1 Moyn’s ultimate objective is to explain how efforts to create a truly “humanitarian” international law in the last few decades have, instead, “made war more durable”. And it is in my appraisal of this dichotomy where I find the majority of my comments and reservations.Īs Emma Mackinnon notes in her own review, Humane “tells a long history in order to argue for a short one”. Was Humane a revisionist history of the laws of war – the “upending” of the “conventional stories that are told about law, progress and war”, as Naz Modirzadeh’s back cover praise suggested? Or an indictment on American 21st-century imperialism – an anti-war “activist bible for Gen Z”, to quote Anne-Marie Slaughter’s blurb? In fact, I concluded, it is both. And yet, as I put the book down, I could not help but wonder what exactly I had been reading. It is a gripping tale and a highly enjoyable read that deserves the excitement it has generated. I picked up Samuel Moyn’s latest book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, on a Saturday morning.
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