Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Abolish War, Not Humanize It: Tolstoy’s Radical Pacifism vs the Geneva Settlement

[Davit Khachatryan is an international law expert and reader]

“They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish! … War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war.”

Prince Andrei’s blunt rejection of “the rules of war” captures with literary force a tension that continues to haunt international humanitarian law (IHL). Efforts to humanize conflict have long been met with suspicion: do rules mitigate suffering, or do they mask the brutality of war in ways that prolong it? In our own moment, amid sieges, drone campaigns, and urban destruction, the specter of IHL erosion and irrelevance looms large. The selective observance of the Geneva Conventions, the manipulation of humanitarian norms for strategic ends, and the sheer scale of civilian destraction and suffering raise urgent questions about the capacity of law to restrain violence.

From Gaza to Ukraine, from Sudan to Nagorno-Karabakh, reports of indiscriminate attacks, starvation, blockades, and forced displacement reveal that the Geneva Conventions’ most basic guarantees are regularly violated. Scholars and practitioners increasingly warn of the erosion of IHL: not only are its rules flouted, but the very idea that law can meaningfully constrain violence is being called into question. Some argue we are approaching a point of irrelevance, where humanitarian norms are invoked rhetorically but carry little weight in practice (here, here, here).

This invites us to cast a glance back to the origins of codified humanitarian law as well as its cultural prefigurations in one of the world’s most celebrated epics, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Through both narrative and philosophy, Tolstoy questioned the very project of taming war through rules. His fiction depicts improvised acts of mercy, yet his later writings argue that such gestures only prolong the institution of war by making it tolerable. Tolstoy thus stands as one of the earliest and sharpest skeptics of the “humane war” concept. This speaks directly to anxieties over the future of IHL.

The Allure of Cruelty

It is argued that cruel yet short wars are better for humanity than restrained yet protracted ones (p. 253). This logic found sympathy among Francis Lieber and his Prussian contemporaries, as well as among some modern writers who defend selective non-compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL) on act-utilitarian grounds. Article 29 of the 1863 Lieber Code famously states: “The more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief.” The most celebrated theorist of war of the age, Carl von Clausewitz, similarly emphasized the dominance of the destructive principle (p. 228).

These currents echo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. On the eve of the Battle of Borodino, Prince Andrei argues that attempts to make war humane risk postponing peace. For him, war’s very horror was its only constraint; to soften it was to prolong it (pp. 440-443). His skepticism attacks the humanitarian innovations that would soon follow from Henry Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino and the Geneva Convention of 1864. 

Tolstoy’s Outlook on the Laws of War

Tolstoy’s stance on the conduct of war is the product of combat, art, and later ethical revolt. He joined the Russian army in 1851. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854, he was mobilized west as a junior officer. During the siege of Sevastopol, he manned a fortified bastion through the climactic ten-day bombardment. The experience seeded a lifelong skepticism that stopgap improvements could “humanize” physical brutality.

That skepticism is already audible in his early war writing. In the second Sevastopol Sketch (May 1855), two days of fighting end with a truce for an ostensibly humane purpose, allowing each side to retrieve its dead and wounded. The opening is stark: 

“White flags had been hung out from our bastion, and from the trenches of the French, and in the blooming valley between them lay disfigured corpses, shoeless, in garments of gray or blue, which laborers were engaged in carrying off and heaping upon carts. The odor of the dead bodies filled the air.” (p. 115) 

Tolstoy lingers on the human cost, “hundreds of men crawled, twisted, and groaned, with curses and prayers on their parched lips, some amid the corpses in the flower-strewn vale, others on stretchers, on cots, and on the blood-stained floor of the hospital,” (p. 109) to strip the truce of any easy halo and show its terrible proximity to the slaughter it pauses. Contemporary commentary notes that this was an episode Tolstoy himself witnessed, underscoring that his doubt about “humanizing” war arose not from theory but from firsthand experience.

In a letter widely reprinted in 1897 (including under the headline “Tolstoi Writes of War, Says It Must Follow Slavery and Disappear”), Tolstoy insisted that making slavery less cruel had been a moral mistake: slavery required abolition, not mitigation. By analogy, softening war risked postponing consensus on its illegitimacy. 

From Austerlitz to Geneva

Tolstoy gives Prince Andrei that outburst on the eve of Borodino, but the masterpiece has already shown us the quieter work of mercy and humane treatment of wounded and hors de combat. After Austerlitz, Andrei is struck down and left on the field. When Napoleon himself comes upon him, the Emperor issues practical orders: “Lift this young man up and carry him to the dressing station,” and then, “Have these gentlemen attended to and taken to my bivouac; let my doctor, Larrey, examine their wounds” (p. 163). The first hands that touch the fallen Russian are French. Larrey’s clinical verdict follows, and when the army moves onward, Tolstoy’s narrative closes the scene with a single humane fact: “Prince Andrew, with others fatally wounded, was left to the care of the inhabitants of the district” (p. 164). The chain is complete. Enemy surgeons stabilize, and villagers in Austrian or Moravian country take in the wounded. Modern IHL places legal armor around exactly that chain.

What the novel presents as instinct and habit is now obligation. The wounded and sick, whether military or civilian, friend or foe, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances and shall be treated humanely” (GC I Articles 12-15; GC IV Article 16; CIHL Rule 3). Those hors de combat must be collected and cared for (AP I Article 41). The duty is without adverse distinction (nationality, side, race, religion are irrelevant to triage: GC I Article 12(3)). Larrey’s conduct toward a Russian officer reads today like compliance with medical ethics protected by law (GC I Articles 19-24; AP I Articles 8, 12). Even the handover from army to village anticipates the search, collection, and evacuation duties after engagement and the requirement to facilitate relief and local care where needed (GC I art 15; AP I art 10(2)).

Elsewhere, Tolstoy notes in passing that during retreats orders could require abandoning the wounded; nevertheless, the wounded pull themselves after the columns, and roadsides, post stations, and parish houses become the hospital of last resort (p. 107). IHL’s answer to these moments is the positive duty to search for and collect the wounded and sick without delay, to protect medical evacuations, and to allow impartial humanitarian relief when state capacity fails (AP I Articles 70–71; CIHL Rule 3(2)). It also guards against abuse: perfidy, feigning protected status (wounded, medical, surrender) to kill, is prohibited (AP I Article 37).

By 1812, when the war reaches Moscow, Tolstoy turns to civil society to show what humane treatment looks like when the state falters. The Rostóv household gives up its carts to carry wounded soldiers out of the city, and the news spreads until the yard is full of stretchers and pleas (pp. 493-494). That night, the convoy halts in a large village, and a sentence does the work of an entire logistics plan: “At ten o’clock that evening the Rostóv family and the wounded traveling with them were all distributed in the yards and huts of that large village” (p. 521). Once again, the village absorbs what the army cannot. In today’s law, that billeting maps onto the state’s responsibilities to facilitate evacuation, shield ad hoc medical shelters, and protect civilians who render assistance (respect/protect obligations extend to improvised medical points and civilian carers: GC I Article 19 by analogy; AP I Articles 8, 12, 15; CIHL Rule 25). Civilians who help the wounded are not taking a direct part in hostilities (AP I Article 51(3)).

These scenes require careful reading because they run counter to our desire to find declarations and doctrines, where Tolstoy instead offers us gestures and arrangements. When Prince Andrei calls the language of mercy “rubbish,” he is striking at hypocrisy and the way noble words can varnish organized violence. Yet Tolstoy portrays the French doctor bending over a Russian officer because that is his work. The villagers accept the wounded into their houses because people with wounds cannot sleep on the road. Modern IHL is the wager that these acts should be guaranteed.

The Geneva took over and codified the practices born of necessity and conscience, rendering them stable, predictable, and reciprocal. Once codified, mercy can become a language of technique, a way to manage the intolerable rather than to end it. That is why his scorn for playing at war retains its sting. But the novel also shows something else: the recurring civilian assumption of care when armies cannot or will not, the enemy physician obeying a different allegiance, the quiet distribution of the wounded into yards and huts.

Against Anachronism

To judge Tolstoy’s world by our legal architecture would be anachronistic. People then inhabited different realities. They did not have a layered system of treaty law, domestic implementing statutes, criminal accountability drawing on international norms, or the bureaucratic pathways that now connect battlefield to courtroom. War itself was still widely treated as a recognized instrument of international relations. The subtle line we now draw between the justice of going to war and the justice of conduct in war had not yet been settled. In that context, the maxim “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” was read to mean that the hard business of war belonged to the shocking realm of hostilities, while humane treatment belonged to conscience and custom. This is the spirit behind Prince Andrei’s provocation, “Leave war to be war.”

Most importantly, Tolstoy writes as an abolitionist. His radical pacifism demands the utopian elimination of war, treating every lesser aim as moral evasion. “Humanizing” war anesthetizes conscience, and thereby sustains it. Recent scholarship likewise reads his nonviolence as a sustained, not late, conviction emerging from wartime experience and ethical reflection. Seen through this lens, the Geneva project looks like a framework that mitigates suffering while conceding war’s continued existence. In Tolstoy’s ledger, mitigation trades immediacy for perpetuation. 

The hors de combat rule and the obligation to respect and protect the wounded and medical care bind parties “in all circumstances” (AP I Article 41). Yet practice keeps testing the promise. In Ukraine, the WHO has verified an extensive pattern of attacks on health care since 2022, documenting hundreds upon hundreds of incidents that degrade the very medical chain IHL is meant to shield. In Gaza, UN reporting details repeated strikes, sieges, and access denials affecting hospitals and evacuations, with humanitarian agencies warning that access constraints and insecurity have crippled treatment and relief. These are precisely the moments when codified humanity must protect the wounded and those who care for them, without distinction and delay, the legal expression of the same humane practice Tolstoy placed in villagers’ hands.  

Conclusion

The argument that brutal war yields swift peace through immense shock (what Hayashi dubs act-utilitarian wartime reasoning) and IHL talk past each other at a structural level. IHL aims to reduce suffering by imposing unqualified duties that bind regardless of predicted net utility. These rules pre-commit belligerents to a domain of permissible conduct fixed in advance, precisely to prevent the “lesser-evil” rationalizations war inexorably generates. One can imagine edge cases where fidelity to one IHL norm is displaced by a contrary humanitarian imperative (e.g., necessity to save life when norms collide), but that is not a license to recast IHL as act-utilitarian: killing enemy civilians on the promise of a shorter war is IHL’s repudiation.

Crucially, the scale is not the measure; the person is. IHL speaks in the singular: in each encounter, with each civilian, detainee, or person hors de combat, protection and humane treatment bind now, without adverse distinction, in all circumstances. No calculus may purchase tomorrow’s peace with today’s protected life. To bargain with someone’s safety, to treat a human being as an instrument of shock for a swifter end, is counter-human and unlawful. Even the combatant’s privilege is conditional on these restraints and never licenses their breach. The “shock” theory is therefore irrelevant at the moment of decision, because in a human-centred legal order, the only lawful question is the concrete one in front of you: Is this person’s life, dignity, and care being honored here and now? The Geneva settlement does not sanctify war; it fixes that answer as duty. Hold the human line, every time, for everyone.