To Make War Safer, Make Peace Safer

Thank you for the introduction and for the honor of this invitation to give the 2024 William V. O'Brien Lecture in International Law and Morality.

Let me begin with this assertion: safer war also requires a safer peace. 

I say that because we need to repair our ethics as much as our law. We have become careless about life, and it shows. Whether it is the brutal Russian assaults on Ukraine’s cities, people, and infrastructure; or Hamas’s assault on Israeli civilians on October 7 and the Netanyahu government’s subsequent disproportionate response, or Iran’s broadside of 300 drones and missiles, we have become careless about innocent lives. They don’t seem to matter.

Carelessness in war begins in peace. It is a continuation of the same thread of neglect. The current so-called polycrisis, a topic to which I will return, speaks of a world gripped by the ravages of climate failure, debt, and poverty as well as governmental dysfunction. We are failing people everywhere.

I acknowledge that its opposite, solidarity, has been at best a precarious and occasional presence in modern history. It is not as if we have tipped from a past perfect to a present imperfect. Our history is evidently one of exploitation and inhumanity at least as much as it is one of decency and respect.

But I do want to argue tonight that we are going in the wrong direction. Both war and peace are nastier than they were 20 years ago. We are reverting to a more barbarous past.

For 18 years, according to Freedom House, democracy has declined globally; the great progresses in life expectancy, universal education, and health along with jobs and equality that had progressed more rapidly than at anytime in global history during the 1990s and 2000s when, coincidentally but luckily, I served at the World Bank and the UN have stalled and in some cases reversed. The world is uglier, angrier, and more unequal than 20 years ago.

Stating that can seem so overwhelmingly big that it drains us of will and agency to do anything about it. What can we do? The task can seem beyond us.

In and out of a UN career, first on the frontline of refugee crises in the 1970s and 1980s and then later as a senior policy-maker, I was very lucky to learn the most important of lessons: we can make a difference. Whether through:

• lives saved as colleagues went the extra mile to get aid delivered;
• protection extended to victims by UN staff brave enough to share the dangers of a war zone to bear witness;
• and for me the occasionally much more systemic opportunities to effect change, like fashioning the Millenium Development Goals, the predecessors to today’s Sustainable Development Goals, delivering transformational change for millions through their redirection of global priorities and policies. Researchers across town at Brookings have put the number of lives thus saved by the MDGs at between 20.9 million and 30.3 million.

But let me take as an example a small thing, but done when I was in a position of admittedly some power. Because it’s about individual action.

The time: 2006. The place: the 38th floor of the United Nations building in New York, where I had my office as Deputy Secretary-General. An office I had known decades earlier when as a U.S. political science Masters student when I had sat immediately outside it as an intern.

During that period more often than not our first conversations in my team would be about the latest events halfway around the world, in Darfur, Sudan. 

By then the conflict there had been raging for three years, a violent struggle between the Sudanese government along with its allied Janjaweed militias, against rebel groups in the country’s western Darfur region. Civilians had been repeatedly bombed, there was strong evidence of ethnic cleansing, and hundreds of thousands had fled.

The overnight news would typically bring fresh reports of atrocities and suffering.

Yet I knew enough about the dulling routines of the UN headquarters to know that even New York Times headlines were not necessarily enough to maintain our vigilance. Colleagues recounted the grim lessons of the war in Bosnia a decade earlier. Especially the massacre at Srebrenica, where on that same 38th floor the routine of interdepartmental meetings and intergovernmental committees had distracted officials from the strange silence emanating from that supposedly protected “safe area.” UN peacekeepers had been apprehended and disarmed and a terrible massacre of Bosniak men and boys was underway. Ten years later I stood in solemn silence at their grave sites in Srebrenica with the chronicler, Samantha Power, now USAID chief and swore: Never again.

Never again. So we did everything we could to keep the nightmare in Darfur top of agendas within the organization and beyond it. To the top team, I handed out a small green rubber bracelet that read “Not On Our Watch: Save Darfur.” I told colleagues: “from the moment you clean your teeth in the morning, to the last thing at night when you reach out to kiss a loved one goodnight, I want you never to forget Darfur.” 

Civil society was stepping up with the Save Darfur Coalition. Major world leaders of the time like Nelson Mandela and his successor Thabo Mbeki, their counterpart President Obasanjo in Nigeria, George W. Bush here, and Tony Blair among others engaged. Memories not just of Bosnia but also of the Rwandan genocide drove this collective act of conscience. Never again.

I share this example not because the international community’s response to that crisis was perfect—it certainly was not—but rather because it captures a different time and ethic for the international community. Sudan’s President Bashir, with whom I had to engage with then and later when I was a British minister, was intransigent and shameless. A war criminal. Several former colleagues have remained adamant we didn’t do enough to stop him. But although we fell short, we cared and kept shining a spotlight. 

Could that be said of today’s crises? Just look at the latest calamity to strike that benighted country: the civil war in Sudan that began one year ago today.

This has received just a fraction of the attention and energies spent on mitigating and stopping the war in Darfur almost 20 years ago. I recently sat down with Jan Egeland who had been our humanitarian chief in the UN at that time; he now runs the Norwegian Refugee Council. He had just come back from the region. He observed more people are dying in Darfur now than then and many more are displaced. But again, as in Srebrenica, a great silence prevails. The world sleeps. 

In a world of so-called polycrisis, in which wars burn in Ukraine and Gaza, but also Sudan, the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], Myanmar, and recently Ethiopia, interacting with myriad other forms of environmental and economic disruption, it feels like there simply is not the bandwidth to respond to them all. Those in Gaza and Ukraine seize our attention. The rest are neglected—forgotten even—though several are probably yet more lethal.

Professor William V. O’Brien, in whose honor this lecture series is named, helped to codify our understanding of the idea of “just war,” including the requirement that it be limited and proportionate. As he put it: “recourse to armed coercion is a perennial feature of the human condition.” I don’t contest that. Indeed, I wholly support the UN Charter’s assertion that the right of sovereign self-defense is paramount to collective peace and security. 

But perhaps because I have lived a significant part of my life amidst other peoples’ wars, I have grown deeply wary of the claim that any war’s conduct is just. Motive? Perhaps. But conduct? No.

There is always collateral damage. Civilians are always placed in harm’s way. Pillage, sexual violence, displacement, disenfranchisement almost always follow when people take up arms against one other. The vulnerable and weak are a target because they are just that.

And they are being targeted all the more today. The Geneva Conventions and the other rules of war still stand, but our respect for them has sharply declined—as has our respect for humanity and sanctity of human life.

I was a twenty-something UN refugee official when an abandoned Cambodian baby died in my arms, denied the chance of life and all it means and can offer. My first encounter with a war death, and one that has remained with me. Three weeks ago I held my first newly born grandchild. He is surrounded by love and security. So as I speak to you tonight I am struck by the lottery of life in a world scarred by war, and the anger we should all feel at that. For it does not have to be a casino. It could be inclusive world of rules and institutions with protection for all. 

***

The deteriorating global picture is alarmingly apparent from the numbers: wars are more numerous now than in a generation, they are more persistent, and they are harming more civilians.  

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program shows that 2022 saw the highest number of armed conflicts—182 including one-sided acts of violence, non-state conflicts, and intra-state conflict—since the end of the Cold War. The latest edition of the Global Peace Index found 2022 to have been the deadliest year for armed conflict since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.  

2023 is likely to have been worse still.

Meanwhile, analysis by The Economist shows that where in the mid-1980s the average ongoing conflict had been raging for 13 years, the figure by 2021 was 20 years. And the total number of forcibly displaced people rose from a record 110 million last June to a new record of over 114 million only by the end of last September.

In December, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Ted Chaiban said that: “In the entirety of my more than 25-year career with UNICEF, it is hard to recall a year in which the situation facing children affected by conflict and disaster has been as dire as the one we are currently witnessing.”

What explains this?  

The term polycrisis is heavily used these days. Some would say overused! But that fact says something of the urgency and undeniability of what it captures:

• disruption and vacuums of power caused by geopolitical shifts
• pressures on natural resources often exacerbated by the climate crisis
• rising authoritarianism driving the oppression of minorities
• polarization fueled by inequality and new technologies
• and weaknesses in the multilateral system and a breakdown of norms in a new “age of impunity”

First coined by the French sociologist Edgar Morin in the 1970s and since re-popularized by the economic historian Adam Tooze, “polycrisis” expresses the ways in which those factors interact and reinforce each other. 

Take that civil war in Sudan, one year old today. 

It broke out against a backdrop of droughts as well as disruptions to food and fertilizer prices and supply chains linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

These contributed to and have worsened the humanitarian impact of the war. I might ruefully add the war in Sudan also is a war of an unresolved past. My generation of diplomats failed in the 2000s despite the green bracelets, protecting lives but falling short on addressing root causes.

And in various of its awful traits the conflict itself typifies others of our age:

• domestic polarization intersects with wider regional and struggles for influence; not just old global rivals like the U.S., Russia and China but neighbors like the Gulf States and Egypt
• the rules of war are flagrantly disregarded
• and the international humanitarian system has thus far failed to marshal the resources needed to meet the scale of the disaster

A report by UN sanctions monitors in January supplied some sense of the dire conditions on the ground, estimating between 10,000 and 15,000 people killed in just one city, El Geneina, in West Darfur. It accuses the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces—the direct progeny of the Janjaweed militia of my day—of targeting the Masalit tribe in attacks that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

It strongly suggests that the official death toll from the conflict of some 13,000 is a major underestimate. Meanwhile some 10.7 million people have fled to other parts of Sudan and neighboring countries and at least half of its population of 45 million are in humanitarian need. The country is now sliding into a famine that will likely kill many more than the fighting itself. Aid shipments have been disrupted by the security crisis in the Red Sea.  

But as of January, the UN’s response scheme was just 3.1 percent funded. Let us all hope that the Sudan humanitarian conference that took place earlier today in Paris marks a turning point. And the U.S. has appointed a former OSF colleague of mine, Tom Perriello, as its energetic new envoy.

What the Sudan case shows is that the polycrisis is most fundamentally about a crisis of confidence in governance—and values. Do we care? Without a common sense of justice and equality institutions fail, the machinery of international order breaks down, and from that cascade down all manner of other crises.

Clausewitz famously said that: “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” When peaceful politics runs out of road, it “continues” as war. The answer, then, lies in expanding the capacity of and confidence in peaceful politics. 

*** 

Within this overall landscape, let me pick out three specific developments that I believe speak to the need for a “safer peace” and point the way towards how we can achieve it. 

The first such development is the mainstreaming of unconventional warfare. We are used to the idea that weapons like drones and improvised, indiscriminate munitions like barrel bombs can be used by terrorist groups or other insurgencies that have never heard of the Geneva Convention let alone studied it. 

What is notable about many of today’s wars is that regular militaries are increasingly adopting those methods, too. Asymmetric warfare is too much of a temptation. Take Iran’s 300 drones launched at Israel this weekend as an example. Or the widespread dropping of primitive barrel bombs by the Syrian regime. Or the use of chemical attacks against both combatants and non-combatants in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

The taboo against such methods has been gradually eroded. The higher standards to which conventional militaries claim to hold themselves, compared with unconventional combatants, seem to be slipping. 

And bodies like the UN Security Council often fail to draw the line. Indeed in some cases, like Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine such as the vital Trypillya power plant near Kyiv destroyed by strikes last Thursday, its own permanent members have perpetrated them. 

Even the military planners across the Potomac from here in Arlington have questions to answer. My colleagues at the Open Society Justice Initiative, our strategic litigation unit, have unearthed case studies from Yemen casting serious doubts on whether the United States’s standard of “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured” in its drone strikes has been met in practice. 

Restoring the taboo on the use of unconventional tactics by conventional militaries is an important step towards making war safer. 

*** 

The second development I want to highlight is the breakdown of the post Cold-War development order. 

As I see it, there have been three development orders since 1945. The initial one was the reconstruction of Europe after the end of World War Two by the West with its Marshall Plan, the Soviet Union, and new multilateral bodies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

This then evolved into the second development order in the 1960s and 1970s, it too shaped by geopolitics and security. As the fault lines of the Cold War had largely stabilized and waves of former colonies became independent countries, proxy wars raged in places like Southeast Asia. 

The multilateral system—blocked by Soviet-American confrontation from fulfilling much of its political mission as originally conceived in the brief afterglow of 1945—evolved accordingly. It provided invaluable technical assistance to newly independent states and greatly expanded its humanitarian vocation in response to the upheavals of a Cold War playing out in the relative political vacuum of the collapse of European, primarily British and French Empires.

I would experience that in my early career working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border, and then elsewhere in the post-Vietnam era. Although that was often cleaning up after a putative American Empire! Aid in those days was geopolitically determined. It went to buy and keep allies, whatever their domestic record, in the great struggle for dominance.

I then experienced the third development order. After the end of the Cold War, aid was driven less by high geopolitics and more by technocratic criteria of poverty reduction and other measurable development outcomes.

Hence the prominence of my Millenium Development Goals. They were the manifesto for this era, an investment of the post-1989 peace dividend, where defense budgets would shrink and not only would development budgets grow but they would be freed of the political criteria of the past. Money would finally go to where it could make a difference, rather than to subsidizing dictators. The energetic civil society and multilateral response to the crisis in Darfur belonged too to that moment.  

To understand that trajectory is to understand the struggles faced by the multilateral system now. 

Interests have once more eclipsed values as the prime political currency of the times; and aid budgets and the fiscal firepower of multilateral development banks have shrunk in relative terms over the post-2008-crash years as governments have looked inwards and found their budgets under strain. 

My own home country, Britain, both championed spending 0.7 percent of GDP on international development and practiced what it preached both in the Labour government in which I served and, initially, under its Conservative successors. 

Alas, that has now fallen to 0.5 percent and seems unlikely to rise significantly irrespective of the outcome of the looming general election. And in Britain as elsewhere, more of that aid is now being spent at home: according to figures released last week, over a quarter of the total budget was going towards housing asylum seekers within the country. 

The current cycle of the International Development Association, the World Bank’s concessional funding mechanism for the world’s 75 lowest-income countries, has been fast depleted by intensifying crises of debt, climate, and conflict. Debt service payments by those states reached a record $89 billion in 2022 and are expected to have risen a further 39 percent by the end of this year.  

At the mid-point of the implementation period of the Sustainable Development Goals, the successor measures to the Millennium Development Goals, last year only 15 percent were on track; 48 percent were moderately or severely off track; and 37 percent were in stagnation or reverse.

As you hear those statistics, reflect again on what they mean for states teetering on the brink of war, or already experiencing conflicts, and their capacity to cool the rivalries, appetites, and furies speeding them towards unrestrained violence.  

As progress on development goals stall, states intended to benefit from that progress are left in the lurch. 

***

The third factor driving unsafe war and disregard for international legal order is the lack of a sense of common ownership of that order.

Across the non-Western world, one often finds a widespread sense that the present justice system was designed by white jurists in the immediate aftermath of 1945. Widespread not least because it is largely correct!

The drafting of the Geneva Conventions, the modern framework for war crimes tribunals rooted in Nuremberg trials, the establishment of the International Court of Justice—these grew out of World War II, out of European soil.

The conventions were pointedly signed on the same table as the first Geneva Convention in 1864, a product of the Battle of Solferino between France, Sardinia, and Austria!

The very architecture of the Peace Palace in The Hague, home to the International Court of Justice, evokes Western universities and cathedrals. 

More substantively, the International Criminal Court has in recent times stood accused of elevating Western legal traditions above others and of concentrating excessively on African cases, with the African Union even urging its members to withdraw from it in the recent past.

One does not have to agree with such accusations, or believe that these Western roots delegitimize the institutions, to recognize why the perceptions matter. And to realize how resonant it can also be when some of the most respected instances of justice in action have been local ones, established under local leadership rather than imposed from the outside. 

For example: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by Nelson Mandela and chaired by Desmond Tutu, with its firm emphasis on reparation and forgiveness. Or the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which based in Arusha, Tanzania, helped to deliver some real justice for the victims of the Rwandan genocide. 

We recently passed the 30th anniversary of that genocide. Let me draw your attention to a speech delivered by Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, on April 7 at a ceremony in Kigali to mark that moment. 

I realize that President Kagame is a highly contentious figure to quote. But he exemplifies attitudes beyond the West that those of us in cities like this one need better to understand.

In his speech, he hailed Rwanda’s progress and specifically its “choice… to reverse the arrow of accountability, which used to point outwards, beyond our borders.” He meant by that a blaming of the French, Bill Clinton, the UN, and others but now he said: “we are accountable to each other, above all.” 

If “naming and shaming” human rights violators from the outside ever worked, it certainly does not work now. Kagame’s arrow does have to be redirected inwards. A lot of this lecture has dwelt on international or individual accountability. But the other element is national accountability.

As the Columbia University political scientist Jack Snyder puts it in his book “Human Rights for Pragmatists”: “The strategy of human rights promotion that gave a central role to ‘naming and shaming’ was based on flawed social and psychological assumptions that are ripe for reassessment.” 

In his speech, President Kagame railed against UN failure to stop the genocide and even the protection of a genocidaire in its own ranks and an American ambassador who was only interested in protecting foreign lives. But then he rose above his own anger and acknowledged that ultimately “We, Rwandans” are accountable for what happened and for a better future. Solidarity begins at home.

But it doesn’t stop there. The uncomfortable truth for the West is as values and agency from the so-called Global South break through onto the main stages of international cooperation, instances of Western perceived double standards become showstoppers.

For example, South Africa’s case in the ICJ against Israel over the conduct of its operation in Gaza. As the commentator Nesrine Malik has put it: “The ICJ case shows how western logic is wearing thin and its persuasive power waning in a multipolar world. The significance of the fact that the country bringing the case is South Africa—an icon of the ravages of colonialism, settlement, and apartheid—cannot be lost on anyone.”

Non-Westerns states are showing more confidence and initiative in a legal order build primarily in the West, by Westerners, and mostly in Western legal and philosophical traditions. That is a notable change.  

*** 

Let me close by returning to the core of this lecture speech—safer war—from which I have strayed. But for a good reason: the safer the peace, the less frequent the war, and the higher the ethical guardrails in those cases where conflict does break out. 

When it comes to the adoption of terror tactics by government troops and air forces, the sheer outrage this has generated in some—if certainly not all—of the cases in question is a force that can be harnessed. In an era of 24/7 live-streamed and social-media-intensive war, atrocities are harder to hide. Citizens have taken to the streets to march for peace.  

There is room now for new civil society coalitions and initiatives to hold governments, especially democratic ones, to higher standards, and to strive towards a global reset of expectations when it comes to the proportionality and conduct of war, and the protections of civilians and aid infrastructure. All this is there in law already, even if it could no doubt be usefully updated to cover the risks of drones and cyber. But so it is a matter of values and political will.

And when it comes to the legitimacy of the international legal order beyond its Western heartlands, the “rise of the rest” brings not just challenges, but opportunities too: deep new wells of leadership and initiative. 

Whether these constitute challenges to the hypocrisis within that order (like South Africa’s case in the ICJ), acts of individual impetus (like Kenya’s move to send police officers to Haiti to curb gang violence), or wider moves to re-found that order and open it up to other legal and philosophical traditions, these new sources of dynamism are to be welcomed.

 ***

Let me conclude by returning to where I started: the global response to the war in Darfur. 

The global community’s response to that crisis was flawed in all sorts of ways; failures measured in the hundreds of thousands of dead and displaced, and the renewed nightmare Sudan is experiencing today on this grim first anniversary of its current civil war. 

But it is a memory of a time when governance—multilateral, national, civil society, NGO—commanded greater confidence and could aspire to have a greater positive impact. Restoring that confidence is the most fundamental step we can take towards resolving the polycrisis and building a safer peace.

This is a bleak topic, one where any realistic hopes of success envisage not global peace but merely wars fought with a little more consideration for the lives and livelihoods of innocent civilians.  

It evokes the famous quote by Dag Hammarskjöld, that greatest of UN Secretaries-General: “It has been said that the United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.”

So, bluntly, the law is not the problem; our politics and our values are. We need to recover a sense of solidarity and find a spirit of inclusion. The world is both more integrated but more divided than ever before.

This is not meant as some sentimental call for a golden age that never was, but rather a bleak warning: “carry on this way and it is not just the victims of war who will suffer, but rather all of us who will become victims of an unsafe peace where the biblical scourges of floods, pestilence and famine, as well as war, will increasingly threaten us.” 

And perhaps in this year of elections, when more people will vote than ever before, it’s time to see victims of war as not something that happens over there to other people but as a symptom of our own failure. We have let the world go off the rails. Not for the first time and no doubt not for the last.

I suspect we will see uncomfortable electoral results because there is a surging impatience for change in most electorates; for something better or at least different. They have felt the polycrisis, even if their aging leaderships have not. Here and elsewhere the conflict in, for example, Gaza, will influence how people vote.

It is no coincidence that in a world where hundreds of thousands can be starved to death as an instrument of war is also where a growing number of Americans cannot get home insurance because of climate threats. There are deep connections between these crises. Government, or order, has deserted us all, in many different ways. 

War and its conduct are coming home. An accountability beckons. 

Thank you.