The Thin Red Line

Wars are about to get more vicious as the concept of 'human' is becoming narrower

- Subir Sinha

AS the year comes to an end, three major wars—Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza, Vladimir Putin’s pulverisation of Ukraine and the lesser-known but no less murderous, the ‘civil’ war in Sudan—rage on. International diplomacy and the international legal order seem unable or unwilling to bring these hostilities to an end. In addition to human lives, homes and homelands, these wars have blown the fiction of ‘a rule- based global order’ and the related lie of ‘just war’, to smithereens.

Bob Marley’s 1976 song speaks of wars without end. At any time, some part of the world is engulfed in, struggling out of, or preparing to go to war.

Wars seem to be a permanent condition of human life. They are the purest examples of human barbarity, though paradoxically, they are always waged in defence of civilisation and for the promise of an elusive peace. Wars remain popular—they energise flagging political fortunes, give us new heroes and a sense of collective identity. Even genocides are popular—the actions of the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza and the continuation of Putin’s operations in Ukraine are gaining massive support among Israelis and Russians, respectively.

When are wars ‘justified’? When is the conduct of wars ‘just’? The answers to these two related questions have long been dominated by liberal international relations theory, and its subsidiary—the ‘just war’ theory. With the terminal decline of liberal world order—a process that gained speed in the 1990s—these theories, too, have lost ground.

The need to go to war is recognised in international law—as wars start when politics and diplomacy have failed, and there is verifiable evidence that some party has dangerous weapons, attacked another country and taken its territory, and has a deranged leadership. When such conditions apply—as the collective West argued in the early 2000s in relation to Iraq—a war is justified.