense hawks and Israeli strategic analysts, uses a structurally identical move in the opposite direction. It speaks the language of deterrence restoration, strategic clarity, and the wages of hesitation. Iran had hidden highly enriched uranium in an underground facility that survived the June 2025 strikes, the IAEA reported days before the February attack. Witkoff’s account of the Muscat negotiations, whatever its accuracy, describes Iran insisting on its inalienable right to enrich uranium and boasting about its nuclear stockpile. In this reading, what looked like a diplomatic breakthrough was either Iranian deception or wishful thinking by mediators who wanted to believe it. The decision to strike during negotiations was not a violation of good faith. It was the recognition that negotiations were being used as cover. Both coalitions claim to see the true structure of the situation. Both select from the same ambiguous facts — the Omani foreign minister’s statement, Witkoff’s briefing, the IAEA reports — and reach incompatible conclusions. The lessons do not generate the conclusions. The conclusions generate the lessons.
The civilian harm contest is where moral authority is most directly at stake, and where the connection to the broader history of international humanitarian law is most visible. The humanitarian accountability coalition, composed of NGOs, international law scholars, and the UN human rights apparatus, has framed its response in the language of proportionality, distinction, and civilian protection. The strikes on Tehran killed Khamenei and senior officials who were meeting in the National Security Council offices on Pasteur Street, a district that also contains civilian infrastructure. Iranian retaliation hit Cyprus, where British bases are located alongside a civilian population. Both events are being assessed through the lens of Additional Protocol I. Reports are being compiled. Casualty counts are being contested. The question of whether the Hormuz closure constitutes an unlawful attack on civilian economic infrastructure is being litigated in documents that will be cited in future UN reports.
None of this is cynical in any simple sense. The people doing this work believe they are doing something important. But the frame they are using encodes assumptions the series has been tracking throughout. The morally relevant question, in this vocabulary, is whether specific actors followed specific procedural requirements. Did the attacking forces take feasible precautions? Was the expected civilian harm proportionate to the anticipated military advantage? These are real questions with real answers that matter for real people. They are not the question of whether the war itself was justified, who benefited from its launch, or what interests were served by striking during a negotiation that the mediating party described as nearly successful. The humanitarian accountability vocabulary makes the procedural harm visible. It renders the strategic and economic interests that produced the war invisible, or at least secondary.
The UNSC resolution captures this invisibility in institutional form. It condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes as a violation of international law. It made no mention of the US-Israeli strikes that preceded them, despite the near-consensus among international legal scholars that those strikes constitute aggression under the UN Charter. The resolution was sponsored by Bahrain. The United States vetoed nothing because nothing needed vetoing. The institutional machinery produced an outcome that named one party’s violence as unlawful while leaving the other’s unaddressed. This is not a malfunction. It is the system working as designed, sorting the innocent from the targetable in exactly the way the series has been describing, through an institutional process that presents its classifications as the neutral application of law.
The security-first coalition, speaking from within the Israeli government and its American supporters, responds with the vocabulary of existential threat, the regime’s 47-year campaign of terror, and the obligation to protect one’s own population. Netanyahu described the goal as removing the existential threat posed by the Iranian regime and creating conditions for the Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands. Trump said the US military was knocking the crap out of Iran and demanding unconditional surrender. These statements do not engage the humanitarian accountability coalition’s criteria. They reject the frame in which those criteria apply. The war, in this vocabulary, is not a military operation to be assessed for proportionality. It is a civilizational confrontation between a legitimate order and those who threaten it. The categories of international humanitarian law are not the relevant measure. They are, at most, constraints to be observed when convenient.
What makes this exchange structurally interesting rather than simply depressing is that both sides are right about the other’s evasion. The humanitarian accountability coalition is correct that the security-first vocabulary treats civilian harm as an acceptable cost in a way that the law does not permit. The security-first coalition is correct that the humanitarian vocabulary assesses specific attacks while declining to assess the broader question of whether a nuclear-armed Iran represents a threat that legal frameworks are structurally unable to address. Each exposes the other’s concealment. Neither engages the question the other raises on its own terms.
The strategic purpose contest is where the current war connects most directly to the long arc this series has been tracing. The order-maintenance coalition, composed primarily of people whose authority derives from the post-1945 international system, has framed the conflict as a constitutional moment for that system. Israel struck first without Security Council authorization. The United States joined without adequate congressional authorization, launching what many legal and military experts describe as exactly the kind of military action that requires a declaration of war. The strikes occurred during active diplomatic negotiations. The UNSC resolution that followed condemned Iran’s response while ignoring the predicate. In the order-maintenance vocabulary, these facts make the conflict not just a regional crisis but a demonstration that the system’s rules apply only to those who lack the power to ignore them.
This is a genuine argument. It is also a vocabulary that serves specific institutional interests. The order-maintenance coalition is composed primarily of people whose authority rests on the premise that there is a rules-based order whose rules can be interpreted and whose violations can be named. A world in which powerful states simply do what they judge necessary is a world in which their specific form of authority dissolves. The defense of the rules-based order is simultaneously the defense of the institutions that claim to administer it, and simultaneously the defense of those institutions’ claim to authority over the classification of legitimate and illegitimate violence.
The sovereignty-particularist coalition — the Trump administration’s stated rationale, Israeli strategic doctrine, and a significant portion of the American public — uses the language of national interest, existential threat, and the limits of abstract principle. Its claim is that a regime that has spent 47 years calling for the destruction of Israel, that has been developing nuclear weapons capability while using proxy forces to fight its enemies, represents a threat that legal frameworks designed for a different world cannot adequately address. The order-maintenance coalition calls this regression to the law of the jungle. The sovereignty coalition calls it the honest acknowledgment of what sovereignty has always meant when survival is at stake.
The National Counterterrorism Center director resigned in March, stating his belief that Iran posed no imminent threat and that the war was started due to the Israel lobby. Senator Rand Paul argued that war should be used only when all other options have failed, not as a first choice. These voices represent a third position that neither the order-maintenance coalition nor the sovereignty coalition can easily accommodate. They are not defending international law as an institutional system. They are making a political judgment about American interests and the costs of a war whose goals remain, as most Americans have noted in polling, unexplained. Most Americans opposed the military action. Trump said he did not care about polling. That exchange, conducted across a gap the moral vocabularies of the foreign policy establishment cannot bridge, may be the most honest moment the conflict has produced.
What connects this analysis to the broader series is the absence of the question that the whole apparatus of competing moral vocabularies is designed not to ask. The humanitarian framework asks whether the strikes were proportionate. The escalation framework asks whether they were strategically wise. The order-maintenance framework asks whether they were legally authorized. The sovereignty framework asks whether they were necessary for survival. None of these frameworks asks whose interests the Iranian nuclear program threatened and in what proportions, who bears the costs of the Hormuz closure and the energy price spike, what structural conditions produced a situation in which military action appeared to its architects as the least bad option, or whether the populations most affected — Iranian civilians, the Israeli civilians who will absorb retaliatory strikes, Asian and African importing economies facing energy shocks, the Iranian protesters who were hoping for liberation and may instead face a rally-around-the-flag effect — had any meaningful role in the decisions that produced their current situation.
That is the Nuremberg question. It is the question that the anti-imperial framework encoded into crimes against peace before it was displaced by the civilian protection paradigm. It asks not whether the conduct of the war satisfies legal criteria but whether the war itself serves interests that can be named and judged. The legal scholars who call the strikes a war of aggression are making a version of this argument. But they make it through categories — aggression, self-defense, Security Council authorization — that the sovereign decision essay traced to their political origins. The argument has formal legal content. It does not have the structural analysis that would explain why the strikes happened when active negotiations were underway, what interests were served by that timing, and whose deaths and whose economic suffering are the price of those interests.
The current elite vocabulary, across all its competing coalitions, has no place for that question. The restraint coalition cannot ask it because the answer might implicate the American security architecture it is trying to preserve. The humanitarian coalition cannot ask it because answering it would require a structural analysis that the civilian protection framework was designed to bracket. The order-maintenance coalition cannot ask it because the rules-based order it is defending has never meaningfully constrained the great powers whose cooperation it depends on. The sovereignty coalition has already answered it in its own terms — the question of whose interests matter has a simple answer, and that answer is ours.
The jurisdictional wars continue. They are fought in think tank reports, UN chambers, editorial boards, and the briefings that shape how governments respond and how publics understand what they are watching. The contest is not primarily about Iran. It is about who gets to define what this war means, whose suffering counts and on what terms, and who has the institutional standing to make those definitions stick. The war over the Strait is visible. The war over its meaning is quieter, conducted in the vocabulary of responsibility and order, and in the long run more consequential. The vocabulary of order was already in place before the first strike. It will still be in place when the last one lands.

Posted in Assassination, Elites, Iran, War | Comments Off on The Vocabulary of Order: Elite Moral Claims in the 2026 Iran War

Buffered Guardians, Porous Fighters: The Self Assumed by the Laws of War

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

The history of international humanitarian law is usually told as a story about rules, institutions, and doctrines. It can also be told as a story about the kind of person those rules require. Not just the soldier or the lawyer in their formal role, but the deeper structure of the self that can inhabit those roles without breaking under the strain. Once that question is asked, a pattern emerges. The evolution of the laws of war tracks a shift in what sort of self the law assumes, rewards, and eventually demands. The early twentieth century still works with people whose loyalties are thick, inherited, and lived as part of the structure of reality. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries construct a framework that depends on a different kind of person altogether: one who can hold those same loyalties at arm’s length, examine them as objects of reflection, and, when the framework requires it, suspend them entirely.
Charles Taylor calls this the difference between the porous and the buffered self. The porous self experiences the world as something that moves through it. Its obligations are not chosen in any strong sense. They are given, constitutive, binding in the way that gravity binds. The community is not something the porous self belongs to. It is something the porous self is made of. The buffered self, by contrast, experiences itself as bounded and self-directing. Its commitments are held at a distance, available for revision, subject to the judgment of a reasoning mind that stands behind them rather than inside them. The buffered self can be loyal, can care deeply, can act from conviction. But it experiences those states as its own, as things it has in some sense chosen, rather than as forces that move through it from outside.
The buffered self is not the default condition of human beings. It is a trained capacity, sustained by specific institutions that teach people to treat their own attachments as objects of scrutiny rather than as the ground of action. Law schools, diplomatic training, international organizations, professional military culture, the entire apparatus of the post-1945 liberal order, all reproduce this stance. They reward the person who can translate loyalty into procedure, who can convert passion into a variable, who can encounter suffering without allowing prior allegiances to determine the response. The law does not simply assume this self exists. It selects for it, trains it, and produces more of it. The buffered self is as much the law’s product as its precondition.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Hague system does not yet require this. It requires discipline, not detachment. The officer is expected to restrain himself, to follow the rules of warfare, to avoid prohibited weapons and unnecessary cruelty. But he is not expected to question the war or his place in it. His loyalty to his state and his people is not something he brackets. It is the condition of his role. The law draws a line between civilized and uncivilized ways of expressing loyalty, not between loyalty and neutrality. The officer can be fully committed, fully embedded in his national cause, and still satisfy everything the law demands, as long as he fights in the proper way.
This is a porous world, and the law works with that porosity rather than against it. The franc-tireur debates show the limit. The irregular fighter, the farmer who takes up a rifle outside a formal command structure, is excluded from protection. But the exclusion is framed in terms of conduct and organization, not in terms of the kind of self the fighter is. The officer who fights with full communal passion from within a recognized army satisfies the law entirely. His porosity is not the problem. The partisan’s failure to meet formal conditions is the problem.
The First World War broke something in this framework. The scale of destruction made it impossible to believe that professional restraint within war was sufficient. The problem was no longer how war was fought but that it was being fought at all, and by decisions made in cabinet rooms rather than on battlefields. The Kellogg-Briand Pact and then Nuremberg formalized the shift. Responsibility moved upward. The crime was aggression. The hero was the prosecutor who could stand outside his own state and judge it by a standard that transcended national interest.
That stance already presupposes a partial buffering. The prosecutor at Nuremberg must be able to see his own political community as one actor among others, subject to a law that claims to stand above the conflict. He must hold his national identity at sufficient distance to condemn its leaders. This is not the total detachment of the humanitarian guardian that comes later. It depends on victory and on the particular historical circumstances of 1945. But it marks the beginning of a new requirement. The law is beginning to ask not just for disciplined conduct but for a self capable of critical distance from its own loyalties.
The deeper transformation occurs with the 1949 Geneva Conventions. They do not ask the legal actor to judge the justice of the war. They ask him to remain neutral within it. On its face this seems more modest than the Nuremberg demand. In practice it is more radical, because it must be sustained not in the aftermath of victory but in the middle of ongoing conflict, and not by exceptional prosecutors but by an entire class of legal and humanitarian professionals.
Neutrality is not simply a rule. It is a discipline of the self. The humanitarian guardian who operates under the Geneva framework must encounter wounded enemies and treat them the same as his own wounded. He must protect prisoners regardless of what they have done. He must maintain the categories of the law when every human instinct is pulling toward the loyalties that the categories are designed to bracket. This is not something the porous self can do. For the porous self, the suffering of one’s own and the suffering of the enemy do not appear in the same register. They cannot. The community is not a preference the porous self holds. It is what the porous self is. To ask it to treat both equally is to ask it to be something other than what it is.
The humanitarian guardian, by contrast, must force the two into the same register. He must act as though the distinction that matters to everyone else in the environment, the distinction between us and them, does not determine his response. He succeeds at his role to the extent that he can maintain this suspension of his own attachments. He fails to the extent that he cannot. The framework therefore selects for, and helps produce, the buffered self. Over time it produces an entire professional culture organized around the cultivation and maintenance of that stance.
What the buffered self gains in clarity it loses in depth. It can sort. It can administer. It can hold the categories steady under pressure. But it does so by thinning out the very attachments that make violence intelligible to the people living inside it. The more successful the buffering, the more the world appears as a set of cases rather than as a set of lives. The suffering that passes through the legal categories retains its legal significance. What it loses is its particular weight, its specific texture, the quality of being the suffering of this community in this place with this history. That quality is what the porous self cannot help but feel. It is also what the buffered system cannot quite hold.
The demand is not placed only on those who administer the law. It is placed on those who seek its protection. The protected person must present herself as a certain kind of individual. She must appear as someone to whom things happen rather than as someone who acts within a collective. The more her life is entangled with a community that is fighting, the harder it is for the law to see her as innocent. The passivity requirement, which every version of the law has imposed in some form since the Hague Conventions, is not only a behavioral rule. It is an anthropological demand. It asks the protected person to perform a version of the self that the law can process: bounded, individual, detached from the political struggle around her.
This works tolerably well for certain kinds of victims. The prisoner who has been captured and is no longer fighting satisfies the requirement by circumstance. The wounded soldier who can no longer act satisfies it by incapacity. The civilian who genuinely has no role in the conflict satisfies it by fact. These are the clean cases, and the law handles them with reasonable coherence.
The hard cases are the ones the law has always struggled with. The woman who hides a fighter in her house. The man who carries food to a besieged community that includes armed defenders. The political organizer who sustains a resistance movement without personally bearing arms. The farmer who provides intelligence about troop movements. These people are not passive. Their lives are entangled with their community’s struggle in ways that are ordinary and comprehensible given what their community is facing. They do not experience themselves as having made a calculated choice to enter the conflict. They experience themselves as doing what loyalty requires, what membership demands, what any person in their situation would do. Their identity is porous. The community moves through them. They move through it.
The law sees this as a classification problem. It struggles to determine when participation begins and ends, when indirect support becomes direct, when a civilian becomes targetable. The 1977 Additional Protocols deepen the language of distinction and proportionality but do not resolve the underlying tension. The post-2001 doctrines of continuous combat function and direct participation push further into the biography of the subject, reaching toward organizational role and sustained engagement rather than specific acts. Each refinement makes the categories more precise. None of them resolves the fundamental mismatch.
What the law experiences as a problem of classification is often a problem of anthropology. It is trying to sort people whose form of life does not match the assumptions built into the categories. The categories were designed for a buffered world, a world in which individuals can choose whether to participate and can be held responsible for that choice. They encounter a porous world, in which the choice is not experienced as a choice at all but as the expression of who one is and what one’s people require. The more the law refines the rules, the more precise the mismatch becomes.
The porous self is not inherently virtuous. It can produce solidarity, courage, and the willingness to sacrifice. It can also produce cruelty, tribalism, and the inability to see the humanity of those outside the group. It binds people to each other in ways that make restraint difficult and compromise feel like betrayal. The point is not that the porous self is better than the buffered self. It is that the law has no stable place for it except as a problem to be managed, a deviation from the norm it rewards, a complication that its categories must contain or exclude.
The targeting lawyer of the contemporary era is the buffered self in its most refined form. He translates a situation saturated with political meaning into a set of legal variables. He assesses whether a target meets the threshold for continuous combat function. He calculates whether the anticipated military advantage is proportionate to the expected civilian harm. He documents the process so that the decision can be audited. He trusts the process because the process is a perfect buffer. It interposes a structure of legal reasoning between the act of killing and the person who authorizes it. The decision is not his passion or his loyalty or his judgment about the enemy. It is the output of a framework that claims to stand above all of those things.
He can kill at significant remove while remaining, in his own understanding and in the understanding of the system he serves, a neutral administrator of rules designed for the protection of humanity. He is the man who can destroy without becoming barbaric. Whether this self-understanding is accurate is a question the framework is not designed to answer.
The algorithmic targeting systems emerging from contemporary military practice carry this logic to its endpoint. The decision is made upstream, embedded in the design of the system. The analyst who builds the model, who decides which signals to weight and which thresholds to apply, exercises a form of authority that the law has not fully reckoned with. The buffering is total. No individual owns the decision in a way that generates clear accountability. The system produces outputs. Humans sign the warrants. The chain of responsibility diffuses across designers, commanders, and institutions in ways that no existing legal framework adequately tracks.
What persists through all of this is the same requirement that the law has always imposed on those who seek its protection: remain legible to a buffered system. Remain separable from your community’s struggle. Appear as an individual to whom things happen rather than as a member of a people who acts. The requirement has changed form, from behavioral compliance in 1900 to data compliance in the present. The underlying demand has not changed.
The turbulence in the laws of war today is, at one level, a doctrinal crisis about non-state actors and urban warfare and autonomous systems. At a deeper level it is a collision between two forms of selfhood. The system is built for the buffered. The world remains full of the porous. Populations under occupation, communities facing existential threat, people whose political identity is inseparable from their daily survival, do not experience their attachments as optional. They act because not acting would mean accepting outcomes that the logic of their identity makes unacceptable. The law classifies this as a problem. They experience it as fidelity.
When the stakes become existential, the buffer breaks entirely. The national protector hero who defies international courts, the community that mourns its dead as martyrs rather than as data points requiring external validation, the population that treats its own survival as a value that overrides the classifications of a system it did not design and does not trust, all of these are expressions of the porous self refusing the buffered world’s terms. The international legal order calls this a failure of maturity, a descent into the politics that the postwar settlement was designed to prevent. What it is describing is the return of a form of identity that the settlement never successfully replaced, only suppressed long enough to forget that it had not been replaced.
The sorting authority of the law is used, finally, to decide whose loyalty counts as a revocable commitment and whose loyalty is treated as a threat. The buffered self presents its neutrality as the natural condition of a mature person and its rules as the natural expression of what humanity requires. The porous self appears in this framework only at the moment it must be constrained: classified, targeted, stripped of protection for taking a direct part in a conflict it experiences not as a conflict it entered but as a condition it was born into.
If a new framework emerges from the current turbulence, it will have to address this gap more directly than any previous one has. It will have to decide whether to continue to privilege the buffered self as the implicit subject of the law, or to find a way to accommodate forms of identity in which political attachment is not something that can be held at a distance without ceasing to be that identity.
That choice, when it comes, will not present itself as a choice. It will appear, as each previous transformation has appeared, as the next necessary step in the humanization of violence. Underneath that appearance will be a decision about what kind of person the law is for, and what kind of life the law is willing to see.

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The Long Neutralization

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

The smoke had barely cleared over Europe in 1945 when the decision was made. The political — with its raw friend-enemy lines, its coarse loyalties, its willingness to name an adversary and fight for a particular way of life — had led to the camps. So it would be replaced. Not abolished, exactly. Managed. Moralized. Proceduralized. Handed upward to committees, courts, commissions, central banks, treaty bodies, and a new class of experts who spoke the language of necessity rather than choice. The noble actor was no longer the man who stood with his people. He was the man who rose above them. The judge interpreting a human-rights convention. The commissioner harmonizing regulations. The analyst explaining why a border had to open. They did not say we want this. They said the situation requires this. Conflict became a data error. Passion became a symptom.
The settlement carried achievements that were real and immense. It made another European civil war less likely. It restrained open imperial ambition within the West. It expanded rights protections, embedded legal review, and discredited open appeals to ethnic supremacy. But it also carried a second effect, less visible because it was experienced not as a decision but as a necessity. It progressively narrowed the range of what democratic politics was allowed to decide. More and more questions were removed from the arena of popular contest and relocated into domains where they would be treated as matters of expertise, law, administration, or moral hygiene. The old language of politics had never been noble. It was coarse, local, interested, sometimes vulgar, often unjust. But it had one virtue the new order increasingly lacked. It allowed people to understand themselves as participants in rule. The postwar settlement increasingly asked them to understand themselves instead as the objects of administration.
Frank Sobotka stands on the dock in Baltimore and looks at the cranes that no longer lift anything made here. We used to make shit in this country, he says. Build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket. He is not making an economic argument. He is naming a loss of standing, a world where men knew what they were for. The room processes it as a labor dispute. A transition problem. A funding request. His words land in the wrong register and die there. The system has no category for dignity that cannot be quantified. It hears the complaint and offers retraining.
In a pub in Sheffield a steelworker watches his plant close and tries to say what he is losing. It is not just the wages. It is the thing the wages were attached to. He has made things with his hands for twenty years inside a community of men who did the same. He knows how to talk about steel. He does not know how to talk about the feeling that his kind of life has been declared surplus. The television explains that the economy is restructuring. The politician explains that new opportunities will emerge. The social worker explains that retraining programs are available. At no point does anyone explain why what he had should have been taken. At no point is he treated as someone who has lost something worth mourning. He is a transition problem. He is managed.
At a town-hall meeting in a northern English constituency a man in his sixties stands up. His hands shake slightly. I don’t recognize my street anymore, he says. I feel like a stranger in my own town. The moderator thanks him for sharing his feelings. Then she rephrases: what we’re hearing is a natural anxiety about demographic change and the challenges of integration in a dynamic economy. The man opens his mouth to answer. Nothing comes. He has heard this translation before. He knows the next words he want to use are already marked as contaminated. He sits down. The meeting moves on to stakeholder consultations.
The same scene repeats in a thousand variations across the West. A French worker says his neighborhood no longer feels like his. He is told that identity is fluid and that attachment to place is a form of nostalgia best addressed through community outreach programs. An American in a postindustrial town says he wants his leaders to put his people first. He is told that such preferences are atavistic and that true leadership requires cosmopolitan vision. At no point is he argued with. He is corrected. The correction is delivered in the calm, reasonable tone of people who have already decided what reality is and have classified his attachment to a different reality as a failure of understanding.
Carl Schmitt had watched the center of human attention drift from theology to metaphysics to ethics to technology, each step a flight from conflict, until in the technical age there were no enemies, only problems. Conflict became a data error. Passion became a symptom. The postwar order perfected this technique. Questions that used to be settled by democratic contest — borders, belonging, what a nation owes its own before it owes the world — were reclassified as technical or moral minima. Once framed that way, ordinary bargaining became suspect. The side that wanted to contest the issue no longer appeared as a political actor with interests and loyalties. It appeared as a threat to a moral floor that civilization itself required. You could still argue about tax rates. You could not easily argue about the pace and scale of demographic change once that change had been folded into anti-discrimination law and human-rights jurisprudence. The language of the court won by default. The language of the kitchen table was told it had no standing.
Rights language performed the same trick that expertise performed in economics. It protected real people from real cruelty, and that achievement was genuine. But it also removed whole domains of life from democratic contest by reclassifying political questions as pre-political. The side that acquired the language of universal rights did not need to win arguments. It needed only to establish that its opponents were making a different kind of speech — not a rival political claim but a moral violation. Once that move succeeded, the opponent was no longer a political actor to be engaged. He was a symptom to be treated. The expert did not argue with him. The expert explained him.
The people who felt this most keenly were the least equipped to name it. They did not read Schmitt. They did not speak of the neutralization of the political or the migration of sovereign authority into courts and commissions and treaty bodies. They simply noticed that every strong attachment they held — to a particular place, a particular people, a particular inheritance, a particular way of organizing life — arrived in public already half-condemned. They learned to hesitate before speaking. They started sentences and abandoned them mid-breath, because they could feel the word they wanted was the wrong word, and they had watched what happened to people who used it. They watched their words being lifted out of their mouths and replaced with safer ones. The cleverer the translator, the deeper the silence that followed.
What is hardest to recover now is the texture of that muteness. It is easy after the fact to read coherent ideology back into the revolt. But for many people the experience was less articulate than that. A man begins to say what he thinks. He gets as far as it just doesn’t feel and then stops. He knows the next word will be the wrong word. He changes the sentence. By the time he finishes, he has said nothing he meant. He is not stupid. He is not manipulated. He has simply learned, over years of being translated, that the language he thinks in does not have a public form that will be heard as legitimate speech. He has been renamed by strangers and he has no counter-vocabulary because the strangers control the vocabulary.
The more this happened, the more resistance to the order was pathologized. If people objected to immigration, they were anxious, provincial, bigoted, left behind, nostalgic, or deceived by demagogues. If they objected to supranational governance, they were parochial nationalists incapable of grasping interdependence. If they objected to the erosion of common national forms, they were tribal. There were often grains of truth in these descriptions. There were also lies. What they systematically refused to see was that they were themselves political acts. They were the sorting machine applied to democratic populations. They did not describe a pathology outside the order. They protected the order by defining dissent as a symptom.
The genuinely novel thing about the postwar neutralization was not that elites governed in their own interests. Elites have always done that. The novel thing was that the governing class persuaded itself, with considerable sincerity, that it was not a governing class at all. It was a stewardship. It was the custodianship of norms that stood above politics. It was civilization protecting itself from its own temptations. The judge did not rule. He interpreted. The commissioner did not choose. He harmonized. The central banker did not redistribute. He managed. The human rights monitor did not favor one political order over another. He held everyone accountable equally. The sincerity was real. The political nature of the enterprise was invisible to those inside it, which made it invisible to the institutions they ran, which made it impossible to contest on its own terms. To say that the human rights apparatus was itself a political project was to mark yourself as someone who did not understand human rights. The circle closed.
The financial crisis of 2008 cracked the circle without breaking it. Expert stewardship had failed at its own stated task. The managers of complexity had not managed it. The people who paid the heaviest price were not the ones who had designed the system. The technocratic response was more technocracy: stress tests, regulatory reform, quantitative easing, recovery frameworks. The political nature of the choices being made — who would bear the losses, whose savings would be eroded, whose public services would be cut to stabilize the currency unions the elites had built — was dressed in the language of necessity at every stage. There is no alternative, the phrase that had been coined a generation earlier to describe a different set of choices, was pressed back into service. The population was living through a vast redistribution of costs that had been decided by people they had not elected, could not remove, and could barely name. The experts explained that this was how modern economies worked. The explanation did not satisfy. It was not meant to. It was meant to end the conversation.
The Iraq War had done similar damage by different means. A war justified in the language of universal values — democracy, human rights, the responsibility to protect, the civilization of the rules-based order — had produced a catastrophe that the people who promoted it never paid for in any meaningful sense. The language had been borrowed and spent. When the next politician reached for it, it rang hollow in the hands of populations who had watched it authorize disaster. The humanitarian vocabulary did not disappear. But it lost some of its power to shame. People began to hear it differently, as the sound a certain kind of confidence makes when it has not yet noticed that it lost.
Mass migration made the distance between democratic publics and transnational management most visible because it was most concrete. You could not explain away the change to your street with a graph. You could not feel reassured by a commissioner’s statement that integration programs were being funded. The question of how fast and on whose terms a society changes is among the most consequential political questions a democracy can face. The postwar order had progressively insulated it from ordinary political will, classifying the preference for slower change as either an economic misunderstanding or a moral failure. The populations who held the preference were not consulted. They were educated. When they voted for parties that promised to take the question back, those parties were described as dangerous. The description was not wrong about every danger. It was wrong about who had created the conditions.
Social media broke the old monopoly on public speech without replacing it with anything that could channel the energy it released. The respectable world still controlled the institutions. The unrespectable world now had a voice. What came out of that voice was not always coherent, not always admirable, sometimes ugly in ways that the respectable world cited as evidence for everything it had always believed about the people beyond its borders. But the ugliness was also a measure of how long the pressure had been building without release, how many sentences had been started and abandoned, how many translations had been imposed and endured. You do not scream articulately. You scream.
By the early months of 2016 the architecture looked solid. The institutions still met. The papers still printed their editorials. The courts still issued rulings in the language of universal norms. The experts still briefed governments on the necessity of further integration, further mobility, further management. The rules-based liberal order hummed along in its familiar key. The respectable world still believed that history, though occasionally turbulent, remained broadly on its side.
What it could not see, or would not, was that the silence had changed quality. It was no longer the silence of acceptance. It was the silence of people who had stopped trying to speak in a language that had never been built for them, and were waiting for a different kind of speech to become possible.
The table in the diner is set. The song is playing on the jukebox. Meadow is outside, struggling with the curb, getting the wheels straight. A man in a Members Only jacket rises from the counter. He walks toward the bathroom with a purpose no one at the table notices. He passes the framed pictures on the wall. He reaches the door.
The bell rings.
Tony looks up.
The screen goes black.

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The Sovereign Decision: What the Laws of War Say About Who Rules

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

Every legal system requires someone to decide what the law cannot cover. The rules run out at some point — in the hard case, the emergency, the situation the drafters did not anticipate — and at that point someone must decide. The identity of that someone, the question of who holds the authority to make the call when the categories break down, is the deepest political question any legal order faces. In domestic law it surfaces in debates about judicial review and executive power. In international humanitarian law it surfaces in the question of who gets to decide who counts as innocent, who counts as a legitimate target, and who counts as a threat serious enough to justify killing outside any judicial process. That question is not a technical one. It is a sovereignty question. And the history of the laws of war, read carefully, is a history of that question being answered differently in each successive era, with each new answer presented as the natural evolution of humanitarian concern rather than as a redistribution of the most fundamental political power.
Sovereignty is not primarily a legal concept, though lawyers have spent centuries trying to make it one. It is a political fact: the capacity to make the decision that others must live with, including the decision about who falls inside the law’s protection and who falls outside it. In war, that capacity expresses itself most nakedly in the authority to classify. The soldier or the civilian. The legitimate combatant or the unlawful fighter. The innocent bystander or the direct participant. The protected person or the targetable threat. These classifications determine who can be killed with legal sanction and who cannot, and whoever holds the authority to make them holds the power of life and death over everyone the classification touches. The laws of war have always regulated that authority, but they have never eliminated it. What they have done, across more than a century of humanitarian development, is move it.
At the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, the answer was unambiguous. The classification authority sat with states, specifically with the great powers whose negotiators wrote the rules and whose consent determined what counted as binding. The laws of war at this stage are an expression of sovereign equality among the powers that mattered, with the rest of the world irrelevant to the negotiation. The relevant classification was between the lawful combatant and the unlawful fighter, and the criteria for that classification — uniform, open arms, responsible command, fixed distinctive sign — were designed by states to protect the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. The franc-tireur, the farmer who took up a rifle without satisfying these formal conditions, was placed outside the law’s protection not because he was more dangerous than a regular soldier but because he represented a claim to legitimate violence that bypassed the state entirely. That claim was the threat. The Hague rules addressed it by excluding it: the irregular fighter received admiration, in some quarters genuine admiration, but no legal recognition. The admiration was safe precisely because it came without recognition. You could praise the heroic partisan while executing him, and the law would support the execution.
The Martens Clause, inserted into the 1899 Convention as a resolution to a genuine disagreement between delegations, has been read ever since as a humanitarian concession to the reality of popular resistance. It declared that in cases not covered by the written rules, populations and belligerents remained under the protection of the law of nations as established by the usages of nations and the laws of humanity. This sounds generous. In practice it left the irregular fighter in exactly the position he had occupied before, outside the formal legal order, subject to the judgment of the very commanders whose authority he was challenging. The clause acknowledged the existence of a moral reality it declined to protect legally. That is not a concession. It is the sovereign decision to maintain the boundary while appearing to soften it.
Nuremberg fractured this boundary in ways that have not been fully resolved since. The International Military Tribunal asserted, for the first time in the history of international law with binding force, that the sovereign decision to go to war could itself be a crime. This was a direct challenge to the Westphalian premise that states are answerable to no external authority for their decisions about the use of force. When Robert Jackson argued that the supreme crime is aggression because it contains within it the accumulated evil of everything that follows, he was not just making a legal claim. He was asserting a form of sovereignty above the state, a jurisdiction that could reach inside the cabinet room and judge the decision that sovereignty had previously made unreachable.
The language in this assertion reveals the political structure of the claim. Jackson and the other prosecutors framed Nuremberg as civilization judging barbarism, humanity judging its enemies, reason overcoming revenge. This framing did something precise and consequential. It stripped the Nazi leadership of the status of a legitimate enemy, a justus hostis in the classical law of nations sense, someone you fight, defeat, and eventually make peace with. The Nuremberg defendants were not defeated enemies. They were criminals against humanity itself. That reclassification had a political logic. If your enemy is merely a rival sovereign, he retains dignity in defeat and the possibility of reconciliation. If your enemy is the enemy of humanity, he forfeits both. The classification determines the treatment, and the classification was made by the victors.
This does not mean Nuremberg was unjust. The crimes were real and the accountability was genuine. But it does mean that the assertion of a sovereignty above the state at Nuremberg was not a neutral legal development. It was a political act performed by specific powers in specific circumstances that happened to align the judgment of the victors with the judgment of history. The authority to declare that a state’s use of force is not merely wrong but criminal, that its leaders are not merely mistaken but outlaws, is an enormously powerful instrument, and its exercise is never separate from the political interests of those who wield it.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions performed a quieter but in some ways more durable migration of the classification authority. They remained formally state-centric: negotiated by states, ratified by states, enforced through state cooperation. But by placing individual human beings at the center of the protective framework, by insisting that the prisoner of war, the wounded soldier, and the occupied civilian hold rights that no state can simply override, they introduced a competing locus of authority that was not the state. The sovereign claim embedded in the Geneva Conventions is modest but real: that the state’s power over the bodies of those it holds is not unlimited, that there is a standard external to state discretion against which that power can be measured and found wanting. The standard was not yet enforced by any effective mechanism. But its existence changed the structure of the claim. The state was no longer the sole judge of its own conduct.
The shift became explicit in 1977. The Additional Protocols’ recognition of wars of national liberation as international armed conflicts was a sovereignty statement of the first order, and it was understood as such by the states that resisted it most vigorously. To say that a movement without a state can hold rights and obligations under international law, that the PLO has standing at a diplomatic conference that is shaping the laws of war, is to say that sovereignty is not the precondition of legal personality but something that can be claimed in the course of struggle. The traditional international legal order had treated the state as the only relevant subject. The Protocols opened a crack in that premise.
But the crack was immediately controlled. The liberation fighter who received recognition had to accept the disciplinary framework of the laws of war as the price of that recognition. He had to carry arms openly, distinguish himself from the civilian population, operate under a responsible command structure. He had to become, in the formal sense, something like a soldier of a state-in-formation. The revolutionary was absorbed into the state form even as his revolutionary cause was acknowledged. The civilian population that fed him, sheltered him, and sustained his movement remained in their previous position: protected in principle, exposed in practice, always at risk of losing protection at the moment they acted. The crack in state sovereignty was real, but the framework closed around it quickly.
What happened in the 1990s was more radical, and more insidious, because it happened without anyone quite declaring it. When the legal literature on the Kosovo campaign in 1999 turned to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as the authoritative sources for what Additional Protocol I required as customary law, the classification authority migrated to institutions that held none of sovereignty’s traditional attributes. No territory. No population. No army. No formal democratic mandate. No process of ratification or consent. What HRW and Amnesty held was credibility, access, and the ability to fix events in the public record in ways that the legal academy then treated as authoritative. They declared Additional Protocol I binding on all states without citing evidence of customary practice, and the academic lawyers who wrote about Kosovo followed their footnotes. The moment of choice, the political decision about whose violence would be constrained and whose would be legitimized, disappeared into the appearance of expert consensus.
This is sovereignty at its most effective and most opaque. The great power at least has a flag. The international tribunal at least has a charter and a defined jurisdiction. The NGO that declares what custom requires has neither, yet exercises something functionally equivalent to the classification authority that has always been the heart of sovereign power in the laws of war. It decides, in its reports, who counts as a civilian victim and who counts as a legitimate target. It decides whether a particular attack satisfies the proportionality standard or violates it. It decides, by the pattern of its documentation and the conclusions of its analyses, which deaths the international community is invited to mourn and which are explained away as the unfortunate but lawful consequences of military necessity. These decisions shape law, shape policy, and shape the conditions under which future violence will be conducted. The entity making them is accountable to no electorate and subject to no constitutional constraint. Its authority rests entirely on the willingness of others to treat it as authoritative, which is itself a political fact, sustained by the same kind of consensus that sustained the dominance of military lawyers before the 1990s and will sustain whatever comes next.
The Israeli Supreme Court’s 2006 targeted killings decision crystallized the next migration. President Barak’s declaration that there are no black holes in international law, that every person in every conflict falls within the law’s reach, is one of the most consequential sovereignty claims in the history of the field. On its surface it sounds like an expansion of legal protection: no one is beyond the law’s concern. In practice it works in the opposite direction. By insisting that there are no spaces outside the law, Barak ensured that the state’s authority reaches everywhere, because the law the state brings with it is the law the state interprets. The terrorist who does not qualify as a lawful combatant must be a civilian. The civilian who takes a direct part in hostilities loses protection for such time as she does so. The determination of what counts as direct participation, what continuous combat function means, how long the loss of protection lasts, all of this opens into a field of legal argumentation that the state’s lawyers control.
What the court built was a legal architecture in which the classification authority the state exercises is legitimized by the law rather than constrained by it. The targeting decision is not a political decision anymore, or not only a political decision. It is a legal determination, made by officials trained in international humanitarian law, applying criteria that humanitarian lawyers helped develop, subject in principle to judicial review. The decision to kill has been laundered through a legal process that gives it a quality of legitimacy that the naked sovereign decision would lack. The classification is no longer the general deciding that this farmer with a rifle deserves to die. It is the targeting lawyer deciding that this individual’s pattern of life meets the threshold for continuous combat function, that the anticipated military advantage exceeds the expected civilian harm, that the strike is therefore lawful. The political decision and the legal authorization have become the same act.
The development of algorithmic targeting systems has extended this logic to its present extreme. Systems designed to identify targets process behavioral telemetry, location data, communication patterns, and associational networks to generate lists of people who meet the threshold for targeting. The classification decision, which has always been the core sovereign act in the laws of war, is now made upstream, embedded in the design of the system, expressed in the choice of which signals to weight and which thresholds to apply. The person who writes the code that defines suspicious behavior is exercising a form of sovereignty over everyone whose behavior the system will subsequently evaluate. The decision is made once, abstractly, in an office somewhere, and then applied automatically to thousands of people who will never know they have been classified.
This is not a departure from the history of the classification authority. It is its culmination. The Hague commanders decided case by case, looking at individual fighters and making individual judgments. The Nuremberg tribunal decided retrospectively, looking at the decisions of leaders after the war was over. The Geneva framework decided categorically, defining classes of protected persons and leaving individual determination to the parties in the field. The NGO analysts decided publicly, in reports that shaped the framework of accountability. The targeting lawyer decided procedurally, within a legal architecture designed to legitimize the decision while maintaining its practical effect. The algorithm decides structurally, by building the classification into the system itself so that no individual decision is visible and no individual decision-maker is fully accountable.
At each stage, the migration was presented as an improvement. The categorical protections of Geneva were more reliable than individual commander discretion. The procedural safeguards of the modern targeting process were more accountable than the informal decisions of the Cold War. The algorithmic system is more consistent than human judgment, less susceptible to the biases and errors of the individual analyst. Each of these claims contains some truth. What none of them acknowledges is that the migration of the classification authority is simultaneously a migration of sovereign power, and that the direction of the migration has consistently been toward less visible, less accountable, and less contestable forms of decision-making.
The populist nationalist movements currently challenging the authority of international humanitarian law and international criminal law are, whatever else they are, a reassertion of the visibility principle. When a leader refuses to submit to ICC jurisdiction, he is saying that the classification authority belongs to the state, that the decision about whose violence is legitimate is a political decision that must be made by a politically accountable actor, not by an international institution whose democratic legitimacy is unclear and whose enforcement capacity is dependent on the cooperation of the very states it purports to judge. This argument is sometimes made in bad faith, as cover for impunity. It is also sometimes made in good faith, as a genuine objection to the opacity of the authority that the humanitarian framework has accumulated. The objection deserves engagement rather than dismissal, because the accumulation is real and the opacity is real, and the question of whether the entity that now holds something like the classification authority in international humanitarian law is more or less legitimate than the state it has partially displaced is not one that the humanitarian framework can answer from within its own terms.
The search for a new framework that might recognize the legitimate self-defense of the stateless, that might detach innocence from passivity and protect the person who acts as well as the person who endures, runs into the same problem at a deeper level. The moment you say that protection should follow from the justness of the position, you must answer the question that has no neutral answer: just according to whom? Every party to every conflict believes its violence is justified. The formal neutrality of the humanitarian framework, which treats aggressors and defenders alike once the war has begun, is not a moral failure. It is the condition under which the framework can operate without becoming merely the legal expression of one side’s political claim. Abandon that neutrality and you are no longer in the domain of law as it has existed since the Hague Conventions. You are in the domain of the political, where the authority to decide is always someone’s authority, always exercised from some position, always serving some interests alongside the universal ones it claims to serve.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of honesty. The classification authority has always been political. The history of the laws of war is the history of that authority migrating across different institutions, each presenting itself as more neutral, more principled, more humanitarian than the one it replaced, none of them fully delivering on that claim because none of them could. The state commander was political. The international tribunal was political. The NGO analyst was political. The targeting algorithm is political, most of all when it looks most like a technical process. The question is not how to find an institution that can make the classification decision without politics. That institution does not exist. The question is how to make the decision visible, contestable, and accountable enough that those who bear its consequences have some meaningful capacity to challenge it.
That is a harder question than the one the humanitarian framework has been asking. The humanitarian framework has been asking how to make the classification more precise, more consistent, more legally defensible. Precision, consistency, and legal defensibility are real goods. They are not the same good as accountability. A system can be extremely precise in its classifications and entirely opaque about who made the decision and on what grounds. A system can be legally defensible from within its own framework and still exercise a form of power over human lives that no democratic theory can justify. The history of sovereign authority in the laws of war is a history of institutions learning to be more precise while becoming less visible, of the classification decision becoming more technically sophisticated and simultaneously harder to contest.
The next chapter in that history is being written now, in the design of algorithmic targeting systems, in the legal arguments about what continuous combat function means and how long it lasts, in the political battles over ICC jurisdiction and the definition of aggression, in the questions about whether a state can strike anywhere it identifies a threat regardless of the territorial sovereignty of the state where the threat resides. Each of these debates is a debate about where the classification authority sits and who can challenge it. They are sovereignty debates dressed in the language of law. They always have been.

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