How Should we Regulate Wars?

How Should we Regulate Wars?

September - October 2026

If wars are mostly morally objectionable, does this imply that the best laws of war are prohibitive in nature? A handful of just war theorists have answered this question negatively. They have pointed out that the best–even the morally best–laws of war in our non-ideal world need not coincide with underlying moral rules. If there is a significant mismatch between how people do behave and how they ought to behave, effective regulation will try to meet agents where they are, seeing this as necessary to guide them in the right direction. This Long-Term Group aims to study how wars should best be regulated in light of this difficulty.

Armed conflicts are–despite what most of us might have hoped–decidedly not a thing of the past. While wars might strike many as lawless, all is not, as a matter of fact, fair in war. The ethics of war and International Humanitarian Law (IHL), also known as the Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC), establish important duties, rights, and prohibitions on when and how to fight wars. However, both the ethics of war and the laws of war are under strain. For one thing, existing rules and regulations are often ignored and difficult to enforce. For another, how wars are fought is constantly emerging, and at least some rules and regulations seem out of date. Finally, political attacks against the international legal order threaten to weaken the status of IHL as a well-established basic order.

These challenges are compounded by the increasing disconnect between different disciplines that study contemporary organized violence. What just war theorists discuss is generally—though not always—quite separate from the debates led by international legal scholars. The disconnect is even starker between other disciplines; neither just war theorists nor international legal scholars tend to be in regular and productive exchanges with historians, social scientists, psychologists, or peace and conflict researchers.