PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... compelling and authoritative ... a narrative of sweeping scope ... gripping and panoramic ... A central touchstone is Moyn’s argument that the laws regulating the conduct of war were always discriminatory in their scope and application, operating on a sliding scale of extremes ... The central premise of Moyn’s argument, that an all-encompassing concern with humanizing war appears to have come at the expense of efforts to address the scourge of war itself, is a powerful one ... But Moyn’s analysis of this phenomenon often treats it as a matter of good intentions producing perverse outcomes ... What this narrative misses is the critical ideological function served by military powers embracing the language and rhetoric of humane warfare ... Moyn’s analysis is focused on \'how the United States abandoned peace and reinvented war.\' But that must itself be viewed as part of another, larger story: the decline and fall of the project of global reordering in the wake of decolonization and independence.
