Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Dune’s Great Convention – An Analogy for International Law

[Jack Provan was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and is currently working on his PhD in International Criminal Law at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.]

Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune has returned sandworms, spice, and galactic warfare to the popular zeitgeist. It was also adapted into a film in 1984 by David Lynch, but the less said here about that adaptation, the better (sorry David).  Governing this galactic warfare in Herbert’s Dune universe is the Great Convention, an ancient, detailed, and nuanced legal code which this post seeks to explore. Within this nuance, an analogy can be drawn between Dune’s canonical conflict regulation and the real-life laws governing armed conflict. We will focus here on its regulation of nuclear warfare, as some of the wider aspects of humanitarian law prevalent in the film are discussed in an excellent podcast by Thomas Harper of the American Red Cross.

I will mostly discuss the lore relevant to Dune (which was the basis for Denis Villeneuve’s two-part film adaptation) and some of Dune Messiah, the second in the book series. This tells the arc of Paul Atreides’ rise to power and the increasingly distant and abstract concepts raised in the later books have less to do with the subject of international law. Indeed, when Paul’s son morphs into a giant sand worm to rule the galaxy for thousands of years, the law becomes utterly meaningless to him.

The story of Dune has been deeply analysed and praised within a variety of scholarly fields including ecology, politics, and religion. I contend that the story’s lasting relevance and popularity comes from the depth of its nuance. In it, we can see enduring parallels with the contemporary world: some intentional, others wholly prophetic. Water scarcity on the planet Arrakis, for example, was written as a direct metaphor for the value of oil (it is water – not spice – that represents oil, despite what many believe). This analogy was at once intentional and worryingly prophetic, as water scarcity may be one of the great challenges of the future.

The Law and Dune

From the outset, it doesn’t seem like Herbert gave the law of the Dune universe the same level of devotion he committed to other aspects, such as religious psychology (for that I recommend this video essay). The Great Convention itself fills five volumes, but little of its actual text can be found in Herbert’s writing. Nevertheless, much like the Gom Jabbar, a poisoned needle held at Paul Atreides’s neck, the law represents a thorn constantly at his side, threatening to thwart his goals.

Herbert was deeply distrustful of authority, and of the cult of personality that tends to gravitate around strong leaders. As a Republican, his perspective was certainly shaped by his negative response to McCarthyism (did you know he and Joe McCarthy were cousins?) and the Watergate Scandal (although he maintained that Kennedy was worse). He writes of this distrust as the driving philosophy behind the Dune novels in his short essay Dune Genesis. Readers should remember to take Dune’s treatment of law not as a reflection of Herbert’s own philosophy, but as that of the strong leaders he aims to criticise. Following his successful uprising, Paul becomes increasingly belligerent in rejecting the legal norms designed to balance government power. Rejecting the notion that his new empire should submit to a constitution, he rants in Dune Messiah, “constitutions become the ultimate tyranny […] The constitution is social power mobilised and it has no conscience”. His quest for revenge and liberation ultimately leads to despotism.

It is possible to read deeper into this stance – much deeper than we have time for here. Dr. Björnstjern Baade meditates in a 2023 article on the relationship between legal philosophies represented in the Dune universe between the “cynical rule by law” of the old Imperium and the “earnest rule of law” among the Fremen – a distinction which Paul himself appears to notice, and which begins to blur as the Fremen, now liberated by the events of Dune Messiah, grow increasingly seduced by the formalism and cynicism which characterised the Imperium.

The Great Convention is the most obvious example of the former rule by law, prioritising form over substance. Each Article of the Convention begins with the words “the forms must be obeyed”. Moreover, the Convention mostly seeks to regulate, rather than restrict, the political operations of the Great Houses: wars are allowed and can only end with the total annihilation of one of the Houses. The ban on the creation of “thinking machines” (computers) does not in practice restrict the Great Houses, who use genetics and mental conditioning to turn human beings into Mentats, people with immense mental processing power akin to computers, robbing them of their humanity. Of course, the ability to train a Mentat is reserved only to those Houses with the capacity and resources to do so. In this sense, we can view the effect of the law by those at the top of the hierarchy as something to be followed in letter – but not always spirit. As said in Heretics of Dune, “law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: who has the clout?”. With this view in mind, we can begin to understand the probable reason that Herbert never saw fit to provide the full text of the Great Convention: we understand its form very well, and even for those to whom it applies, the substance is secondary.

Nuclear Weapons in the Great Convention

The most obvious parallel between the Great Convention and our own international law can be found in the prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons (called “atomics” in the novels). Millenia before the events of Dune, catastrophic nuclear warfare between man and machine led to the destruction of advanced computers and paved the way for a new, rules-based legal order. In its aftermath, the victors – humanity’s prosperous Great Houses, would draft the Convention with the protection of human life at its core. The Houses would argue that the prohibition was a result of witnessing the tragedy and indiscriminate loss of life borne out of using such destructive weaponry. Perhaps all residents of the Dune universe should be grateful.

But there is another, perhaps more pessimistic, way to interpret the decision to ban nuclear weapons in the Great Convention. If the goal was to eliminate any possibility of the recurrence of nuclear war, it would be more effective to demand that all weapons be destroyed and outlaw stockpiling. After all, the existence of nuclear weapons presupposes the possibility of their use.

The Convention failed to go this far. In a rare instance that we are given explicit text from the Convention (as quoted by Paul Atreides), the reader is told that: “Use of atomics against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration”. For those living in the Dune universe, this short clause is utterly terrifying for three distinct reasons, which I will outline chronologically.

First, only the use of nuclear weapons – not their ownership or production – is outlawed. What does this say about the drafters’ intentions? Unfortunately, the 10,000-year-old drafting transcripts of the Great Synod were not included in the litany of materials written by Herbert to flesh out his universe, so some guesswork is required here. One plausible explanation – one we certainly find in reality – is the deterrent effect. Paul Atreides himself observes in Dune that “it’s fear, not the injunction that keeps the houses from hurling atomics at each other”. He is, of course, talking about mutually assured destruction. But in this line, he is actively justifying his own use of nuclear weapons by assuring his advisers that they will not face retaliation. When push comes to shove, and with the gift of foresight, he knows that even in retaliation his enemies could not bear to press the button.

There must be another reason, then. The Dune Encyclopaedia (a non-canonical summary of Dune lore) helpfully points out that the primary drafters of the Great Convention – the Houses themselves – had the most to gain from maintaining the status quo. What sense would it make to legislate away their own valuable assets, simultaneously increasing the risk of another smaller House eventually matching their dominance? The result was “scrupulous detail” over the minutiae of deploying or storing atomics; a level of detail which betrays their intention not to surrender any of their stockpiled weapons.

Two years after the publication of the first Dune novel, the international community would begin signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would enter into force in 1970. Its objective, not unlike the Great Convention, would be to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons, allowing dominant states to continue producing and stockpiling them while waxing lyrical about the urgent need to avoid the dangers of nuclear war. The possibility of disarmament, while providing a core pillar of the Treaty, is kept as a goal for future negotiations, and a relatively vague one at that (Article VI). In the years since, the ICJ has given some concreteness to that goal, interpreting within Article VI an obligation on all states to “pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion” disarmament negotiations, but in the absence of a timeframe disarmament efforts by nuclear weapons countries seem to remain a distant possibility. To this end, it is telling that the much more comprehensive Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into effect in 2021, was unenthusiastically received by nuclear weapons states around the globe, who have all failed to ratify it at time of writing.

The second horror to be found in Dune’s atomics prohibition is the curious stipulation that only the use of atomics against humans may be grounds for planetary obliteration. This was Paul Atreides’ dubious justification for using atomics at the end of the first novel to destroy a shield wall, allowing the Fremen to ride their sand worms into battle. Here lies the most interesting dimension to a nuclear weapons ban, on the outer edges of its applicability. As Herbert wrote himself in Children of Dune, “to know a thing well, know its limits; only when pushed beyond its tolerance will its true nature be seen”.

Unpacking the wording of the Convention, one may have visions of the Harkonnens recklessly (but lawfully) bombing barren wastelands to smithereens just to prove that they can. If the point of nuclear disarmament is to avoid the catastrophic harm these weapons inflict on humanity, is there any harm in deploying them on nobody, for no real reason? If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

To answer this question, we should start by recognising that the use of nuclear weapons against humans is (almost) certainly illegal under international humanitarian law. Two core principles of the jus in bello related to the use of force are inevitably violated by nuclear weapons: they are incapable of distinguishing between military and civilian targets; and the collateral damage they cause will far outweigh any military advantage to be gained by their use. However, the absolute nature of this prohibition is, much like in Dune, a potential subject of debate. There is an argument to be made, as envisaged by ICJ Judge Schwebel in the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion, that deploying a nuclear weapon against an enemy nuclear submarine at sea might be lawful. The most surprising revelation here is that our own law on nuclear weapons may give more leeway than that in Dune, since it is possible to imagine and debate scenarios where their use against humans could be justified. Others have proffered hypothetical situations (such as a combatant army, alone in a vast desert with no civilians or civilian infrastructure nearby) as an example of when a nuclear strike might be proportionate under international humanitarian law, but there is already enough fiction in this piece that we need not begin exploring those possibilities as well.

The third horror is thankfully more fanciful. The punishment for violating the prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons is nothing short of planetary obliteration. There are only two instances, deep within the Dune lore, of this ever happening under the Great Convention – the Dune Encyclopaedia doesn’t count Paul’s dubious justification, nor (spoilers for Dune: Messiah) the attack on his life which involved conventional weapons fuelled by atomic power (another loophole left in by the Convention’s drafters).

Here, thankfully, we can state with confidence that our international law does not permit the nuclear “obliteration” of states as retaliation for prior use, for that is a rather extreme standard and foresees the total destruction of the aggressor’s planet (state, for our purposes). The key word here is reprisal – not retribution. The Geneva Academy summarised this in 2014 by stating that any act done in lawful reprisal “must be conducted with a view to bringing the target state back into compliance with IHL”. It would be very hard to argue that the goal of obliterating a planet was to curb its transgressions and encourage its future compliance with the law. But there remains a point of contention within international law about the extent to which states could lawfully use nuclear weapons in reprisal to earlier use by an enemy in an international armed conflict. The USA has never declared that its nuclear weapons could not be used in retaliation, but has also failed to contend with the fact that civilians and civilian objects are not lawful targets for reprisal. The high collateral damage of any retaliatory nuclear strike would quickly encounter this problem.

The Prescience in (and of) Dune

It would be fair to argue that the Great Convention, rather than directly replicating international law, takes the relevant principles and repurposes them for the Dune universe. They do not have the jus in bellum; they have blood feuds. There is no WTO; there is CHOAM. No human rights; but a ban on thinking machines, which retains at its core a recognition of the value of human life which requires protection against a long and brutal historical backdrop.

Some of these may be inspired by the real world, while others would go on to predict with striking accuracy how our world would later develop. It is tempting to see Herbert’s work as prophetic. Indeed, the themes of prescience and free will are perhaps the most explicit themes of the novels – above even their treatment or politics, law or ecology. Was prophecy at play here? Was Herbert able to glimpse into the future, much like Paul and his son Leto II? 

There is a (non-trivial) danger in thinking this way, and I am not only talking about the alt-right exaltation of the novels as some form of fascist manifesto (indeed, it seems there is much to appreciate in Dune from any vantage point on the political spectrum). Those who view Paul’s story as a simplistic hero’s journey, in which genocide and holy war are just harsh realities in the unification of remaining humanity, are completely missing the point. Dune is a cautionary tale about the cult of personality surrounding those to whom we voluntarily surrender power. In any case, we are best to hope that Dune remains cautionary, rather than prophetic: the eventual abandonment of the Great Convention under the rule of Paul’s son, the God Emperor, warns of uniting under charismatic leaders who are themselves merely cogs in the machine, predetermined to centralise power ever further until the rule of law itself, now an inconvenience rather than a safeguard, is brushed away.

Moreover, and as a final comment, trying to find some great prescience in Dune goes contrary to what Herbert himself intended. By constructing a cautionary tale about belief in a cult leader, he came dangerously close to that status unintentionally, in a somewhat poetic instance of life imitating art. Rejecting the notion of prescience in Dune Genesis, he said:

“Do you want absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe […]  Don’t look to me as your leader”.