Did a largely forgotten peace pact transform the world we live in? Louis Menand reviews The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro (and more and more). Outlawing war? It actually worked — a 1928 pact brought an end to the right of conquest and changed the way states behave. Charli Carpenter on a treaty to end all (most?) wars? There’s still no reason to think the Kellogg-Briand Pact accomplished anything (and a response). Here is an article on “war manifestos”, documents that set out the legal reasons sovereigns provided for going to war from the late-fifteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.
