The Future of the Law of Armed Conflict Warrants Hope

[Rob Grace is an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of San Diego’s Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies and a Senior Researcher for the Beyond Compliance Consortium, based at the University of York]

There is no denying that these are dark days for the law of armed conflict. Millions of people across the globe suffer the brutal physical, emotional, and psychological harms of armed conflict, from Gaza to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and beyond. The United States has been exhibiting increasingly flagrant disregard for laws and norms relevant to the use of force in Iran, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and Yemen. But all hope is not lost for the law of armed conflict. If history is any guide, we could be living through yet another iteration of an oft repeated historical cycle, during which a period of widespread dismay about the lack of efficacy of, and widespread disregard for, the law of armed conflict ultimately gives rise to reinvigorated efforts to innovate, expand, and strengthen the application of this area of law.

Confronting Our Tragedy

To be sure, the global mission to prevent and address need during armed conflict is in a time of peril. The first year-plus of the second Trump administration has seen the flouting of international laws and norms become commonplace; the dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), sparking a humanitarian funding crisis that has left conflict-affected people across the globe suffering and dying after losing access to lifesaving services that USAID had previously funded; and the more general end of multilateralism as we have recently known it.

These events ride a wave of already growing despondency about efforts to prevent and address harms and needs resulting from armed conflict that have pervaded most of the 21^st century. Over this century’s first 26 years, we have seen brutal civil wars (including in Sri Lanka, Syria, Ethiopia, Libya, and Sudan), as well as Western governments’ responsibility for, and complicity in, largescale violence that has contravened and/or weakened international laws and norms, spanning the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, U.S. detainee abuse in the context of the “Global War on Terrorism,” and Western arms support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen and Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The edifice of post-Cold War era optimism that defined this century’s early years (fueled, for example, by the International Criminal Court, an ever-growing volume of human rights treaties that directly address armed conflict, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and a dramatic expansion in international humanitarian funding and programming) has come crumbling down. The law of armed conflict, humanitarianism, and even the field of conflict studies itself, various commentators have asserted, are dying, dead, and/or being rendered increasingly obsolete.

Reframing the Current Moment

This moment in geopolitics and global governance, especially with respect to law of armed conflict, is no doubt unique. However—to paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous aphorism—the events of the first quarter of the 21^st century rhyme with history. Looking back, the second half of the 19^th century through the first decade or so of the 20^th century saw progress for global governance relevant to mitigating the human costs of war (e.g., the First Geneva Convention in 1864, its revision in 1906, and the Hague Conventions in 1899 and 1907). But then the horrors of World War I seemed to render all of these developments moot. As legal scholar Gordon E. Sherman lamented, writing in 1918 as World War I raged, “At the present moment… the very existence of international law as a practical element in the conduct of human affairs is doubted or derided by many,” and “such precepts as are claimed to be fundamental in that law itself are daily set at nought by belligerents in the world conflict.” But this crash in optimism definitively did not kill the drive to govern war’s horror, but rather, prompted reinvigorated energy for innovation (e.g., the League of Nations; the Kellog-Briand Pact, the Geneva Protocol in 1925 that banned the use of chemical and biological weapons during war, and another Geneva Convention in 1929). 

World War II then had its way with these efforts to govern war’s horror in the form of brutal events that include the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, the Holocaust, Allied firebombing of German and Japanese cities, and the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Hirashima and Nagasaki. But similar to the end of World War I, the cycle repeated, with crashing optimism once again giving rise to ever more innovative efforts to keep this mission’s flame alive in the form of the United Nations, the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, the Genocide Convention of 1948, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the birth of international human rights. 

The post-Cold War era and the events of the first quarter of the 21^st century, it seems, constitute just one more iteration of this historical cycle of rising, and then crashing, optimism. As the first quarter of the 21^st century sinks once again into dismay, this read of history warrants hope for the future. Despite successive tragedies and disappointments that have been epic and heartbreaking in scale, lawyers, advocates, and policymakers have historically continued to push forward in innovative ways toward a more hopeful future.

The Path Ahead

Although the darkness of the current era is inescapable, it is also likely that a new day will someday come, and there is merit in preparing to seize that moment, in whatever form it might take and whenever it might arrive. It is worth remembering that the law of armed conflict still retains widespread global support, even in the face of so many persisting atrocities. And as one expert in the field recently wrote, even despite its myriad flaws, the law of armed conflict “has saved lives, preserved dignity, and drawn lines where none would otherwise exist,” and indeed, “Sometimes a single, imperfectly applied legal norm saves a life—or many.”

Considering the bleak current prospects of impactful great power multilateralism, two overarching dynamics could be key to the path ahead. 

The first dynamic is middle-power multilateralism. A key takeaway for many from the famous January 2026 speech at the World Economic Forum by Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, is that the time has arrived for a “requiem for liberal peace,” as one scholar stated. But the speech was also a call to middle-power activism. As Carney stated of middle powers, “The powerful have their power. But we have something too—the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.” This dynamic is evident in the historical development of the law of armed conflict. The depository state for the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols is not a great power, but rather Switzerland. The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 were not proposed by that era’s global hegemon, the United Kingdom, but rather rising powers of the time: Russia for the First Hague Conference, the United States for the second. The list of examples goes on and on. If history is any guide, middle powers will play a key role in whatever happens next. 

The second dynamic is transnationalism. Norms of the law of armed conflict have in many ways filtered down to the domestic level. National laws across the globe criminalize genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes; prohibit the recruitment and use of children by armed forces and armed groups; and place obligations on states to uphold people’s rights—including to healthcare, education, and essential services—even during wartime. Continued middle-power engagement can be complemented by building cross-national linkages between stakeholders devoted to strengthening and propagating these norms at the domestic level.

There is also certainly a case for pessimism. Perhaps we are like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. After all, we have spent 170-plus years trying to innovate global governance in this issue area, and we have often thought that we had made headway, only to repeatedly confront the same tragic failures. 

However, the long arc of history offers us an important lesson. In these moments when this arc seems to be bending in the wrong direction, and feelings of powerlessness in influencing its trajectory pervade, it can be important to remember that this arc does not choose its direction on its own. Many who care about this inter-generational global mission no doubt currently feel the pull toward throwing our hands up. But if a new day does someday dawn for the law of armed conflict, it will only be because a network of devoted people will have invested great energy in making it so.

Photo attribution: Photo by Pao Dayag on Unsplash