The laws of war: Reflections on Alexander's understanding of the institutional requisites for creating a more peaceful world

Abstract

In ‘The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv’, offers a meditation framed by civil sphere theory to explore what is necessary for effectively combatting interstate war and related forms of violence, doing so by discussing both the historical origins of civil society and the matter of boundaries in limiting the exercise of civic power beyond a state's borders. Agreeing with Alexander's assessment, this reflection stresses the agonistic character of the perpetual struggle between peacemakers and warmakers and the increased dangers to humanity resulting from the new weapons of war made possible by the Military-Industrial Complex. It concludes by highlighting the centrality of law if civil power is to trump warrior culture, and if democracy is to offer a path to a more peaceful world.

Alexander's (2006a) now decades long project of developing Civil Sphere Theory (CST) has sought in various ways to make sense of the promise and the peril attending to creating and preserving robust democratic societies, and the justice and equality claims made possible by democratic governance. The usually implicit assumption is that democracies predicated on the rule of law are more inclined to peace than authoritarian societies. Most of this work has focused on the workings of the civil sphere within nation states, with relatively little attention paid to the possibilities of a transnational or global civil sphere. In ‘The civil sphere in war and peace’ (2026), Alexander turns his attention to the value commitments and institutional structures necessary to create a more peaceful world than the one we inhabit. In his article, he both locates the emergence of civil society historically and addresses the limits of civil society imposed by boundaries – specifically, the boundaries of states, be they the city states of the ancient world or the nation states of today.

The question posed is how is it possible to constrain and contain the forces propelling nations to opt for war and its violent surrogates? Keenly aware of the failures of all such efforts to date, Alexander does point to two ingredients necessary in any attempt to make constraint and containment possible. The first involves creating the institutional structure requisite for civil society to flourish, which CST divides into two types: communicative and regulatory institutions. Alexander (2026) finds in Aeschylus’ Oresteia a portrayal of ‘the eventual triumph of law over revenge, peace over bloodletting, and self-government over tyranny’. The second is reflected in the reference to Vico at the article's conclusion, stressing that humans create the social world and have the capacity to change it. In other words, establishing a more peaceful world in no small part a matter of human will.

Advancing the cause of peace is a matter of deploying secular and realistic utopian visions. The plays of Euripides, the last of the tragedians, were conspicuous for their cynicism about gods and heroes. This view was reinforced in the work of Aristophanes (1998), the central playwright associated with what came to be known as Old Comedy, which arose as the tragic tradition declined. In ‘Peace’, the protagonist Trygaeus, seeking to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War, which had raged on for a decade, takes flight on the back of a giant dung beetle, headed to Olympus to seek the intervention of Zeus. When he arrives, he discovers that the gods are not at home. The hard lesson Trygaeus learns is that peace will be achieved, if it is to be achieved, by the actions of humans, and not by divine intervention. Thus, we need to think about these matters in terms of human relations, without reference to the supramundane.

Although peace is achieved at the play's end and Trygaeus is the hero, the precariousness of that peace is evident when it becomes clear that there are those who benefit from war, and for whom peace is an unwelcome threat to lucrative businesses manufacturing weapons. Thus, Aristophanes points to the inherent tension between the peacemakers and the warmakers. This reality haunts us today, made all the more foreboding by the fact that the weapons of war are far more lethal than the spears and lances of the ancient world. Some attribute the beginning of industrial warfare to the late nineteenth-century Prussian Chief of Staff General H.K.B.G. von Moltke. He understood better than others the significance for war-making of technological developments, not only regarding weapons but also in advances in communications and transportation technologies. Propaganda was an essential part of his military machine, key to mobilizing the citizenry in any war effort. The means for achieving quick and decisive victories required being prepared to use any means possible, in von Moltke's own words, ‘no matter how odious’. Moreover, he was an advocate of a warrior culture, contending that ‘eternal peace is only a dream, and not even a happy dream. Without war the world would fall into decay, and lose itself in materialism’ (Moltke, quoted in Park, 1900: 387).

Von Moltke did not live to see World War I, but its horrors can be read as a consequence of the great powers embracing his destructive, violent vision. Thus, despite international declarations condemning the use of chemical weapons, both sides resorted to poison gas during the conflict. In its aftermath, after the cessation of fighting at 11:00 am on 11 November 1918, reacting to the sheer brutality of the war and the suffering it had inflicted, widespread disenchantment and growing antiwar sentiment took hold in Europe and America. It was reflected powerfully, for example, in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and in Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.

With the horrors of that war in mind, in 1932 Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud, posing the following question: ‘Is there a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war’ (Einstein and Freud, 1933: 12)? He wanted Freud's insights in addressing the question of whether human aggression can be channeled to help protect people against the impulses of hatred and destruction. Freud waited two months to reply, but when he did, it was in a lengthy reflective letter. He begins with an account of violence among animals, which he stresses, includes humans. But, echoing Aeschylus, he contends that ‘in the course of evolution this state of things was modified, a path was traced that led away from violence to law’ (Einstein and Freud, 1933: 28). For this to be possible, it was necessary for society to create the ‘machinery ensuring that its rules – the laws – are observed’ (Einstein and Freud, 1933: 30). This can work, he continues, in contexts involving ‘equipollent’ actors, but that is the rub, since the real world is full of unequal actors (Einstein and Freud, 1933: 31). Recognizing ruefully that the League of Nations, which sought to address this reality, ended in failure, he nonetheless observed that it was ‘an experiment the like of which has rarely – never before on such a scale – been seen in the course of history’ (Einstein and Freud, 1933: 37).

At the letter's conclusion, Freud, describing Einstein and himself as pacifists, reflects on the ease with which people can get swept up in warfever and ponders how long it will take for the rest of humanity to embrace their pacifist vision. Admitting that there is no way of knowing if this will come about, he points to two factors that can play a role.

Without offering it as more than an assertion, the first is the evolution of what he calls ‘man's cultural dispositions’, which appears to be his shorthand for claiming that over time a civilizing process has to some extent changed people, moving them in the direction of seeking comity and rejecting violence. The second factor derives from ‘a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take’ (Einstein and Freud, 1933: 56). To hope for this outcome is not ‘chimerical, but by what ways or by-ways this will come about, we cannot guess’ (Einstein and Freud, 1933: 56). Six years later, in the wake of the Nazi annexation of Austria, Freud and his family departed Vienna for London, where he would remain until his death as the storm clouds of war once again darkened. Less than a decade later, a form for future wars unknown to Freud (but not to Einstein) materialized: the atomic bomb.

For the first time in history, human ingenuity driven by the fear of enemy nations had resulted in the creation of a weapon that made possible the end of life on earth as we know it. Enter the world of Dr Strangelove. It was a world aptly captured by the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer in his song, ‘We will all go together when we go’, sardonically describing nuclear Armageddon as producing ‘universal bereavement, an inspiring achievement’ (Beckett, 2025). Although there have been moments of heightened anxiety about the prospect of nuclear war – the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the escalation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Reagan administration – the superpowers avoided a catastrophic direct confrontation. Alexander is right that this was the product of the cold calculation behind the implicit doctrine known as MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction.

But the Cold War did not lead to the dramatic growth of people committed to pacifism that Freud and Einstein longed for. Rather than anything resembling what Kant had in mind in advocating on behalf of ‘perpetual peace’, wars were farmed out to the nations of the periphery, those nations that the superpowers sought to bring into their respective spheres of influence and control. And in this competition, the United States, leader of the democratic world, did not do the cause of democracy any favors by undermining democratically elected leftist politicians, with Mossadegh in Iran, Árbenz in Guatemala, and Allende in Chile being egregious cases.

This is not to say that antiwar sentiment did not grow. It did, as was evident by the size of the antiwar movement that opposed the Vietnam War. Indeed, a generation of young people in the United States came of age politically via their involvement in that movement. Many acted with a conviction that democracy can be found in the streets, in nonviolent protest. And in these activities, they got a taste for what they were up against as those controlling the levers of state power persisted in savaging a poor country and its largely peasant population. Alexander (2006b) has chronicled his involvement in the antiwar movement at Harvard and Berkeley as part of the ‘disobedient generation’. My involvement began in Ann Arbor, and I got my first taste of tear gas outside the Pentagon as a participant in the 1969 Moratorium March, a protest that brought 250,000 people to the nation's capital. The takeaway is that to say we create our social world needs to be understood in relational terms, for what is involved here is an agonistic struggle between the forces of war and the forces of peace.

The weapons dealers described by Aristophanes who sold lances, spears, helmets, and breast-plates bemoaned the peace as leading to their financial ruin. The heirs of von Moltke have not had to worry about that fate. By the second half of the twentieth century, with the Cold War well underway, a centrist Republican president and former World War II general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, would tellingly warn the American public in his farewell address to the nation of the threat posed by what he called the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’. What has changed more recently is that the billionaires of Silicon Valley have gotten into the action, including the founders of Palantir, a company committed to advancing the surveillance state. Among its founders is the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who a few years ago declared that capitalism and democracy were incompatible, making clear his allegiance was to the former. He subsequently employed J.D. Vance and bankrolled his senatorial run, his money making it the costliest senate race in history. Vance is now the vice-president of a former draft dodger who has recently sought to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War. After the administration's destruction of small speedboats in the Caribbean that it accused as being part of a coordinated drug smuggling operation, Vance was asked whether this amounted to a war crime. His reply was, ‘I don’t give a shit what you call it’ (Johansen, 2025).

This is but one example of the challenges confronting democracies globally. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the cynical nihilism of right-wing populists pursuing authoritarian projects designed to undermine democracy combined with the recklessness of capitalist elites – the older segments attached, for example, to defending fossil fuels and the new tech-billionaires committed by their own admission to smashing things. It is not surprising, then, that many ordinary people, feeling powerless against the combined impact of political and economic power, opt to retreat from public life. Meanwhile, armed conflicts around the world, be they between nations or civil wars, rage without sufficient ideas about how peace – fair and just peace – can be established in current hotspots. How is it possible to end the war in Ukraine in a manner that is fair and just to the citizens of a struggling democracy? Do we have the imaginations required to find a solution to the longstanding Israeli–Palestinian enmity that has made the Holy Land anything but? And then what about those places that even the best informed of the public tend to know little about? What is required to find a way to peace in Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, and other conflict zones?

Alexander's account would certainly not be described as a walk on the sunny side of the street but neither does he intend it to be a justification for despair. Rather, given the fundamental grounding of CST in the idea that we define our world in binary terms, he is urging us to use our utopian imaginations, while cautioning against embracing utopian visions unless they are grounded in realism. We can never achieve a perfect world, but we can create a better one. Although organized violence is endemic, there is reason to continue to work against it. To do so requires confronting political and economic power with civil power, the power that is located in the civil sphere. This, in turn, requires working to strengthen the civil sphere, which is essential if robust democracies are to flourish. A critical factor is creating an international legal structure that is capable of advancing the cause of peace. Legal scholar Koskenniemi (2025: 47) concedes that to date international law has had a dismal record in this regard, but he insists that international law actually does have power. The law, he contends, ‘is a language that translates raw facticity into a binary code – legal/illegal – using jargon such as “right”, “responsibility”, “competence” and “privilege”’ (Koskenniemi, 2025: 19). Such a code exists in adjudicating disputes inherent in the system of global capitalism. How to use that legal infrastructure to advance peace and prevent war is the great unanswered question of our time – and the challenge confronting those who share the aspirations of Einstein and Freud.