Legal scholars often write about law and war, including war’s impact
on constitutional rights and powers. But what about war’s assumed
opposite: peace? If war is exceptional – a rupture of normal time, as
Jeh Johnson, then General Counsel of the Defense Department,
suggested in a recent speech
-- then peace is thought to be our normal time. Peace seems to do a
lot of work in American law and politics, since the arrival of peace (or
the process of war’s ending and the transition to peace) is assumed to
bring about a recalibration of the exceptional legal regime that war
requires.
But what is peace, and how does it work in
contemporary law and politics? Are there two sharp categories
(war/peace), so that peace is the absence of military conflict, turning
off the spigot of the war powers? Or is peace, sometimes enforced by
soldiers carrying arms and wearing blue UN Peacekeeping helmets, a form
of military conflict? Is peace a tactic or a rhetoric in a world of
ongoing conflict? Or is peace and idealized imagined state, a goal of
human striving, that, like the concept of heaven, simply cannot exist in
the material world?
An imaginative and interdisciplinary group of scholars took up these questions on an AALS panel in January on
The Concept of Peace in Law, Culture and Society.
In a series of posts over the next week or two, I’ll share with you
summaries or snippets from their presentations. The roundtable,
organized by Matteo Taussig-Rubbo and me, included a historian of peace,
Petra Goedde, Temple University Department of History; founder of the
U.S. Institute of Peace, John N. Moore, University of Virginia School of
Law; and interdisciplinary legal scholars Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton
University; Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, University at Buffalo Law School and
Ruti G. Teitel, New York Law School(and me as Moderator).
Although not set up as a panel on
my book on the concept of wartime, some speakers took the book as their starting point. Posts on the concept of wartime appeared on
this blog. For more, see war reporter
Peter Maass's take in The Nation. More reviews and commentary are
here.
Cross-posted from the War Time blog.