80 Years after Hiroshima: Working for peace in a time of resurgent nationalisms

By – Andrew Lichterman, address at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, Santa Cruz, California,
August 6, 2025.

80 years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prospects
for disarmament are grim. The dangers of nuclear war once more are on the rise. The post-WWII
international legal order is collapsing, from arms control to the laws of armed conflict. Arms
racing has resumed. Nuclear disarmament is a distant goal, and prevention of wars among
nuclear-armed states a pressing priority.
Where do we go from here? How might work for peace and disarmament fit in the broader fabric
of emerging movements that are responding to the world-wide resurgence of authoritarian
nationalist movements and governments? I believe that to address these questions we need to
shake up our ways of thinking a bit about global affairs, about matters of war and peace. I don’t
have the answers, but perhaps I will be able to leave you with a few themes for further thought.
Seventy-seven years ago, the United Nations General Assembly passed its first resolution. The
subject the governments represented there thought important enough to be first on their agenda
was the establishment of a commission to develop proposals for the control of atomic energy,
and “for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major
weapons adaptable to mass destruction.” In a joint statement, the three governments that had
participated in the development of the atomic bomb, the United States, Great Britain, and
Canada, stressed that the tasks of controlling atomic energy and eliminating the threat of nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction could not be achieved by monitoring and control
measures alone. “No system of safeguards that can be devised,” they wrote, “will of itself
provide an effective guarantee against production of atomic weapons by a nation bent on
aggression.” To end the threat posed by rapidly developing technologies that could yield ever
more destructive weapons, they emphasized that a far more ambitious goal must be sought:
“Faced with the terrible realities of the application of science to destruction, every nation
will realize more urgently than before the overwhelming need to maintain the rule of law
among nations and to banish the scourge of war from the earth.”1
Other commentators of the early atomic age argued that the inquiry must go deeper. In 1946,
journalist and disarmament advocate Norman Cousins wrote,
“Let us have a National Concentration Week, during which we can ponder not only the
implications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, moral and political, but the problem of
competitive national sovereignty in an atomic age.”2
A year later, the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which included Albert Einstein
and several of the physicists who had participated in developing the atomic bomb, warned that “Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the
most revolutionary force since prehistoric man’s discovery of fire. This basic power of
the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.” 3
These insights were clear to many in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe brought on by
competing imperial nationalisms. World War II was a global conflagration of industrialized
warfare and genocidal extermination, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only
being the culmination.
With the rapid onset of the Cold War, the focus on the dangers posed by nationalisms in the
atomic age faded into the background. The Cold War brought a different kind of competition
among nuclear-armed governments, a global confrontation between competing political and
economic systems, with different dynamics and potential flashpoints. The collapse of the Soviet
Union brought both the Cold War political confrontation and the Cold War arms race to a close.
With the Cold War confrontation seen as the reason for the existence of vast nuclear arsenals and
the risk of nuclear war, mass movements for nuclear disarmament disappeared.
And in the first two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dangers of competitive
nationalisms leading to conflict among nuclear-armed states were not immediately apparent. One
of the two most powerful states had collapsed, and was significantly diminished geographically,
economically, and militarily. China’s emergence as a first rank economic power still lay in the
future. The governments and corporations of “the West” were preoccupied with the project of
integrating much of the Eurasian continent into the global neoliberal circuit of trade and
investment.
And yet despite these decades of momentous change, nuclear arsenals and the institutions that
sustain them carried on, largely without sustained debate by government or publics. Although
their magnitude was reduced in comparison to immense Cold War stockpiles, enough nuclear
weapons remained to inflict irreparable harm on humanity and the ecosystems that sustain us.
At the founding of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein addressed his
appeal to those with power and influence over governments:
“Our world faces a crisis unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions
for good and evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our
modes of thinking.”4
Eight decades on, the destructive power of nuclear arsenals has grown exponentially, but the
thinking of those who hold power over our futures not only has failed to change, it has regressed.
In significant ways, today’s world more resembles the first half of the 20th century than the Cold
War. New economic and military powers were rising to challenge old ones, with potential
flashpoints focused on the margins of declining empires and the spheres of influence claimed by
their rulers. And we are seeing once again the proliferation of “blood and soil” nationalisms, and
their use by powerful factions to acquire and hold state power and to mobilize their publics for
war. The Russian historian Alexander Etkind writing in the light of the Ukraine war, said,
“Peace is good for complexity, war brings clarity…. It changes everything — first the
present, then the future, and finally, the past.”5
What do the wars dominating our headlines, those in Ukraine and Gaza, make clear?
First, they show that we have not yet escaped the competition among empires, and the unwinding
of empires through struggles to carve out new Nation-states, that engendered the horrific wars of
the last century.
They have made clear that humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict intended to limit war’s
effects, has failed to prevent the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians and the destruction of
the infrastructure urbanized modern populations depend on. Those laws also have failed to
convince governments to forego nuclear weapons, weapons so horrific and destructive that their
possession by a state constitutes a continuing rejection of the supposed purposes of humanitarian
law.
The Ukraine war emphatically clarified that whatever window there was for nuclear disarmament
following the end of the Cold War has been missed. Significant reductions in the number of
nuclear weapons did not precede, but rather followed the reduction in the actual threat of war
among the leading nuclear-armed states. The reduction in the likelihood of war among the Cold
War adversaries was not caused by negotiations about weapons or about anything else, but rather
by massive social change that brought the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the political systems
of the states most closely aligned with it. For those who have been working for disarmament
today, our first priority today must be preventing wars involving nuclear-armed states. Work for
nuclear disarmament must be long-term. And we will need to rethink the approaches that have
prevailed for the last three decades.
One place to start is thinking about why post-Cold War nuclear disarmament initiatives, mainly
single-issue campaigns grounded in humanitarian law like that for the Treaty on the Prohibition
of Nuclear Weapons, had so little effect. At the same time, we should consider why humanitarian
law, the main legal framework for mitigating the horrors of war, has been so ineffective in the
wars in Ukraine and Gaza. How might we change the ways we think and talk about these issues
in ways that might help both to prevent war, and to create conditions that some day could make
disarmament possible?
In the world of nuclear disarmament work, there is much talk about “changing “norms.” There is
much less talk about just which norms must be changed if we are to make progress towards a
world in which eliminating nuclear weapons is possible.
Outlawing nuclear weapons would change one legal rule about armaments. But changing that
rule may require far more. The legal historian Robert Cover wrote that formal legal rules and
principles are “only a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention.” No
set of legal institutions or prescriptions,” Cover tells us, “exists apart from the narratives that
locate it and give it meaning.”6

We must ask ourselves: What are the dominant underlying stories that give the current law of
war and its limits meaning, in which they make sense? So long as those deeper narratives and
frames remain unchallenged, we may not be able to do much to change the rules.
The rules regulating armed conflict remain grounded in a narrative in which Peoples are seen as
locked in an eternal existential struggle for primacy. Defined in some combination of language,
religion, and ethnicity, Peoples are seen as fixed entities, their existence stretching back into
misty antiquity. These Peoples are understood to have a right to realize their destinies as Nations
through their own States—Nation-states.
Where the use of armed force is deemed legitimate, there is an assumed identity between states
and their Peoples. This is the basis for the permissive element of humanitarian law. Killing of
non-combatants is not prohibited, only limited.
As the International Committee of the Red Cross has observed, “These rules strike a
careful balance between humanitarian concerns and the military requirements of States.”7
Another, even less-acknowledged frame lies beneath the laws of armed conflict and of modern
international law generally. Only “peoples” deemed to be civilized are seen as worthy of a state.
The “great powers” —really, modern empires—long have claimed the prerogative one way or
another to determine which “peoples” are civilized. “Uncivilized” peoples are not entitled to
their own state, and hence also are not subjects recognized or protected as Peoples by
international law.
The core assumption of Peoples in eternal existential conflict provides ample ideological fodder
for dehumanizing the adversary. This is true most of all in wars where the adversary can be
portrayed as beyond the pale of the law, of lacking a legitimate State, and most of all of being
“uncivilized.” The latter charge is levied mainly against irregular non-state forces resisting the
distanced high-tech violence wrought by modern militaries. All of this has hampered
humanitarian law’s ability to rein in modern warfare’s violence. The wars of the 21st century
have shown the continuing power of these frames. They are manifested in the way these wars
have been fought, and their violence and destruction justified.
U.S. officials in the War on Terror labeled the non-state actors they wished to target “terrorists,”
a modern term that is the equivalent of “barbarians.” Political jurisdictions where they wished to
conduct military operations often were derided as “failed states.” When the legality of operations
that killed civilians were questioned, they invoked the unity of armed elements with the civilian
population. Donald Rumsfeld declared that
“We have assumed that where you find large numbers of al Qaeda and Taliban, that
there may very well be non-combatants with them who are family members or supporters
of some kind, who are there of their own free will, knowing who they’re with and who
they’re supporting and who they’re encouraging and who they’re assisting.”8

Campaigns by governments to dehumanize their adversaries have grown more prevalent, and
more intense, with the global resurgence of identity-based, authoritarian nationalisms. The
justifications offered by officials of Israel and the Russian Federation for their wars, for the
devastation of cities and mass killing of civilians, are grounded in stories of primordial
nationalism and imperial, civilizational right.
President Putin portrays Ukraine as never having been a real state, and as wrongfully severed
from a Russian empire he now will restore.9 “Russian and Ukrainian peoples are essentially one
people,” Putin recently claimed. “In that sense, we see Ukraine as ours.”10 Former President of
Russia Dimitry Medvedev describes Ukraine as “a threadbare quilt, torn, shaggy, and greasy,”
and says “We don’t need unterukraine. We need Big Great Russia.”11
In the Gaza war, Israel’s president Isaac Herzog declared: “It’s an entire nation out there that is
responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.”12 Israeli
government spokesperson Eylon Levy nonetheless asserts that their military is adhering to the
humanitarian law rule that strikes must be proportionate to the expected military advantage.
“And the expected military advantage here,” he explained, “is to destroy the terror organization
that perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.”13 Measuring each military
strike against a claimed threat of existential magnitude makes humanitarian law’ proportionality
requirement, intended to protect civilian populations against massive harm, infinitely elastic.14
In 2018, President Putin said that “…if someone decides to annihilate Russia, we have the legal
right to respond. Yes, it will be a catastrophe for humanity and for the world. But I’m a citizen of
Russia and its head of state. Why do we need a world without Russia in it?”15 Putin’s logic
assumes that every Nation-state ultimately has the right to consider only its own survival in the
endless struggle of all against all.
This also is the frame within which the International Court of Justice’s conclusion, or its inability
to reach a conclusion, in its opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons makes sense. “….[I]n
view of the current state of international law and of the elements of fact at its disposal,” they
wrote, “the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons
would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very
survival of a State would be at stake.”16
The boundaries of what governments claim to be such an “extreme circumstance” also have
proved to be elastic. The government of the Russian Federation continues to press its war of
aggression and conquest in Ukraine, leveraging the power of its conventional forces with
frequent nuclear threats. Russian officials portray their nuclear posturing as a response to an
“existential threat” from NATO and the “West,” at a time when no NATO country has made any
move that threatens the Russian Federation’s internationally recognized borders.
These wars have left the rules of armed conflict in tatters, and have laid bare the flaws in their
foundations.
Benedict Anderson, a leading theorist of the origins of nation-states and nationalism, wrote in his
book Imagined Communities that “No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.”17

Therein lies the heart of the problem. In a time when humanity has developed technologies
capable of bringing history to an end, that kind of thinking is an existential threat to all of us. We
must find our way to a post-nation-state, post-nationalist order of things, while seeking to lessen
the danger of catastrophic wars in the meantime. We need a new account of how our
governments and the ways they relate to each other and to those they rule evolved, and a vision
of a path towards a more fair and less violent future.
A first step is understanding that Nation-states and nationalisms based on combinations of
language and ethnicity are not natural or necessary. They are made things, their prototypes
forged over the last few centuries in the crucible of European state-building, colonialism, and
inter-imperial competition, their identity narratives shaped to justify the exploitation,
enslavement, and extermination of other peoples, and to mobilize us against one another for war.
We need to understand nationalisms as strategies of rule and contending for rule. They have been
used by imperial governments to justify domination of far-flung, diverse domains to their
populations at home. They have also been used by elites in colonized lands to carve states out of
declining empires, from the new European states created after World War I through the waves of
decolonization after World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and other states after the
Cold War. To sustain their empires against rising nationalist resistance, colonial governments
often deployed divide and rule tactics, setting emerging nationalisms against each other within
colonial jurisdictions with boundaries arbitrarily imposed on their populations by inter-imperial
political settlements. And in their wars with one another, empires sought to stoke nationalisms
and nationalist conflict within each other’s domains.
All of this has echoed down to the present, in wars and civil wars across the world where
empires have unwound or are unwinding, in the post-Soviet space, in the Middle East, and
elsewhere. As Kenya’s UN Ambassador Martin Kimani said in the Security Council in the
debate on Ukraine in February 2022, “We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead
empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”18
How do we begin to counter all this? We can start by changing the way we talk about global
affairs. We need to break away from the geopolitical jargon that dominates public discussion of
global matters across the political spectrum, including much of “the left.” It too is grounded in
the frames of reified Peoples and Nation-states, and portrays competition and war among them as
an eternal aspect of the human condition. Today’s most familiar version of geopolitics is
international relations realism, variants of which we hear everywhere, from media talking heads
to leading anti-war activists.
One critic has described this approach as “a theoretical articulation of the spontaneous
ideology of state managers.”19
Geopolitical thought took shape at the beginning of the 20th century as the theory and practice of
imperial competition and colonialism. As Paul Reinsch, a leading figure in early international
relations theory, wrote in 1900, “…[T]he natural wealth of the remoter regions must be utilized for the benefit of
mankind, and if any nation or tribe, by the use of antiquated methods of production, or by
total neglect of certain parts of its resources, such as mines or forests, stands in the way
of this great need, that nation or tribe must pass under the political power or tutelage of a
nation that will draw from the earth the utmost quantity of produce.”20
The “great powers” geopolitics recognizes are empires or their modern equivalent, with all less
powerful states viewed mainly as fodder for great power competition. Geopolitical thinking
devalues the lives and aspirations and voice of the people who don’t live in great powers. Their
lands and cities and futures are conceived as something to be bartered or fought over, valued
only for their resources or cheap labor pools or as subaltern militaries or as buffer zones against
attack by some other great power.
Geopolitical and realist thought also portray states as unitary, assuming an identity of interest of
governments and the peoples they rule. Portraying states as unitary actors obscures the reality
that governments often choose courses of action that work for their immediate strategies of rule,
but are a disaster for most of their people. Geopolitical thinking pushes to the margins the
particular economic, political, and ideological dynamics within states that create the conditions in
which those who rule choose war.
The Cold War arms race further focused the attention of international relations theory on
confrontations among “great powers,” now nuclear-armed. The inherent danger of confrontations
among nuclear-armed militaries lent intuitive weight to the bedrock geopolitical assumption that
only the most powerful states really matter.
In place of the manifestly Eurocentrist and racialist rationale provided by early 20th century
geopolitics for the predations of the imperialist states now sits the Bomb. This has allowed the
power games of geopolitics to be represented instead as neutral, technocratic exercises of “crisis
management,” “realist” assessments by those who threaten us all with catastrophic war regarding
what must be done to preserve the peace. In a nuclear-armed world, allowing the nuclear-armed
ruling classes to divide up the world among them, to cut their deals over the heads of other
“lesser” governments and peoples, can come to seem a practical necessity. We are discouraged
from even questioning the legitimacy of claims to a “sphere of influence.” Over time this
“necessity” that is really the avoidance of an immense and unnecessary evil can come to be seen
as a moral good, the best imaginable outcome, the height of “statesmanship.”
The pervasiveness of this kind of thinking, I believe, is one factor contributing to the failure of
many in peace organizations and the left to strongly oppose the Russian government’s war of
aggression and annexation in Ukraine.
The Bomb is like a black hole, distorting everything in the legal, political, and moral field around
it. No living thing can long survive its use, and no ethical or legal norms can long survive its
very existence. This is the reality that the International Court of Justice cryptically acknowledged
in its 1996 advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, writing that “In the long run, international law, and with it the stability of the international order
which it is intended to govern, are bound to suffer from the continuing difference of
views with regard to the legal status of weapons as deadly as nuclear weapons.”21
We can take a first step away from the geopolitical frame by rejecting the way it uses the names
of countries to signify the actors in the international drama, implying that complex polities speak
with one voice. At minimum we should portray the actors as the government of the Russian
Federation, or the government of the United States. Even such small efforts to change the way
we think and talk about things matter. They remind us that the people living in some officially
proclaimed adversary likely are not our enemy. They may have little more choice than we do
about their rulers’ decisions about war and peace. From there, we should try to go further in
identifying and naming the particular factions and institutions with decision-making power, those
that are playing a significant role in choices about war and peace. If we find that difficult, it
means we have further work to do. Developing a more nuanced language for talking about global
matters helps to immunize ourselves, and broader publics, against nationalist appeals.
In the long, slow work of trying to affect discourse in international institutions, we can seek to
shift the foundations of the laws of armed conflict from the frame of endlessly competing
Peoples and Nation-States to human rights. The fundamental claim upon which human rights law
rests is that we are all human beings, entitled to a dignified life and an equal voice in how we
live together on this planet. This provides a more powerful antidote to the Othering ideologies of
those who would mobilize us to war than does the current war of armed conflict, which rests on
foundations that assume that our differences are profound, and that war is an eternal aspect of the
human condition.
Finally, a law of armed conflict based on human rights could more firmly ground the claim that
governments bear responsibility for protecting all people who are or may become victims of their
wars, not just their own. And acceptance of that could be a step on a path away from endless
wars.22
This kind of thinking may seem utopian, “unrealistic,” as attempting to push against
overwhelming currents of ideology prevalent world-wide across the political spectrum. Fredric
Jameson, who taught here in Santa Cruz for a while, once said that “…it is easier to imagine the
end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”23 It may be even harder to imagine the
end of nationalism.
But even small things like changing the way we talk and think about international matters,
beginning by severing the pervasive, mainly unconscious framing of people as in identity with
their governments, with those who rule us, can bear fruit. It is a step along the way to becoming
more aware of the deployment of nationalisms as elements of strategies of rule and contending
for rule. A post-nationalist, post Nation-state vision that seeks to ground limits on the use of state
force both at home and abroad in the rights of all human beings to a dignified life and an equal
voice in our shared future could have some restraining effect even before it can be realized
within institutions.24

In the past, what concrete successes there have been in disarmament work have come in the
context of broader, system-critical movements. They laid out visions of a world never fully
realized, but in doing so mobilized social power greater than could any single-issue campaign.
The 1980s peace movements had significant strands connecting disarmament to other issues, and
placed all explicitly within a broader project of societal democratization. Adherents of this
approach aimed to build a democratic and democratizing civil society out from under the frozen,
authoritarian politics of both Cold War blocs. This entailed a vision that addressed the causes, as
well as the symptoms, of nuclear-armed militarism.
Disarmament movements did not succeed in abolishing nuclear weapons. But where they did
have victories, they came in the context of such broader, multi-issue movements. These were
movements that criticized not only the terrible effects of nuclear weapons but the nature of a
society that could build arsenals that could kill billions of human beings, and do irreparable
damage to the ecosystems we depend on.
Writing at the height of the successful campaign to stop U.S. deployment of nuclear missiles in
Europe, Jurgen Habermas observed that the resistance movement encompassed far more than a
‘no’ to nuclear missiles.”
Rather, he wrote, “many no’s’ are aggregated in this movement.” These included no’s
not only to nuclear weapons but to nuclear power, and to large-scale technology in
general, no’s to pollution and the death of forests, no’s to bureaucratic health care and
slum clearance, no’s to discrimination against women and to hatred of foreigners. Taken
together, Habermas concluded, these “no’s” were rooted in the rejection of an entire way
of life “tailored to the needs of a capitalist modernization process, programmed for
possessive individualism, for values of material security, and for the strivings of
competition and production, and which rests on the repression of both fear and the
experience of death. 25
The 1980s disarmament movements drew much of their power from the way such themes were
brought together in local contexts, often crystallizing around campaigns of direct resistance to
nuclear weapons development, manufacture and deployment. Here in California, a coalition that
included disarmament groups, organizations opposing US intervention in Central America, local
chapters of environmental groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, and elements of
organized labor in a successful campaign to resist the berthing of a flotilla of nuclear-armed US
Navy ships in San Francisco Bay. That campaign linked disarmament, anti-intervention, jobs and
development choices and environmental issues while sparking discussion of emerging new
themes like the environmental impacts of the military and environmental justice. The participants
developed new alliances, becoming part of the long chain of campaigns and movements that
have built the organizations and relationships that make the San Francisco Bay Area one of the
US regions where there is relatively more resistance to arms racing, militarism and war.
Today, the mix of issues and emerging movements is different, but even more urgent. We do not
get to choose the terrain of struggle. We are living in a state of emergency, faced with growing
repression and violence from above. Everywhere refugees, immigrants, and national minorities are on the front line. The nationalist rhetoric of fear and hate that is employed to target them and
to divide us from one another is the same kind that is used to march young people off to war. We
must find a way to defend those most vulnerable, to resist the slide towards confrontation among
nuclear-armed states, and to begin the long task of building a fair and sustainable world, all at
once.
Nationalisms may not be the fundamental driver of renewed arms racing and war risk. But as has
happened in the past, they may still be war’s proximate cause, necessary to mobilize publics for
war and to prepare them to endure its hardships. Countering the identity-based nationalist
campaigns coming from above will require broad-based movements from below. A conversation
about the reasons for the resurgence of authoritarian, identity-based nationalisms and could be a
step towards connecting work for peace with other issues and movements. For affected
communities and human rights movements, the world-wide prevalence of authoritarian
nationalisms poses an immediate threat. The civilizational crisis of ecological overshoot will
require unprecedented levels of global cooperation if we are to avoid disaster, and nationalisms
heighten barriers to cooperation necessary to address the ecological crisis. Nationalist programs
for competitive growth are driven by imperatives often at odds with necessary transition efforts.
In an era of pervasive authoritarianism, developing a common human rights vision can be a key
element both for resistance and for sketching a path towards a more fair, humane and democratic
future. Understanding why authoritarian nationalisms have flourished as the long cycle of neo
liberal globalization has reached its systemic and ecological limits can help us better understand
the dynamics that drive the greatest dangers of our time.
We must have a movement that is willing once more to ask the big questions. Can capitalism, a
system of economies and states driven by endless competition among immense, authoritarian
organizations avoid sliding into militarism and war? Does the problem go deeper? Can a
modernity dominated by organizations that treat both nature and people as a objects to be
manipulated and controlled via the tools of a one-sided, technical rationality avoid either war or
the eventual destruction of the ecosphere we all depend on? As Lewis Mumford put it half a
century ago, “Is this association of inordinate power and productivity with equally inordinate
violence and destruction a purely accidental one?”26
We need new ways of talking about all this that recognize fully that there is little democracy
anywhere, that we have an economy that is starkly two tier and growing more inequitable all the
time, that decisions about war and peace in every country on earth are made by tiny elites who
are largely unaccountable, and that the vast majority of humanity, and the planet itself, have no
voice.

Notes
1United States—Great Britain—Canada, Declaration on Atomic Energy, November 15, 1945, The American Journal of International Law, Jan., 1946, Vol. 40, No. 1, Supplement: Official Documents (Jan., 1946), 48-50.

2Norman Cousins, “The Literacy of Survival,” The Saturday Review, September 14, 1946, collected in K. Bird and L. Lipschultz, Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (Sotny Creek, CT: The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), 305, 306.
3Fundraising letter, Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, January 22, 1947.
4Albert Einstein Telegram to prominent Americans seeking support for the newly formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, as reported in the New York Times, May 25, 1946.
5Alexander Etkind, Russia Against Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2023), 1.
6Robert M. Cover, “Nomos and Narrative” (1983) 97 Harv. L. Rev. 4, 4.
7International Committee of the Red Cross, Advisory Service On International Humanitarian Law, “What is International Humanitarian Law?” 2004.
8U.S. Department of Defense News Transcript, Presenter: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, March 4, 2002 .
9Vladimir Putin, Address by the President of the Russian Federation February 21, 2022.
10 Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, responding to questions at the Plenary session of St Petersburg International Economic Forum, June 20, 2025.
11 Dmitry Medvedev Deputy Chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. The third President of Russia, 2008-2012. For tweets in Russian, follow @MedvedevRussia twitter/X April 8, 2023.
12 Rageh Omaar, “Israeli president Isaac Herzog says Gazans could have risen up to fight ‘evil’ Hamas’”, ITV News (13 October 2023), https://www.itv.com/news/2023-10-13/israeli-president-says-gazans-could-have-risen-up-to fight-hamas; cited in Application instituting proceedings and request for the indication of provisional measures, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), 29 December 2023, para. 101 p.60.
13 Oona A. Hathaway, “War Unbound: Gaza, Ukraine, and the Breakdown of International Law, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2024.
14 Id.
15 Steve Rosenberg, “Ukraine invasion: Would Putin press the nuclear button?” ,BBC News, Moscow, 27 February 2022
16 International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 8 July 1996, para. 105(2)(E).
17 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London; Verso Press, 1983, 1991), 7.
18 Statement by Ambassador Martin Kimani of Kenya, United Nations Security Council Urgent Meeting on the Situation in Ukraine, The United Nations, New York, N.Y., February 21, 2022.
19 Alex Callinicos, in Alex Callinicos and Justin Rosenberg, “Uneven and combined development: the social relational substratum of ‘the international’? An exchange of letters,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 21:1 (2008), 77 – 112, 83-84.
20 Paul S. Reinsch, World Politics [at the End of the Nineteenth Century as Influenced by the Oriental Situation,] (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1900), 11.

21 International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 8 July 1996, para.98.
22 “While IHL’s [International Humanitarian Law] aim is described as ‘preserv[ing] humanity in the face of the reality of war,’ human rights law aims at the higher goal of [a]ffecting systems of repression and denial. Unquestionably, human rights law offers a more ambitious set of provisions. These alternate approaches produce different results and fundamentally different views of conflict.… A developed human rights approach has the potential to reach more broadly, to evaluate the fuller set of consequences, and possibly even the choice of engaging in the conflict in the first place.” Karima Bennoune, “Toward a Human Rights Approach to Armed Conflict: Iraq 2003,” U.C. Davis Journal of International Law & Policy 11, no. 1 (Fall 2004), 171-228, 197.
23 “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 May June 2003, 65, 76.
24 “In the historical evolution of democratic regimes, a circuit of surveillance, anchored outside mainstream institutions, has developed side by side with the institutions of democratic accountability. Necessary to democratic legitimacy, confidence requires defiance, in the sense of instruments of external control and actors ready to perform this control; in fact, democracy requires permanent contestation of power. Actors such as independent authorities and judges, but also mass media, experts, and social movements, have traditionally exercised this function of
surveillance. The latter, in particular, are most relevant for the development of an ‘expressive democracy’ that corresponds to the prise de parole of the society, the manifestation of a collective sentiment, the formulation of a judgement about the governors and their action, or again the production of claims.’” Donnatella della Porta, Can Democracy be Saved? Participation, Deliberation, and Social Movements (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 5; citing and quoting Rosanvallon, P., La Contre-democratie: la politique a l’age del la defiance. Paris, Seuil.
25 Jürgen Habermas, “Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology Vol. 30 (1985), 95-116, 110-11.
26 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1970, 257.

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