“The lawyers clean up all details.”
(Don Henley, 1989, quoted by Moyn, S. Humane (Verso, 2022)
This Semester the ILCR Reading Group will discuss the provocative arguments made by Samuel Moyn’s Humane. How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Verso Books, 2022). Participants are encouraged to read the whole book, but rather than setting specific chapters to read for each session – in the spirit of opening up conversation – we will use multiple and different kinds of media to raise topics and questions for us to discuss. These topics and questions, for example, might cover whether “… efforts to make war more ethical – to ban torture and limit civilian casualties – have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier” (Moyn); what history can tell us about the ethics of deploying (institutionalised) violence; and to what extent lawyers have been complicit in creating aregime of ‘forever war’?
Sessions are in-person (with free lunch), but if anyone would like to join the group discussion remotely via MS Teams please contact [email protected].
Session 1 (Week 2), Thurs. 26 January: lunch from 11.45am (room 11, 71 South Street), discussion 12.05-12.55pm (Old Class Library).
Watching: Institute of International and European Affairs Seminar 11/05/22: Samuel Moyn – Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War: [26.15 minutes]
[Optional reading: Samuel Moyn, Humane… Chapters 1 and 2.]
Session 2 (Week 5), Fri. 17 February: lunch from 11.45am (Room 11, 71 South Street), discussion 12.05-12.55pm also in Room. 11.
Reading: Samuel Moyn, Humane… Chapter 3, “Laws of Inhumanity”.
[Optional reading: Tocqueville 21, Book Forum 4:3: Humane (Samuel Moyn) — September 2021. Download here]
Session 3 (Week 8) Weds. 15 March: lunch from 11.45am (Room 11, 71 South Street), discussion 12.05-12.55pm also in Room 11.
Listening: “Samuel Moyn on the idea of humane wars”, 55 Voices for Democracy – The Podcast (Produced by Thomas Mann House and Los Angeles Review of Books): [31.34 minutes]
[Optional reading: Samuel Moyn, Humane… Chapters 4 -8 and Epilogue]