Re-examining our Capacity for Just Peace

BRIAN MATEO: Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Mateo, and I serve as deputy director of programs and partnerships at Carnegie Council.

To begin, I would like to welcome you all to our fourth event in the Council’s Ethics Empowered: Leadership in Practice series, which convenes scholars and practitioners to discuss pressing moral issues, reflect on their careers, and offer insights to young leaders. In today’s panel we will be reexamining our capacity for just peace amid ongoing current regional wars, frozen conflicts, and the deployment of new military technologies.

It is my pleasure to now introduce our moderator for this event, Peter Hoffman, associate professor of international relations at The New School. We are also honored to welcome our panelists, Asha Castleberry-Hernandez, adjunct fellow at the American Security Project, alongside Scott Silverstone, professor of international relations, Navy veteran, and former Carnegie Council fellow, whose research focuses on the causes of war, military power, strategy, and great-power competition.

As we convene in Carnegie Council’s Global Ethics Hub in New York City, I want to welcome you again and will now pass the program over to Peter.

PETER HOFFMAN: Thank you, Brian. Good evening, everyone. Forgive me, I am going to use my notecards as well. The older I get, the more loquacious I get. I used to speak in sentences, now I speak I think in paragraphs and chapters. I am going to try to stay focused by using my cards here.

Violence and justice are central elements of social life. Kinetic coercive acts writ large are a common occurrence throughout history, but so too is humanity’s capacity to refrain from and restrain armed conflicts. Technological and strategic innovations in war and warfare reverberate throughout societies, reflecting not only the price of deploying force but also stoking political debates over what is just and humane in war, and this in turn often shapes prospects for peace.

Consider the scope of the problem. Since 1800 over 37 million people have died on battlefields, increasingly a larger proportion of them civilians. For 2024 estimates range from 130,000 to 230,000 killed in armed conflicts. Even at the low end of these estimates, they are far above the average of the past 30 years. The present trajectory for 2025 is approaching 200,000 fatalities, which is around double what it was just five years ago. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza get the most attention, but violence in Sudan and in other parts of Africa and the Middle East also contribute to these horrible global trends.

Moreover, aside from these shocking casualty counts, the problem of war also manifests in the consumption of resources. Global military expenditures in 2024 reached $2.7 trillion, up 9 percent over 2023. Furthermore, the carbon footprint of armed conflict is also substantial. It is estimated that global military activities account for approaching 6 percent of greenhouse case emissions.

We need not get lost in all the data points about the frequency, intensity, and costs of war to know that it is imperative to ask, how to we get to peace? This is where the issue of justice looms largest as we need to understand the connective tissue between war and peace, which is the underlying premise of today’s conversation.

Let me start by asking our panelists about the nature of justice and how and where it fits into the equation of war and peace. I want to start by having each of you speak to just-war issues with regard to the recourse to a use of force and conduct in using force. We will begin with the jus ad bellum tradition.

The first question is: What are the justifiable reasons for using force? How can the decision to use force be legitimate?

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: Thank you so much for having me here. I am excited to discuss such a relevant question or overall theme. I want to put my disclaimer out there: My views in no way represent the United States government.

As far as looking at the features or the justification of the use of force, one point you could start at is pretty much common sense when you look at the threat: Is the threat considered a “clear and present danger” to a specific sovereign state or a local population? Is the threat considered unavoidable? Also, are we responding to an attack? A clear example of that is Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

We can also look at other critical features like a situation where we are responding to a massive-casualty crisis or something like a genocide and responding to that, or, for example, a specific issue like Rwanda where the international community over time wanted intervention, not just necessarily the international community in terms of government to government but winning the hearts and minds of the people to show that this is a clear threat to global security.

In terms of legitimacy, there are two factors we should definitely take into account; one is when it comes to garnering a consensus from the international community. For instance, when President Bush looked for the justification of the use of force for the invasion of Iraq, immediately per guidance from General Colin Powell, he sought support from the United Nations. Also, with President Obama with regard to the no-fly zone in Libya, he quickly sought support from the United Nations Security Council as well as the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council states. What you see from the Executive Branch is that the president of the United States will use this as a justification to deliver to the American people: “I have the international community supporting my decision of the use of force.”

Another feature we should take into account is affordability. I think that is more of a factor now than before. Why is that? Well, the United States is roughly $31 trillion in debt, so not just some of our elected officials but the American people are paying attention to the use of force in terms of the cost of it, and is it worth it. One airstrike alone costs millions of dollars.

What you are seeing now from a growing number of American people is: “Is it worth it to conduct airstrikes versus pay for my infrastructure projects at home?” So there is a lot of analysis when it comes to conducting military operations and use of force in comparison to what we could be doing at home.

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: Good evening, everybody. I would like to thank Carnegie Council for the invitation to be here. It is great to be back. I have a longstanding relationship with this amazing institution. Like Asha I need to provide the standard disclaimer: Anything that I say here is strictly my personal opinion as a scholar and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense (DoD), Department of the Army, of the United States Military Academy. Now I have made the lawyers happy.

The legitimacy of just war, if you look at the long-term tradition, has one basic concept, and Asha spoke to different aspects of this. There is a term you will see over and over again, an ancient term, this notion of “self-defense.” If you want to make a claim in terms of what justifies the use of force, deadly force—let’s be very blunt in the kind of language that we use here—killing other human beings and destroying property are acts that require this kind of very deep reflection, continued debate, and even angst among those who are involved in this.

Once you start talking about self-defense you are on the most solid ground you could be on. The just-war tradition begins with St. Augustine. Ancient Greeks talked about self-defense as well in terms of the basis for legitimizing the use of violence against others that may lead to violent death.

However, once you start unpacking this concept of self-defense, you see it is something we all understand intuitively; we see this codified not just ethically in the just-war tradition in international law. It is longstanding in terms of customary law.

It is codified within the UN Charter. The UN Charter says technically that the use of military force is only legitimate after you have gone to the UN Security Council and received a majority vote. With that backing of international legitimacy that justifies the situation under which you use force, you can use military power as you see fit and as it has been authorized.

However, it says in Article 51 of the UN Charter, “Nothing in this segment of the Charter denies the inherent right to self-defense for any actor if you find yourself funder imminent threat,” if you do not have time to actually to a larger international body, the UN Security Council being the classic institution that is obviously built into the United Nations.

It is about self-defense. It is recognized in international law and at the heart of just-war theory, but once you start to unpack this it starts to get much more debatable and less clear because we can define many situations, whether it is in a personal situation and codified by domestic law—most countries’ domestic law will exonerate somebody charged with murder if they can prove it was in legitimate self-defense—and of course we bring that same principle to the international system.

That implies first of all that it is imminent: How close is this threat, or is it just a fear of something that is gathering in the future? That begins to cloud the justification. When we move away from immediate human life to start talking about defending other kinds of interests that human beings have, what about human enslavement, human liberty? Is it justified to use violent force to liberate those whose liberty has been taken away from them?

How about property? We talk about the sovereign rights of any country to defend their sovereign territory against unprovoked aggression, but at some point you have to ask yourself, what is proportional in terms of the use of force when it is not to protect the life of a human being or even a human being’s liberty but merely the possession of property? That becomes a little cloudier.

Then, what if we talk about a way of life? Cheap oil from the Middle East? To what degree can you justify maintaining open ceilings and using military power to prevent, say, any one major regional state from controlling the free flow of oil, which would of course spike the prices and have immediate economic impacts on other people? Can you claim self-defense if it is about a way of life?

What about freedom of navigation? You have those who oppose your access to the so-called “global commons.” Do you have the right to take the lives of those who are trying to blockade you from moving ships through areas engaged in peaceful trade?

We always begin with this concept of self-defense, but where the conversation becomes really fun and complicated is when we start to unpack what it is that we are actually defending: How much does that umbrella actually cover?

PETER HOFFMAN: The slide from national security to this international security idea is a subjective one sometimes.

Next we are going to turn to questions of jus in bello that take up the duties and rights of those who participate in war, but before I ask you about that I want to situate this in terms of innovations in warfare, whether it is the so-called “revolution in military affairs,” “fourth-generation warfare,” whatever you want to call it, that has enfolded over the past 30 years. We could even look at more recent outbreaks, whether it is asymmetric warfare, hybrid warfare, or violent eruptions in the gray zone between war and peace, however you want to characterize it, to you what key changes stand out as dramatically impacting how warfare is fought, technological, strategic, et cetera? What’s new on the battlefield?

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: The obvious answers when we pose this question right now are autonomous systems, autonomous weapons, autonomous reconnaissance assets, and artificial intelligence (AI).

My quick from-the-hip answer is nobody knows. There are a lot of smart people who are working this problem in the government, outside the government, at think tanks, and in universities. A tremendous amount of money as we know is being put into the development of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence with untold numbers of applications from warfare through peaceful interactions among human beings.

I am a lot older than most people in this room, I would say, so you know better than I do where the cutting edge is in terms of these specific types of technologies, but clearly for anybody studying American defense policy and watching investment in technologies and innovation in different parts of the world this is the first answer that you come up with.

The challenge for anybody like us is when asked: “What does the battlefield application of these types of weapons and capabilities mean for the conduct of war and issues of jus in bello, the ethical actual application of violence once you are in that space?” All I can offer at this point—I puzzle over this a lot —is, is there a way for us to think through both potential positive impacts and negative impacts as just a basic framework to ask ourselves, if we are watching these particular technologies being rolled and being adopted by national governments, our own government and foreign governments, what kinds of expectations should we hold our militaries to?

Our militaries in the United States and in many other countries around the world are accountable to civilian leadership, accountable to values and principles that our civilian leadership and our larger populations expect of them. You could imagine a set of positive impacts that come from these kinds of capabilities, again autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence.

If we think about reconnaissance alone, the ability to actually collect information through different assets, process information, and have a finer-grained understanding of threat—coming back to what is it that you are actually confronting—you might imagine if this is what those doing this kind of intelligence analysis are focused on, if this is their priority, we might be in a much better position when the trigger is pulled, when the order is given. We would be much more confident that in fact this is a legitimate target.

We might have much more confidence that when we have precision-guided munitions based on targeting with increasingly sophisticated weapons—and this is not a new story; this is a 30-to-40-year story of intelligence, targeting, and precision-guided munitions—the better and better we get, then perhaps we reduce so-called “collateral damage,” the innocents who might, because of poor targeting and poor intelligence get caught up in what otherwise is a legitimate use of force. So there is a good-news story I think.

I know that within the United States military this is clearly a priority, but let’s think about the potential flip side. There is still the so-called “fog of war” and friction, even with increasing sophistication of how you understand developing threats, how you develop targets, and how you make assessments of these deep ethical and strategic questions that anybody confronts before they give the order to pull the trigger, if this technology remains imperfect, if there are still uncertainties yet our confidence now is much higher because, “Well, I have these fancy tools; this fancy tool is telling me I got it right,” but maybe you don’t have it right. The more optimistic you are that you have got it right, the more confident you will be and the more willing you will be not to slow down, rethink, and get others involved in this decision process before you give the order to pull the trigger, so the more confidence you have, the potential for mistakes is still out there, no matter how sophisticated the autonomous systems and AI become.

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: Looking back at my military career, as a cadet, as far as reflecting on the evolution of warfare, we were trained on Vietnam jungle-warfare-type style, and lessons learned came out of Iraq and Afghanistan three years later after I was commissioned. We doubled down on counterinsurgency, counterattacks, and urban operations, so we were quickly moved on to, “Okay, we have to get them trained up on these specific warfare styles.”

Then, doubling down on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency became one of the main efforts in terms of hybrid warfare as information operations. Information operations was a big deal in terms of countering disinformation and misinformation and building up the critical capabilities whether it was on offense or defense as far as how we can effectively operate in the operational environment.

Going back to Scott’s point, in terms of what you are seeing more of involving innovation are the technological changes that are happening. The DoD is constantly looking at the effect of investing more in autonomous capabilities versus looking at the legacy capabilities and whether we should retain them, upgrade them, or modernize them. This is the big question, so there is a back and forth with a lot of that happening and how that plays out.

Looking at the future of warfare, especially in new domains like space, where you are seeing this constant investment in offensive and defensive capabilities and how they operate in that in terms of satellite imagery and in comparison to Russia and China as far as how does it look in the event of a war in a domain like space. We are heading in that direction, I must say.

In terms of precision or becoming more adaptive or confident in working with autonomous capabilities I think that is a big question, and that also is a situation where it impacts the rules of engagement: How do we have confidence in ensuring that whatever we are doing in terms of reconnaissance or collection, are we really confident in this autonomous system? I think it is just a work in progress as far correcting the approach. I think what you are seeing is a rapid adaptation to how we effectively work on these autonomous systems in an operational environment.

PETER HOFFMAN: It is interesting that there seems to be a shrinking of trying to expose your troops to less risk while there are new vulnerabilities discovered in cyberspace, outer space, et cetera.

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: This led me to think back on this question of cost, the cost to those who are actually out there engaged in the use of military force. The decision to send soldiers, airmen, and sailors into harm’s way is part of the more rational strategic calculus that any leader has to make, and our ability to target long-range, our ability to have increasing battlefield awareness has allowed us to develop stand-off weapons, and frankly the lower the cost becomes in terms of the risks to your own folks when you send them into harm’s way, the higher your willingness becomes to actually pull the trigger.

That becomes a strategic calculation and not an ethical calculation, but in a weird way if you think back to multiple points in history in terms of the emergence of ethical claims oftentimes they didn’t come out of some abstract. Just-war tradition comes out of a certain Christian theology, which is an abstract claim about human rights and our responsibility to treat other human beings in a certain way, but so much of the progress that has happened in human history in terms of introducing constraints on violence has been this interaction between the immense level of violence and casualties suffered by multiple combatants in a given conflict, and at one point it becomes, “We can’t do this anymore.”

The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648, with religious origins in terms of a follow-on of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic states and Protestant states, has the highest percentage of casualties as a percentage of the population at that time in world history. The Thirty Years’ War actually leads as the most deadly conflict as a percentage of the overall population at the time.

It rages for 30 years. It is unbelievably violent, and out of this comes the principle of sovereignty in which, through their own suffering, you have both rules—law—to mutually constrain the use of violence, but then it makes possible ethical claims that are reinforcing, legal claims about the right to be free from this kind of violence and interference in your own sovereign affairs, and they can over time work hand in hand, so I think there are multiple times through history in which we see suffering by all parties who come to a place and say: “This cannot go on. We need new laws. We need new principles.”

We live in a world now in which the cost is lower because we don’t have these horrifyingly tragic events, but so much human progress has come through the suffering and lessons learned, reflections on “Why did this happen to us?” The more you have major actors who can use military power—it sounds ironic and paradoxical to say, but you have to say it out loud—the less we will learn, the less we will realize the value of both legal and ethical constraints on violence, at least certain parties will, given that lower cost.

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: I agree with the lower-cost argument. In fact, what you have seen across both Democratic and Republican administrations is that there were a lot of investments when it came to special operations because the number of uniformed personnel that participated was extremely low and in the event of casualties the numbers were extremely low and many Americans did not know about it, which reminds me of why we are investing so much in AI and robotics, because we want to avoid the massive level of casualties in a war.

I don’t think the leadership for the past several years, especially in the United States, has the appetite to see the massive number of casualties in an operational environment in warfare. Also, when you look at our near-peer competitors, especially our enduring competitor, who has not been to war since 1940, I think too they don’t necessarily want to engage in a physical in-person war-style crisis or an operational environment with us. I think they would rather do it more online, just like what you are seeing play out a lot with the Russians. It is a little bit different in terms of Ukraine, but definitely when it comes to engaging the United States it is more about online warfare and electronic warfare than in-person.

PETER HOFFMAN: We could talk a lot about the paradoxes of the international sacrificial order and how traumatic learning drives the humanitarian system, but the tyranny of time demands that we move on to the just-peace question. We have talked about just war, but the conduct of war usually influences the conditions of peace. How belligerents behave in armed conflicts matters because the manner of military defeat and its political consequences determine the reaction of local populations.

The end of war may not necessarily be the end of conflict. It may in fact provoke further hostilities, especially if mass human rights violations are committed. At the start of the First Millennium in describing Rome’s campaign against Germanic tribes, Tacitus wrote: “They make a wasteland and call it peace.”

With the scourge of war as virulent as even, please unpack for us this notion of a just peace. What are its features? How is it achieved?

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: Looking at this question I think immediately about peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The justified way of enforcing peace, especially as we see at the United Nations, is deploying a peacekeeping operation in a postwar environment. The purpose of why they are doing it is to pretty much achieve sustainable peace.

How do we do that? There are a couple of objectives. One is to achieve political, economic, and legal reform. Why do we need to do that? Looking at resolved conflict, institutions have been pretty much weakened or collapsed, so if you look at the legal system, the loss of jobs, and the loss of government, they need to be restored.

Going back to the justification in terms of peace, as far as the legal side of it, I must say that when it comes to the conflict, who were the victims, who needs justice, and how do we achieve that? In terms of the local courts, are they capable of being able to address that? Sometimes you have external affairs legal systems or organizations like the war tribunals of Yugoslavia or Rwanda that have to step in to help facilitate the legality of peace as well. That is very important.

Looking at it in terms of economic reform, how do we take ex-combatants and reintegrate them into society? The United Nations underscores the process of DDRs—demilitarization, demobilization, and reintegration—bringing them back into society and giving them a job. That is a common recommendation. How do we reduce violence in a specific area? Give somebody a job.

In terms of the political approach, it is about rebuilding the government but in doing so making sure that it is more inclusive and includes different groups. In Afghanistan you saw it actively where they were ensuring more women were represented in government. I think that is important in terms of looking at the main pillars of it, but it is all about institution building as far as being able to achieve sustainable peace.

PETER HOFFMAN: That idea of sustainability I think is a wonderful contribution.

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: That is really good, sustainability, and adding the word “just” onto peace, when you pose that question you have to pause and ask, “Well, what’s the difference, what’s the distinction between peace or the sources of”—I think that’s at the heart of this question—“peace,” which is great and the sources of just peace?

As I thought through this question I realized that those are two potentially different things, the sources of just peace and the sources of a just peace. You can have peace imposed by power. You can have a highly stable and peaceful society at the domestic level and at the international level if it is enforced with enough brute power, intimidation, and coercion to keep people in line.

You could talk about Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, his classic take on creating this all-powerful being that will relieve us of fearing each other and therefore we can go about our business every day; power is at the center of peace, and peace then makes possible prosperity, health, commodious living; and the other things he talks about. You could also think about theories of hegemony at the international level, in which a great power uses its power to hurt and reward to keep others in line. That is something different; that is not what we are talking about.

Whether it is within broken societies and reintegrating those who had been combatants or a just-peace—think the post-World War I classic case of serious dissatisfaction with the status quo created at Versailles in 1919 and ongoing discussion of to what degree did this plant the seeds that led to World War II—I come back to this notion of legitimacy.

Sustainability depends on legitimacy, so a just peace is legitimate in that, whether it is at the local or international level, the key parties whose interests are directly impacted have to believe that whatever order you create the rules, the distribution of power, the distribution of benefits in the society fundamentally are the best we can get: “This is okay with me. I would rather just live with this environment if I can trust the others that I may have been at war with prior to this to see it the same way that I do.” Then it is about legitimacy. Then the question becomes, how do you generate that kind of legitimacy, and that is the kind of work that happens within failed states and societies that have suffered that kind of violence.

We think about the post-World War II period. Within the Western world, this is the most important example. Out of this horrifying catastrophe and immense suffering across the combatants on a global level in World War II, the United States, having not suffered directly from the war, steps forward and says: “We’re not going to get sucked into a third one. We’re going to fix this problem.”

There was a receptiveness to this. The idea was: “Okay, America, what have you got in terms of recreating an international order that is going to prevent us from falling into what we have just gone through for a second time in two generations and there is something in it for me and my people?”

The post-World War II period, while generating that legitimacy, however, without that suffering along the way, they are not receptive to this openness. How do you bring local communities and international actors to a position where they say, “Yes, this is better than anything that might come if it breaks down?” That is the challenge. How do you get buy-in from the key actors?

PETER HOFFMAN: I am glad you also raised for the question of “victor’s justice.” When the victor rewrites the rules it creates this condition. We often talk about asymmetric warfare, but this is asymmetric peace, where it is imposed with uneven outcomes in this way.

Keeping in mind the elements you have shared with us, I am going to ask you to not only apply this to contemporary armed conflicts but consider for us how upcoming challenges may be tackled.

To put this in a certain concert, and there is always a paradox in these things, Albert Einstein made the sweeping claim that “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” Nevertheless, the onset of World War II and other wars have demonstrated the importance of deterring and confronting aggression early. Reconciling these sensibilities forces us to think about what responsible preparation for war and responsible preparation for peace look like.

What is on the horizon for just war and just peace? What is on your just-peace agenda to address changes in war? Some people say what is taking place right now in the world is a form of World War III and that eventually there will be another tragic moment when we will recreate either the United Nations or some other type of fixture. We see a few ideas out there, but I was wondering if you see any things that we are not talking about enough about just war and just peace at the international level?

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: What is on the horizon for just peace? This has been an unbelievably tumultuous two, three, four years. We don’t need to rehearse the places in the world that have suffered immensely and generated immense anger and discontent by observers around the world watching what has happened. The few major fires that are burning are so ripe with unpredictable consequences in terms of how we are defining self-defense and who was the aggressor in this situation and who is on the side of justice in this situation?

Within our own communities we are torn apart by these questions, so it is a big question mark. One thing that I will say, and I am going to hearken back to some comments I made earlier, Joel Rosenthal and I were talking earlier about being the elder statesmen oftentimes, if I can use that august phrase in the room, Joel, and places that we hang out, Jim?

When I look back on the most progressive era in human history it is after 1945, and that is not an accident. It goes back to the immense suffering of the first half of the 20th century. The world we were all born into was a product of the first half of the 20th century, and we who are in our older decades might not have lived experience of that, but we had parents and grandparents and we studied it in school, and it was part of our lived historic experience to appreciate that this is not the natural order of things. This was a painfully constructed international order that made the best of a horrifying catastrophe. I think frankly for those who were involved in this project in that moment of history this is one thing that Americans can be very proud of in terms of finding a way forward with partners from 1945 and producing a level of peace and prosperity that literally is unprecedented in human history.

We are losing that memory to the degree that political order, a sense of legitimacy, a sense of what justice means, and constraints on our potential for violence against each other. My students weren’t born when 9/11 happened, for example; they certainly have no personal experience of great-power conflict as Cold War kids have. So I think it is really important to be creating conversations and educational opportunities to remind each new generation of the first half of the 20th century because it was fundamental in shaping so much goodness that we are at the risk of losing.

Asha, you made this point earlier about China, and that is spot-on: The Chinese suffered greatly for a long period of their history. They talk about a “century of humiliation” with just cause, but it has been a long time since they have had this kind of experience directly themselves. Are we losing that immediacy of what could happen if this carefully constructed order—haphazardly at times, in fits and starts, back and forth—fades and breaks down? We don’t appreciate; why does it work this way? I see that as an ethical responsibility that older generations have to continue that part of the education and the conversation about the first half of the 20th century.

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: I agree that the older generation does need to communicate more with the younger generation as far as the shaping of just war and just peace.

I have two quick points as far as this question. I think one way we can look at it as far as shaping the future in terms of just peace and just war is looking at reforming the international institutions and more specifically reforming and expanding the UN Security Council. As a former Biden appointee, I am proud to say that we advocated for that. The last U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, believed in expanding it to more seats that represented the Global South and those that are more prone to issues involving conflict and war. That will help develop policies in terms of preventing war or how we can move forward effectively with some sort of authority and power as well. I think it is important to look again at reform of the Security Council.

Another point in terms of American power is that it is still extremely relevant when it comes to shaping hearts and minds globally. In America what you are seeing in terms of the use of force or war is that you are seeing this growing horseshoe issue between the extreme right, the extreme left, and the middle, where, because we went through 20 years of war there is not that much of an appetite to go into another one, so you are seeing where this is marrying more of the American people, that we are just not interested.

There are a lot of activities going on where the American people are working together in terms of, “We don’t want to go to war,” and I think we are seeing that resonate globally. The administration right now especially does not have the public opinion to support that. I find it quite fascinating that amongst the three groups they come together quickly to say they are not in favor of it.

PETER HOFFMAN: There is some consensus on that one point.

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: Yes.

PETER HOFFMAN: We only have about 15 minutes. Maybe we will take some questions that have come in. I will remind everybody that there is speaking truth to power, but there is also stepping into traps that can be misconstrued, whataboutism, and things like that, so I want to make sure we don’t fall into any of that.

I will take this first one that came our way: “Since we don’t have lived experience of the first half of the 20th century on our younger generation, how should we become more aware of this?”

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: Read. Read longform. Read books. It’s the only way we can touch the past. I will tell you, I know one of the questions you had cued up for us, Peter, was what’s on our nightstand. It is directly relevant to this.

I spend most of my time reading about the Ancient Greeks, the fifth century B.C. I am writing a book now on the origins of the ancient Athenian empire, the Persian invasion, and the coming of the Peloponnesian War. I do it for two reasons. It’s timeless and not of this moment, so it gives me great relief so that I don’t doomscroll like we tend to do.

I am reading the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and the Greek tragedians, and it is truly timeless. Twenty-five hundred years and human beings are still the same. Radical changes in the character of our societies, technology, geographic scale, et cetera, but there is so much wisdom in history, and you only have access to it through reading and finding others who can geek out with you. Find mentors, courses, documentaries, whatever grabs your interest. Read.

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: Yes. I agree. If you don’t want to read, which are lot are not doing unfortunately, please navigate the media outlets engaging with the truth about history and even current events. Diversify as far as looking at national media, international news like BBC News all the way to documentaries as mentioned.

PETER HOFFMAN: I also have a penchant for reading the Ancient Greeks. There is a wonderful version of Oedipus out. It is a modern adaptation that I recommend people go see, but I saw it recently and I was like, “I’m going to read Antigone again,” and there is a lot of just-war stuff in that.

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: Yes, there is.

PETER HOFFMAN: It’s great. Since you brought it up, Asha, where should people get their information from? If you want to understand just war today, what sorts of things should we be reading?

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: War on the Rocks, that’s a good one. Foreignpolicy.com. The military makes me do this. Clausewitz, About War; Sun-Tzu, The Art of War.

PETER HOFFMAN: The classics. If there are any new classics, let us know.

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: I like to read foreign news sources. In the United States we do a lot of navel gazing and tend to go around and around in unproductive circles, whether you watch your feeds with rapid-fire news or you try to get a little longform journalism now and then, which is really important because we have so many great outlets, writers, and journalists working in the United States.

Foreigners, whether they are Brits, Germans, Japanese, Indian, don’t obsess about the same things. They are still watching the world. They are still reporting on really important stories, but they don’t become obsessive the way many American writers do. Over the course of a week, I try to take in a healthy dose of high-quality foreign reporting and writing, English language obviously. My language skills aren’t that good.

PETER HOFFMAN: That is a good point, triangulation.

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: And scope of coverage too, the scope of stories they are paying attention to.

PETER HOFFMAN: We have several other questions here. I want to make sure we get our bang for the buck in asking something that seems to cut across a number of these questions. A number of them seem to be about how leaders can build consensus around pathways to just peace. What more can leaders be doing in order to push us in these directions?

I know this is sort of a policy question in some ways, but it is an ethical one as well, because it imputes that we have a sense of what justice looks like obviously. If you want to speak to things that you think could help better shape how countries or the UN Security Council or whatever agent you want to look at as a legitimate authority, what more could they be doing to help propel this agenda?

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: It’s a great question. There are two ways in which we can facilitate conversations about and get people to think about issues of justice and ethics. One may be effective sometimes and another may be effective more often. This is just my personal take. I have not studied this closely, so if you disagree, please let me know.

We have universal abstract claims about human rights and about justice from a cosmopolitan human-centered global level. That is a core part of the evolution of ethical reasoning and efforts to shape behavior based on ethical principles. That oftentimes is harder to get buy-in on by your own people when you are confronted with threats, challenges, fears, and appetites that you want your leaders and your society to pursue.

Some of the most effective conversations that I have seen in the last 30 years, since 9/11, have been conversations about America. Let’s just talk about Americans right now: Who are we? “Not in my name,” and you have probably seen this, at certain points in our history it has been a common refrain: “My government is doing these things not in my name.” What that can lead to is a conversation about, “Well, who are we?”

Whether or not others are doing these heinous things in this world, whether or not that global universal norm has broken down or is not going to mobilize your own people by doing what is considered to be the ethical thing in treating others, maybe we can generate a conversation about: “I don’t care if other peoples don’t respect us. This is who we are. This is who we are.”

I would hope all of us as individuals have that sense of individual character and the strong red lines that puts up in terms of our personal behavior in this world and our relationships with other people. At key moments since 9/11 we have had all these challenges about torture and other kinds of things that were happening in reaction to that terrible event. Those were more effective in carrying changes in leadership behavior and American sentiment when we turned it around to ask: “Who cares about the rest of the world? How can we hold our heads high and say ‘We stand for something, we are a noble good people, and not in my name?’”

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: I look at it two ways. First, we have to learn more how to work with people. One side needs to know how to work with others in terms of who they disagree with. That is just the basics.

Another point is that what we are seeing actively from American leadership is that there is this global peacemaking operation going on, including just today in the Oval Office between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as far as a peace deal. There are some benefits to it and also some costs. The reality is, in terms of looking at the world, there are still countries to this day that rely on the United States to prioritize these peace deals, and if it is done the right way using good ethics, it can turn out to be a good thing. If those peace deals are fair, just, and achieve sustainable peace, then it is a good thing.

In terms of America prioritizing and giving a lot of visibility to peace deals like what you are seeing in regard to what is happening in Africa between Rwanda and the DRC—you had also Armenia and Azerbaijan—when that happens it starts to energize the rest of the international community to take it a lot more seriously, being a low-visibility approach in terms of looking at that issue, but it has to be done right.

PETER HOFFMAN: It’s a very fine line ethically here. We only have a minute or two left, so maybe I will just finish up a thought and get your reactions to it.

Several of the things you both have said remind me that there is a school of thought in a subfield of security studies known as “military orientalism,” based on ideas of Edward Said, and it basically says that how we fight tells us something about the culture we are fighting against. If we fight in a certain way, our identity becomes something and can contribute to either peace or war.

I mention this because recently we see countries trying to pull out of the international landmine ban, and it is the countries of Eastern Europe. It is the Baltic States. Ukraine has now said that they want to suspend it. Obviously they have security reasons for why they want it overturned, but as we know the use of landmines usually impacts civilians.

We are at a real crossroads I think in international politics about the humanitarian agenda, and I am wondering if you have thoughts on where you see it going. Whether it is what is taking place in Ukraine or wars anyplace else around the world, the system is bending. Are we going to break before we are able to bend the arc of justice backwards? Do you have any thoughts on that?

I know it’s a big question to end on, but I think that’s the one we want to know. We have talked about ethics in war and ethics in peace. Do you have any thoughts on where this may be headed? You mentioned earlier the crisis that is needed to change things.

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: I told Joel two hours ago, “If I have a chance to bring E. H. Carr into this conversation, by god, I’m going to do it.” This is an E. H. Carr moment.

Some of you may be familiar with E. H. Carr. If you are not, E. H. Carr, again, early 20th century, he was a Brit, diplomat, intellectual, wrote one of the most important mid-20th century books called The Twenty Years’ Crisis. It was a diagnosis from his perspective of what went wrong with the expectations of peace coming out of World War I. He is remembered as a hardcore realist, you know, “those feckless liberals making all these gross mistakes, they let Hitler rise without opposition, and therefore World War II.”

That is a misreading of E.H. Carr. If you read the first chapter of that book, the last paragraph on page 10—I know it because I teach it all the time—is so wise. He makes the argument that international relations emerges as a field of study out of the wreckage of World War I. It looked at war as a disease and that we needed to bring the scientific method to the study of the causes of war to diagnose, treat, and cure this cancer.

However, he said, because we were so purpose-driven we went through this utopian phase at first, pie-in-the-sky ideas with no connection to reality. It was only when we had a rigorous study of the facts and just the way the world works like science has to study. It doesn’t matter what you wish your chemistry lab to produce; the chemistry is going to work out the way the chemistry works out. We need to have that same realist approach to this.

People say: “Well, I guess that’s just it. You throw up your hands. The world is the way it is. Sow the landmines. We are back to 1932 again.”

But he ends it by saying, utopianism is a necessary corrective to what he calls “the barrenness of realism.” Realism is the attitude of old age, and you can never give up the sense of human progress coming from this deliberate interaction between studying the world the way it is and being wise enough to recognize that, “Here are the things that we can’t change,” but man, always looking for opportunities to say: “No, these things are manipulable. We can change these, we can shape these, we can shape behaviors and incentives, and let’s never just throw up our hands and say, ‘It’s etched in stone, adapt or die.’” So, E. H. Carr.

It's an enduring tension between the two. We will never get away from it. Your generation will never get away from it. Just embrace it. What things do you have to just accept and live with and where are those pockets to keep pushing for progress?

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: I like the point about pushing for progress. I look at it as a correction or adjustment. Your example reminds me of when you had a growing number of African countries withdraw from the International Criminal Court then went back in.

SCOTT SILVERSTONE: Exactly.

ASHA CASTLEBERRY-HERNANDEZ: What it is telling you is that these smaller and some middle states are more active in proving a point to the international community that if a certain international institution, cause, or treaty does not stand for us or does not align with what’s going on now, we have no problem with withdrawing. I think that is good for the international system right now.

You are also seeing that play out, not really focused on war and peace, but looking at reforming the Bretton Woods institutions like the World Trade Organization. There is a lot of discussion in Europe on whether they should just pull out because it is not preventing global tariffs. “Should we just create our own with other countries and without the United States and China,” but creating a rule-based system that does not include them will create fragmentation. In the international community right now there is this constant thinking of how do we correct the system or how do we adjust this. I think that is pretty big.

PETER HOFFMAN: Asha, Scott, I think you have bent the arc back toward justice. Thank you.