Humanitarian Juggernaut

Alex de Waal

  • War and Law since 1945 by Geoffrey Best
    Oxford, 434 pp, £25.00, October 1994, ISBN 0 19 821991 1
  • Mercy under Fire: War and the Global Humanitarian Community by Larry Minear and Thomas Weiss
    Westview, 247 pp, £44.50, July 1995, ISBN 0 8133 2567 6

The ‘law of war’ is a paradox, an exercise by turns noble and futile. ‘A remedy must be found,’ Grotius wrote, ‘for those who believe that in war nothing is lawful, and for those for whom all things in war are lawful.’ Geoffrey Best, in his magnificent exposition of the modern pursuit of legal restraint on warfare, opens with another aphorism, from Hersch Lauterpacht: ‘If international law is, in some ways’ at the vanishing-point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing-point of international law.’

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