 So thanks everyone for coming. What a great turnout. My name is Heidi Matthews. I'm a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow here at SOAS and I've organized this event today. I and you two, I imagine, are very happy to have the illustrious Chase Medar with us today. He's a long time and prolific thinker, writer, tweeter, Facebooker, etc. about the laws of war, civil liberties, and international law, specifically within the U.S. context, but also internationally. And so Chase is the author of The Passion of Chelsea Manning, the story behind the WikiLeaks whistleblower published by Versaup. And he also writes for the London Review of Books, Le Mon Diplomatique, Al Jazeera, America, the Nation, the American Conservative, and Jacobin. So we're really delighted to have you. Thanks for joining us in London. And then what's gonna happen, I think, is that we'll have Chase give his talk on the weaponization of human rights. And then we'll have very brief sort of discussion slash feedback sessions from Kevin John Heller and myself. Of course, whoa. Then we're having a rave. There will be wine afterwards, too. The British Academy will provide glow sticks, won't they? Totally. So of course, everyone, if you don't know Kevin, you should know Kevin. Kevin is a professor of criminal law here at SOAS and is fantastic. And thanks so much for joining our panel. So yeah, take it away, Chase. Thank you so much, Heidi, for inviting me here and for your publicity work plastering my mug all over SOAS. Thank you both for hosting this talk. It's a real pleasure to be here. And thank you all for coming tonight. I'm flattered by your fire hazard. Human rights has changed a bit. What used to concern itself almost exclusively with freeing prisoners of conscience when the movement as we know it started in the 1970s has moved on to other things. Things that the movement and its institutions, founders, would have a hard time envisioning. For instance, you have Sarah Sewell, former director of the CAR Center for Human Rights at Harvard University, co-authoring the United States military's field manual for counterinsurgency warfare to which he supplied an introduction boasting of this new tactics fidelity to human rights. You have Michael Ignacev, a leading public assistant campaigner for human rights in the 80s and 90s supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 in the name of human rights. Bernard-Henry Levy, the inescapable publicist of La Ponce unique of liberal rights, was a leading campaigner for the Libya war in the name of human rights. Samantha Power, self-titled genocide chick and also a former director of the CAR Center for Human Rights at Harvard, has been writing op-eds on how to strong arm U.S. allies into supplying more troops for the Afghan war. She was a leading advocate within the Obama administration for the Libya war and she also pushed hard for military intervention as we call war nowadays in the summer of 2012 in Syria. Michael Posner, the founder of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, now called Human Rights First in New York Group, went on to work at the U.S. State Department as assistant secretary of state for human rights and labor. His first task in office in 2009 was to help bury the Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead. Harold Coe, more recently, Harold Coe is a leading scholar of human rights law and his former dean of the law school was the unofficial pope of American lawyers, joined the Obama State Department as chief legal counsel in 2009, and it was on him to produce the legal rationale for drone strikes, which he did at the American Society for International Law Meeting in 2010. Newsweek magazine wrote about Coe's drone assassination rationale that it was a quote, human rights approach to drones, without any comment or explanation, without even scare quotes around it. That's where we are now. Such a thing as a human rights approach to drones, a human rights approach to counter-insurgency warfare are passed almost without comment. And it's not just a handful of grandees of the human rights industry who have developed itchy trigger fingers in the past 20 years. Among major human rights institutions, Human Rights Watch has an official policy that they do not weigh in on matters of use at Bellum. That's the Latin tag phrase for whether or not you should go to war. They claim to restrict themselves only to matters of use in Bello. That's the Latin tag phrase for how war is waged. It's also more or less synonymous with international humanitarian law and the laws of armed conflict, the question of how war is fought. But despite Human Rights Watch's stated position of not weighing in on matters of use at Bellum, whether or not to go to war, they in fact have made numerous exceptions to this rule. Starting with the humanitarian war in Somalia in 1992, which led to the resignation of two Africa researchers supporting the bombing of Belgrade over Kosovo in 1999. More recently, not only did Human Rights Watch support the UN resolution for a Western intervention, as we call war nowadays in Libya, but one of their Africa researchers, Corrine Dufka, published in a foreign policy magazine article the very next day that she wanted to see nothing less than the type of unified and decisive action the UN security has brought to bear in Libya to be employed in Cote d'Ivoire. So if Human Rights Watch has been letting it all hang out a bit in its endorsements of wars, it has been rather tight-lipped about opposing wars. For instance, in 2003, Human Rights Watch's response to the Iraq invasion was to note merely that it did not qualify as a humanitarian intervention. Amnesty International has a better record, I believe, but far from a spotless record. In 2012, during a NATO summit meeting in Chicago, thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets. And Amnesty International's American branch staged what is hard to see as anything other than a counter demonstration with hiring out billboards for bus stops throughout Chicago saying keep going NATO, keep up the progress. And for holding a forum, a meeting with former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and the Obama Administration State Department's top person for the war effort in NATO. Now it's not that Amnesty has been consistently pro-war, indeed they have published scathing reports about violation of the laws of war inside Afghanistan and how that war has been waged. But we should be aware that the question of how the U.S. and allies are waging the Afghan war is very different from whether they should be waging the war. So how did this partial weaponization of the human rights industry come about? It is true that all insurgent movements eventually get institutionalized. That is, if they are lucky, that's not a bad thing in itself. And we do see that the human rights institutions, many of them have a hard time resisting the gravitational pull of Washington, Paris and London, and these imperial habits of foreign policy and of the militarized foreign policy die very hard. But one major reason for the partial weaponization of the human rights industry that I'd like to focus on is the belief in the power of law to civilize warfare, to soften it, to ameliorate it, to make it better. There is a misplaced faith, I think, in the power of law to turn drone strikes or counterinsurgency war or a military invention for regime change into a surgical instrument of policy. And a misplaced faith that war can be sufficiently regulated to spare civilians and even many combatants' harm, that it can be made much less nasty and awful, that it can be made more gentle and more moral. And I think there is too much emphasis on this notion that war can be regulated by law. To put it in the terms of art, there's too much use in bellow, not enough use at bellow in our public discourse on the use of armed force. Now I don't mean at all to dismiss the good work done by progressive international humanitarian lawyers, those who concern themselves with law, who monitor violations of the laws of armed conflict and who engage in other advocacy efforts. It's certainly a backhanded tribute to the power of progressive IHL lawyers, IHL international humanitarian law, laws of armed conflict, I want to make sure that's clear to people who aren't swimming in this daily. It's a backhanded tribute to the power of progressive IHL lawyers in the way that American military intellectuals will occasionally freak out about them and declare them enemies worthy of being targeted in the most literal sense. This happened recently with a law professor who was set to teach at West Point, posted a rather unhinged article talking about the perfidy of these international humanitarian lawyers and how they should be seen as enemies. This was not the first time in the Pentagon's quadrennial defense review of 2005, humanitarian lawyers and human rights activists were listed in the same breath as terrorists and other enemies. But this unhinged tribute to the power of progressive IHL lawyers should not really make us overstate the power wielded by them, or wielded by international humanitarian law in general. I think for those who are truly in charge of war and carrying it out, law is not the master discourse. And to the extent that law is a part of war, it is less a restraint on the use of lethal military force than a lubricant for it. Something that licenses force more than checks it, and something that's used to organize and optimize the application of deadly force. I think we should see that there has been a kind of regulatory capture to use a metaphor from economics with the laws of war, which are generally written to the advantage of great world powers, not subaltern groups, to the advantage of well-funded modern armies, not insurgent groups, not non-state actors. One of the many revelations in Chelsea Manning's leaks about the Iraq war is that how legal many atrocities are. I imagine that many of you have seen the most sensational and famous of those leaks, the helicopter video. This is a video shot from an Apache gunship helicopter about a kilometer in the sky, and you hear the pilots and the gunners talking with each other, battering each other, and then they open fire on a crowd of mostly unarmed civilians, killing over a dozen when vans come by to retrieve the wounded and bring them help at soccer. The helicopters open fire on these vans, too. And it was shocking to watch, it's shocking to see, but what's also shocking is that none of the big three human rights groups, big three in the United States anyway, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Human Rights First, uttered any comment about this particular atrocity. In part because what those helicopter gunships did is very defensible under the laws of armed conflict. And when I say that this action is defensible under the laws of war, I say that not to excuse or defend the deed, but to point out just how pliable and how loose the laws of armed conflict are, and that their real purpose or their primary function is more often to legitimize the use of lethal force rather than to restrain it or, God knows, to discipline those who wield it. Another example is fragmentary Order 242 issued by the U.S. military in Iraq during the occupation of Iraq that ordered Americans not to interfere with torture when being carried out by local Iraqi authorities. And that too is something that very arguably according to IHL lawyers within the military checks out. So I think it's important to take a cold-eyed look at the differential between a war waged strictly according to the laws of armed conflict and a war that is not so strictly waged in adhering to those laws. How different would Operation Cast Lead look if it had been waged and strict adherence to the laws of armed conflict? Would there be only 1,800 deaths instead of 2,166? Now, the margin, the difference between a war waged strictly according to IHL and that not, I don't mean to write that off as negligible. Lawyers who can say that their efforts saved the lives of a few hundred people or even a few dozen people in this conflict or that, that's as great an achievement as any lawyer can hope to get in the course of a career. I mean, most lawyers would be delighted to say at the end of a career, yes, my work saved the life of a dozen civilians. But we should also not let the question of how a war is waged eclipsed the bigger issue of whether the war should be waged in the first place. And if it's the case that international humanitarian law and human rights law and humanitarians in general are not really an effective check on war but increasingly often a lubricant for it, they could be a very effective lubricant. And the case of Harold Coe and his work coming up with the drone strike rationale for the Obama administration is a, I think, a very pungent example of this. Now Coe's defenders argue that it was his work that restrained the drone strike program, made it better and led to the deaths of fewer civilians. And there's a case that can be made for that. But it's also certainly true that Harold Coe's status as a human rights professional is something that helped wash the whole drone assassination program down in the public consciousness and make it much more acceptable to Democrats, to Liberals, and to the media in general in the United States. To quote one insider journalist account of the drone program and Coe's involvement in it as a lawyer, Coe began lobbying Secretary Clinton and the White House to let him make a speech in defense of targeted killing. The White House saw an upside in making him the unlikely public face of the CIA's drone program. It was a Nixon ghost to China play. It would give the president cover with both the human rights community and America's allies. The military and the CIA, too, loved the idea. They called the State Department lawyer Killer Coe behind his back. Some of the operators even talked about printing up t-shirts that said drones. If they're good enough for Harold Coe, they're good enough for me. This is one of the many instrumentalizations of human rights law, and it's not the instrumentalization that many human rights are set out to achieve, but we have to be aware that this is a deployment of human rights employers. Now, again, I don't want to be entirely dismissive in any way of IHL, but I think we should see them clearly. And the problem is very often questions of how acts of war are being carried out are fully occupying the space of dissent. I'm trying to think about a more elegant way or direct way to put that, but so much of the debate about drones, for instance, and what passes for critical scrutiny about drone assassinations in the American quality media is almost entirely about how drone strikes are conducted. You know, you have civil libertarian nonprofits and other legalistic advocacy groups saying that there needs to be more legal procedure. There needs to be more transparency. And I certainly agree with those complaints, but I have to say those are not the primary issues. Those are secondary or even tertiary issues. And I don't think the drone program's flaws, and I think it is a bad program, would be fixed by more legal paperwork or more transparency. It's somewhat remarkable that, to use an example of this, you know, of use in fellow questions filling the space of dissent and of critique, David Cole, a very fine legal academic, very public-spirited, writes an article for the New York Review of Books called 13 Questions for CIA Director John Brennan, and it's all about the CIA's particular drone program. And nearly all of these 13 questions are focusing on law and legal procedure. There's very little about the strategic outlook. There's very little about Washington's real security interest, whether or not this helps the security of the United States to begin with. A first-order question that has fallen by the wayside with alarming ease. Now, I don't want to blame this too much on lawyers who are doing what they have been trained to do within their sphere of expertise. Lawyers are good at lawyer. And if an editor calls up a lawyer who is also a journalist, they'll write something up. And I think the greater part of responsibility for this distorted media focus on how war is waged rather than the bigger first-order questions lies at the feet of the media. I want to talk about that for just a moment. Elite media generally come from the same general subculture as lawyers, same universities, same media consumption habits. And lawyers at humanitarian NGOs or at law schools are likely to have had some media training at some point, so they know how to supply a pithy quote, how to write a press release, how to get a journalist exactly what she or he wants. This is not the case of generally with anti-war activist groups who are often taking on more first-order questions about the morality of war. And less often, strategic issues of war. These tend to be not full-time professionalized activists. They're more likely to be amateur activists. And I think we should all remember that there is such a thing as non-professional activists. That's something in the United States that is increasingly rare. They are also anti-war activists more likely to be older people from the Vietnam generation who use a certain lingo of that generation that may be less media-friendly or less salon-fee for the New York Times. An example of media focus, which I think is, it stay with me here, not entirely healthy, is this recent hospital bombing by American jets in Kunduz, Afghanistan. There's a lot, one reads now, of, was it a war crime? Will it be investigated? Will any American or Afghan military personnel be disciplined? If so, how? Will the investigation be transparent? Spoiler alert, given that a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan accidentally killed a Marine and a U.S. Navy medic in 2011, and that report was never released, I think we can guess what the outcome is going to be in any investigation that does happen here. Now, this debate about whether this hospital bombing was a war crime, is important, but I have to say it is not nearly as important as it seems. You heard it in American white guys come to so ask that war crime, and to say that war crimes aren't that important, I feel like the walls are going to collapse on you, but stay with me because I mean something different than what that sounds like initially. Here's what I mean. The matter of war crimes, like this hospital bombing in Afghanistan, should not eclipse the bigger question of overall war, strategy, and war aims in Afghanistan. Questions like, why does the U.S. have 10,000 troops in Afghanistan? What would happen if all U.S. troops and contractors left in six months' time? Is there a way to cut a deal with the Taliban to give them a share of power, to incorporate them into government in a way that is broadly acceptable to the parties in Afghanistan? Are the anti-Taliban militias to which the U.S. has outsourced security in much of the country any better than the Taliban when it comes to committing atrocities or having more egalitarian views on gender roles? Now, I read in the New York Times this morning that President Obama is now reconsidering pulling out of Afghanistan and is leaning towards leaving a heavier garrison of 3,000 to 5,000 troops there. What does that mean for prospects of peace there and for the ongoing civil war there? Those are bigger questions, and I think more important questions than whether or not the war is being waged correctly. And the problem with focusing on war crimes can be that it perversely legitimizes the rest of war to perpetuate the faith against all evidence that military violence can be a clean and hygienic political instrument, that you can have war without atrocity, that you can order up a war but politely ask the chef to hold the side order of war crimes, that you can have decaffeinated war. It doesn't really work like that, and it's often a conservative, right, or, you know, militarist talking point that, well, war is hell and these things happen. I think that's actually true, and the implications should not be that, therefore, keep going and, you know, keep the war going, but I think it's time to rethink broader strategic questions. So that's my message of futility, despair, and perverse consequences for you this late afternoon, but I want to balance that out with some empty exhortations as well. Use ad bellum jurisprudence, also known as just war thinking, examining the question of whether or not you should go to war in the first place, whether the war is legally warranted. I think this is probably the dead end, too. Most of the scholarly interventions in just war, and you said, well, are really not interventions at all but redundant encouragements to the war machine, pushing on an open door, thinking of American scholars like the late Gene Betke Elstein or Stephen Carter, or Oxford theologian Nigel Bigger, and even some of the work of Michael Walzer. It's almost a ritual incantation mumbling the names of Augustine, Aquinas, Grosius, and then press the button, we're going to do it. So I don't think there's much hope there. One area where I do see potential for checking a militarized foreign policy going amok is if we embrace the language of strategy and interest. For left-wing people, one of our major vices, I think, is squeamishness in thinking about interests. We're much more comfortable thinking about ideals, values, principles, but the notion of interest is kind of dirty and unclean. I think we should get rid of that scruple and start talking seriously and looking seriously about what the real security interests in these wars are, what are the consequences, and to start reading military science, military history, and to dig in there. It's often assumed, I think, by left-of-center people that all military science and thinking is inherently bellicose and pro-war. That's really not the case. There's a growing number of dissenters within the U.S. military intelligentsia who are very critical of drone assassinations, for instance. And I wish that they got a fraction of the attention in The New York Times, the review of books and other quality media, that the hand-ringing about drone transparency and drone legal procedure got. And I think that it's important not to cede the ground of military strategy and interests to the war party. You will be surprised at how many allies you can find in military academies who are very critical of either counter-insurgency warfare or drone strikes or both, because principles are not enough in the eternally recurring battle between Darth Vader and Lisa Simpson. Guess who wins every time? I also think, third exhortation, that there should be more focus on preventive diplomacy. There's a lot of human rights professionals with real area expertise here. Instead of asking ourselves, why didn't we intervene in Rwanda or somewhere else to stop the genocide when it was already too late? With military force, there needs to be a growing consciousness of students, lay people, all people who follow foreign affairs in general, that there are other preventive steps you can take to avert genocide, to avert atrocity, apart from military force. The late Allison de Forge, a longtime human rights watch employee and expert on the Great Lakes region of Africa, applied a helpful list of 12 steps that can be taken to avert genocide, and only one of these, the last one, involves the deployment of military force. That's a very different approach than the one taken by Samantha Power, for whom the only way to prevent genocide and atrocity is to launch the missile sorties, send in the special forces. And fourth, I think we should recognize that the sphere of human rights, and meaningful, does have limits and that it is not all-encompassing and that there are important spheres of human activity, including especially war, where human rights law does not cut much ice or have any real traction. This is not to dismiss or insult the sphere of human rights because all professional specialties have their limits. Tax law is essential to civilization but tax lawyers recommend that war is not primarily a matter of tax law. War, similarly, is not a matter of human rights, primarily or ultimately. War is not a matter of individual rights. War is not primarily or ultimately a matter of law. All right, let's hear responses. My basic responses. Hallelujah, singing a brother, but that wouldn't be very much of a comment, so I'll try to deepen what Chase, I think the weakness of this panel is we probably all agree with each other. And you get two Americans and a Canadian, so I apologize for that. She's the Canadian. So, what I want to point out, Chase has talked about the false promise of international humanitarian law in terms of humanizing war. I want to talk a little bit about the false promise of international human rights law itself because when you look at kind of the dominant effort of left-wing international lawyers, of which I've won, it has been over the past 10, 15 years to actually try to insist that international human rights law applies actually in armed conflict and governs the use of lethal force outside of armed conflict, extra-territorially. And that doesn't actually humanize war very much either. In terms of targeting, when you insist upon the co-application of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, doesn't affect targeting at all. Clearly, the rules of IHL trump any competing rule of human rights law. And then even in detention, which has really been where the action is insisting that human rights law, even in armed conflict governs detention, it also doesn't really prevent detention. The standards are not that much narrower than under international humanitarian law. And so, you get endless amounts of hand-wringing over cases like here in the U.K., Sir Darmar Hamid that says the European Convention on Human Rights governs the U.K.'s detention activities in Iraq. And the U.K. has been up in arms about this. What does this decision actually require the U.K. to do? Just pass a law that says it's fine to do what the U.K. has already been doing in Iraq. That's literally the only thing that goes from that decision. And then even if you look outside of armed conflict, where we insist upon, against the United States, this very stubborn insistence that human rights law applies extra-territorially, well, it's great. It would be nice if they acknowledged that it did. But it's certainly not going to prevent the use of drones outside of armed conflict. The rules on the use of lethal force are not that much tighter in human rights law than in humanitarian law. There's a widespread misperception that if human rights law governs, and they have a targeted killing, nothing could be further from the truth. And the way that the U.S. styles its drone attacks, well, they're inevitably against targets who themselves pose a lethal threat, and they're invariably in areas in which things short of lethal force like capture are not actually feasible. So, really, it does nothing to limit the U.S. drone program. And so, again, I think this emphasis on human rights law also detracts from considerations of the use of Belem. When states can actually use force extra-territorially. And it's clearly, and Chase has not claimed otherwise, it's not a zero-sum game. It's not like we have to choose one or the other to emphasize. But I, like Chase, and like a mutual friend, Sam Moyn, who writes on this as well, believe that the scales have been balanced too much toward humanitarian law and human rights law, and not enough toward the use of Belem. So, for a few years, I've been waging a very lonely academic fight against what we know as the unwilling or unable test of self-defense. A test that has been adopted by the United States and the United Kingdom that says any time a state is unwilling or unable to deal with a terrorist threat that is using its territory as a base of attack, that you are free to then violate that state sovereignty and attack the terrorist group. And it is, without question, the most radical development in the use of force since World War II. Hands down. Nobody talks about it. Almost all scholars just kind of passively go along with the claim of literally two states that this represents international law. And not only does it fundamentally change the rules on the use of force and make it far easier to go around the world bombing things, it's even more perverse in the sense of what is unwilling or unable. Well, of course, it's the states that use the force like the United States or the United Kingdom. They don't even have to ask someone like Assad in Syria whether he'll participate in counterterrorism activities. You just decide, well, he's unwilling to do so, he's unable to do so, so we can then bomb Syria as much as we want. Again, almost no conversation about one of these really fundamentally radical changes in international law. And I don't want to claim, and Chase certainly didn't claim, that some kind of renewed emphasis on the U-Side Belem would somehow fundamentally limit the use of force extra-territorily. That's counterintuitive. And again, I want to echo something that Chase said, all of these areas of law are aspects of international law. And from the piece of Westphalia in whatever it was, I always forget the year, all the way to today, international law is authored by states. States make these rules. And it's not that the rules are useless. It's not that the rules don't somewhat humanize war, but we should never expect international law to develop rules that fundamentally limit the right of states to use force in ways that they think are necessary, particularly when they can style it as an existential threat like terrorism. So just to conclude, there are basically three takeaways from this. The first being that international law can only be reformist. It will never be revolutionary. It is a contradiction in terms to say that a state-authored area of law is going to fundamentally change the nature of state power. Second, in so far as we still do want to emphasize international law, and like Chase, I'm not saying we abandoned it, when we use it, and of course, the global south can use international law strategically, even though the rules are largely authored by the global north, but this just needs to be on institutions and not simply rules. I think debates about whether the P5 at the Security Council can exercise vetoes in atrocity situations and general assembly resolutions condemning aggression are far more useful than endless debates about the meaning of Article 51 self-defense under the UN Charter. But really, the third takeaway in the bottom line is that the only durable answer to the kind of discussion that we have been witnessing is politics. It's not going to come from law. States are never going to be deterred by legal rules, but they certainly can be made to fear their populations, whether at the ballot box or through, shall we say, more dramatic means, and that's really going to be the only source of progressive change if that's what we're looking for. So thank you. So I'm going to respond briefly to what's been said by both Kevin and Chase, and then we'll open it up always the best part of the evening, which will be in a discussion with you guys. So I think, yeah, fundamentally, fundamentally, fundamentally, I agree with both of you, but I do find myself in the odd position, I think, of being a defender of law at the table, but not in the way that you would think. Because I think that law is politics. So if you believe that law is politics, then it's difficult to come to the conclusion that law is actually useless and we need to turn to politics when always already what we're doing with legal discourse is doing politics, right? So I think it's a bit of a topology to just say, well, we'll get, you know, rid of the use ad bellum, and we don't need to have use ad bellum jurisprudence and jurisprudence that's useless. So I like to think of myself as a use ad bellum jurisprudence, that's a thing. And, you know, and query the manner in which thinking about why we should go to war in the first place can help us answer some of the what are actually fundamentally political and moral questions at state care, right? And to not take that away so quickly from the realm of the lawyers who are, you know, maybe a lot of things, but can be quite good at marshaling discourse for specific and very instrumental in a good way, political ends, yeah. And so, and my impetus for doing that are taking, at least taking that identity at this point in my career is to, you know, try and conceive of what the law of war insofar as it's the use ad bellum could actually mean for a person thinking on the left, for a person interested in revolutionary international law, right? Now, it sounds weird, right? So being a revolutionary international lawyer is actually being anti-international law, but from your perspective is supporting international law. So it's a weird position to be in. And it might not make sense at all, but that's my project now, I think. So that's a little bit of context. So just a few small things, and then we'll open it up. So I think what is fascinating and I'm very glad that both of you actually tried to do this was to parse what the concrete stakes of your observations and arguments are from the point of view of what do we now do with human rights law, what do we now do with international law. And I think that or I detect what might be a little bit of a slippage between a critique of the laws of war, right? So the adbellum and the inbellum and the way that those two things fit together. And as you said, the idea that the law actually seems to aid in a vet atrocity, right? Which I think is true and is not necessarily a new observation. So a slippage between that and what's also known as a critique of what human rights actors and groups are actually doing with the law, which might be two slightly separate things. So on the one hand, this involvement in the business of war-making itself, this seems to be quite a bad thing. So the idea, in other words, that whereas before human rights people were concerned with civil liberties in some kind of more purist or effective sense, now they're merely cogs in the sort of bellicose machinery of Washington's foreign policy. But on the other hand, from time to time, less so today, you want to cut them a little bit of slack by saying it's not the job if human rights watch or amnesty international to actually get involved in the adbellum. And so, you know, although we could debate this, of course. And so, you know, they're in this sort of bizarre position that means they're ultimately ineffective. So, but it's true, of course, that human rights actors sometimes still make substantive proclamations about the goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness of this or that particular earned intervention. You're right to observe that not only do they do it, obviously, which as in your examples were great, but they also do it in, or at least I think, I would argue that they do it, you know, under the radar, right? So, using the in bello language is actually a way of making an adbellum statement, right? So it's an exercise in massive non-transparency, right? So every time you say that something's a war crime, you're actually in some way making a judgment about the reasons for going to war, right? For both sides and making a normative judgment, right? That's going to come down on the left side or the other, and it's always going to come down on the side of the, there's the imperial actor, whatever, in the situation. So I'm concerned about the implications of this critique. So is the problem then that human rights groups are too much in the business of war, on the one hand? Or is the problem that human rights groups and actors, lawyers, et cetera, students, whatever, are not enough in the business of war? Yeah, so my suggestion would be, I think the problem is the latter, right? So we actually could, we could do more war, and that might be a good thing. Sounds a bit crazy, but yeah. So you often lament the depoliticization of the hybrid legalized discourse about war. So at one point, and this is a great, I love this quote, Kay said, quoting, human rights organizations can do a splendid job of exposing and criticizing abuses, but they are constitutionally incapable of taking stands on larger political issues. With their legitimacy and funding dependent on a carefully cultivated perception of neutrality, human rights non-profits will never be any substitute for an explicitly anti-imperialist political force. So I think my reading of this would suggest then a more radical critique of what you call the weaponization of human rights, right? So as I've said, the real problem lies in human rights groups, willingness to accept the legal status quo as actually reflective of some sort of morality or reality. And so insofar as human rights, I think we're loosely here understanding is in bellenorms, although there is actually, you know, separate body of law, but understanding human rights is in bellenorms. Insofar as they fit within the larger framework of the law of war, we shouldn't be surprised that human rights facilitate bellicosity and atrocity. And so in a sort of somewhat paranoid, structuralist observation, we might assume that the human rights project sort of was designed, for lack of a better word. And it continues to function to do precisely what I have suggested it does, which is to say to take, and what you both also agreed with, is to take use-add bellen questions off the table entirely and to populate that space entirely within bellen questions. And so I would argue that the distinction between going toward itself and the waging of war is just a false distinction, okay? It empowers and emboldens those with privileged access to the discourse, which is, of course, lawful combatants and also human rights groups. So they're the same people. And on the same side of the power table. But another question is, all right, how do we embolden and empower people, you know, not the U.S., like, insurgent groups that we may or may not agree with in Syria or elsewhere? How can we use the law to that effect? Yeah, I mean, that's a big question. I would like to suggest that it's possible to going forward to articulate the challenge in terms of what it would look like to have a world in which human rights and human rights actors and proponents could be more political. So instead of the in-bellow swallowing the add bellen entirely, the political could swallow what we can see as a merely tactical. This may entail the dissolution of the human rights project itself. That's an outcome. It would probably entail the dissolution of the U.S. bellen in-bellow distinction, I hope, itself. It would entail a lot of crazy stuff, but I think ultimately from a perspective of doing a distributional analysis, yeah, this is the way forward. So yeah, so just to end with that, I think, you know, the idea that we turn to strategy and interest and politics is absolutely the right thing, but it might be possible to do that within a discourse that can simultaneously be considered both political and legal, and that, you know, a distributional analysis of the costs and benefits of that alternate discourse would be the way forward, rather than abandoning the add bellen entirely. But anyway, I'll leave it there and open it for questions. So I'll take a cue. I don't know anybody's name. So, sorry, what's your name? My name's Julian. You wouldn't know my name because I'm not from the Sylox. She wouldn't know any of you. I still don't. Go ahead. I'm a PhD student at the University of Canada, and first of all, thank you very much. I really, really enjoyed that. You're right. Of course, we do agree with each other, but I think there's a lot of things to talk about. One of the classic observations, because you're going back to politics, is that war is another means of waging politics, right? And then the inversion of that would be, well, is politics another way of waging war, increasingly. And I don't know if anyone watched the Democratic debate yesterday. I certainly did not watch it, because let's face it, who even watches these things anymore, right? We just look on Twitter and we read, I don't know, Salon or Sleep. But essentially, one of the questions in the Democratic debates was, do you have an enemy that you have cultivated, an enemy that you like to have? Now, most Democratic candidates said, well, the NRA or, I don't know, Republican Institute of General, there are a couple of answers to this. That was a curious question, because it shows that the idea of having an enemy is something that we are proud of as Americans to a certain degree. And I was thinking particularly of David Graber's critique in The Baffle from a couple of months ago, where he said that a rhetoric about drones actually is the reverse of what we say about terrorists. We say that terrorists are cowardly, whereas technically, you can say a lot of things about terrorists, but blowing yourself up in the middle of a square, it requires some guts. Now, a drone, at the essence of it, is compared to, say, the trauma of the Vietnam War or wars like this, would be considered more cowardly for using the sort of holistic moral equation, saying, okay, we are engaging in a war that we are very distanced from. And my question to you is, we are going back to the political, putting our hopes into the political experience. How, as a society or even an international law in Western countries, do we take this legalese and do we take this new type of warfare, and are we still able to internalize it into a militaristic culture? Because it seems on the face of it, it actually seems like drone warfare contradicts a lot of the sort of very stereotypical American macho values of what warfare meant. Does that make sense? So I think we'll take maybe two more questions and then I'll send answers. So there's a question right here. Hi, can you introduce yourself as well? Yes, sorry, hi. My name is Orlando Econos. I'm an exchange student from the U.S. My question is for Professor Heller. You talked a little bit about this, you know, responsibility to intervene in terms of when a state is unwillingly or unable to prevent terrorism. You said it hasn't really, like you learned to the fact that it's not been written much about, but the language seems to me like it's very much an extension of responsibility to protect and R2P, which has been written a lot about. So can you talk a little bit about the distinction between this responsibility to prevent terrorism and the responsibility to protect citizens of a nation and why one has been written so much about and the other, not really, and does writing about R2P relate and does it apply? This woman here in the purple. Hi, my name is Eleanor. I'm a student in violence, conflict and development. And I'm very interested in all of you kind of, you started talking about the concept of shifting and looking at politics more so, and I'm interested in what you think about the role of NGOs in civil society. More so in sort of treaties and legislation to ban certain types of weapons. So if we look at the landmine ban treaty and how NGOs were so incredibly involved in that, do you think that there's some merit in that? And if we kind of look now at the campaign to stop killer robots in the discussion of drones, do you see a place for NGOs in civil society that is sort of kind of towing the line between involvement in law but also kind of general advocacy and creating and changing norms about violence? I'll answer the last question first about NGOs in civil society. I find it impossible to generalize just because there's so many NGOs with totally conflicting agendas and goals. So, you know, one, let me just describe something. And I see it as a problem, but I don't see it as a solution. Since in the past 50 years, anti-war criticism has been professionalized and been cabined into NGOs. The anti-war movement around Vietnam was not a 501C3 that's the tax code for a tax deductible charity organization that most NGOs are part of. It was a mass movement, a political movement. And since then, what dissent there is about foreign policy is more and more cabined into NGOs. And I don't see that as a good development. I don't think it's likely to change. Part of the reason why anti-war spirit and dissent has been cabined into NGOs is because the draft in the United States was gotten rid of by Richard Nixon in 1973. Middle-class families no longer have really any skin in the game when it comes to warfare. And the burden of war is distributed very unevenly. And even though it was quite possible to get a draft deferment during the Vietnam War, there was at least a theoretical possibility in the households of the elites in media, law, business that junior might get sent, you know, but not anymore. And part of the rise of NGOs is that they tend to be staffed by lawyers in the United States who are comfortable talking law more than politics. And, you know, to relate to something you said, they often do use criticisms of how a war is waged. Use in Bello as a kind of veiled criticism of the war itself that you said, Bello. But I think the mask has stuck to the face and now they're incapable and, you know, have been for a while of speaking clearly about the merit of a war. It's just tactical questions of how they're doing it. So I know that doesn't, you know, come to your question about the excellent NGO that's trying to, you know, ban landmines. They wish them well. It's not that I think all of these agendas are bad, but we have to pay attention to the form of these organizations and what that entails and what meaning that has, not just the specific agendas. Should I talk more? I don't know the etiquette. It's your show, so if you have more to say. Yeah, that's all I have for now. I'll chime in. Any other two questions? Sure. I'll address the other two questions. I'm in reverse order. It was a really interesting question. I actually hadn't really thought much about the elective affinity to use the verbarian term between unwilling and unable and R2P, but they both do kind of come from the same place, which is a greater skepticism toward the notion of state sovereignty that we need to eliminate state sovereignty in order to eliminate the scourge of terrorism and we need to eliminate state sovereignty in the need to, you know, combat these humanitarian crises. And again, this has been a very traditional occupation of the left over the past 40 or 50 years trying to move away from state sovereignty. And again, we could all have a moral discussion and think there's probably, sometimes, when we do want to pierce the veil of state sovereignty. We don't like it when, you know, dictators massacre their own people. But it's, but you're right that these doctrines support each other and reinforce each other and just make it easier to think about the irrelevance of state sovereignty. And it's a much longer discussion than we have time for now. But I'm actually not completely sure that the left is gaining something by constantly critiquing the form of the state and trying to say that anytime something happens within a state that is problematic, the sovereignty of the state no longer matters. Because in a world that is governed by power politics, you know, those who are making the decisions about when it's time to intervene, this doesn't tend to be a democratic process. It doesn't tend to be a process in which the Global South gets any say. No member of the Global South will ever use R2P against the United States to protect, you know, Native Americans. You know, state-sponsored terrorism of which the United States and Israel and a kingdom and other states are the leading purveyors, they will never have their sovereignty violated by an armed drone from Uganda. So it all works one direction. So I'm not in favor of terrorism or mass atrocity, but the idea that the solution is then to ignore state sovereignty, I find very skeptical and I think your question is really intelligent. And then just really briefly on yours, you know, I can actually say something kind of optimistic, which I never actually get to do, which is, I think it's getting hard, you know, it's trite to say that the West needs enemies and invents them when it doesn't have them because it's true. But I actually think it's kind of getting harder to generate the enemies that can motivate really fundamentally illiberal and illegal uses of force. The Nazis were truly an existential threat. The VC, not so much of an existential threat. The idea that we had to bomb the hell out of Cambodia illegally and in secret, in order to save democracy in Asia, you know, didn't convince that many people. I think terrorism is probably even harder than the VC in some ways. Again, not that terrorism isn't a terrible thing, but I think people are less and less likely to look at terrorism and say, yeah, it's just like the Nazis, the Al Qaeda, you know, outside the Republican Party where everything is like the Nazis. I think most of us are more skeptical of that. And so I think they're having to work harder to use terrorism as a means for kind of reshaping the international system in any way, you know, low and behold, completely conveniently favours the United States and other kind of global north powers. So, yeah, I mean, again, your point is very well taken. A few more questions? Right here. Okay. Given I've been approached saying, well, the end times are human rights, it's an odd position for me to be in, but I'm going to push back a little and I'm going to suggest that these arguments are ultimately self-perfeiting. But if the conclusion is it's all politics or all strategy, then you have this discourse which has a degree of traction which can generate a significant amount of income from both the individual. It's not obvious what they give their money to other ones. So why would you not co-opt and use that language as effectively as possible in order to fight the political battle? Why would you abandon a language which has a large degree of public recognition? I'll give you a couple of examples. So the Amnesty Example putting up the posters, that led to a rebellion within Amnesty and Suzanne Nossel, who's a perfect candidate for what you were describing, was driven out of the organisation precisely by those old-style ex-Vietnam activists in the Midwest in their Amnesty groups who are all leftists before their human rights people who drove around through the networks of the organisation. And in your case, Kevin, about institutions, can the International Criminal Court be built without this kind of well-spring of support from human rights and other sorts of lawyers? So if you want those institutions, if that language can help carry you to a place where those institutions get created, why would progressive forces not use it up to the point at which it ceases to be affected? I think the strongest argument is the displacement argument which is human rights displaces other forms of activism. And I've seen that argued both ways. So that's really my question is, if it's strategy and politics, then, you know, your leftist training would tell you, use what you've got, use what language you've got, take the money from the right and spend it to support the left, you know, use what you have. So why would you abandon this sort of highly legitimate language at this stage? I'll take two more questions. Oh, yeah. We'll take two more. Hi, my name's Jen Elene. I'm in the Globalization Development Program, so I don't have any kind of legal background whatsoever. But I'm curious, because at least in the United States, this becomes sort of a bit of a reckoning in the medical community for a lot of the doctors who worked in Guantanamo. And I'm wondering, are there parallels between the medical community and the legal community about, you know, with time, there will eventually be, to this day, reckoning? Or are the two fields so fundamentally different that it doesn't matter how much time passes, there's just not going to be that commitment? So we're going back to, you know, Madalina Albright and Goswami and all that stuff. So I'm just curious, Madalina. Right here. Go ahead. Madalina Maning was prosecuted, was because he leaked the US confidential document. Don't you think in the age of digital privacy, around the age of digital era, privacy is a myth. Privacy is something we don't understand and that we want to exercise in this years of terrorism when the state's all pervasive, sovereignty dictates that you give up every document, you give up everything that you require and you basically don't have any human right to privacy when it comes down to security and safety. Apparently, there was a case filed and the US lost here because they wanted to take a few files or rather they wanted to take a patch of documents from the European Union states and the ECHR ruled that you cannot take so. So what is your opinion on the fact that where do you think the world is heading down vis-a-vis the privacy of individuals, privacy of states and whose convenience is this privacy who dictates it? Because internet is not neutral. It is run by the western states, it's the conception of the western states. So what happens to those states of global south that Kevin Sir was mentioning about? Okay. In reverse order to partially answer your question in the back, there's a categorical difference between the privacy of states and other large powerful institutions and the privacy of individuals. It's inversely proportionate. The more power someone or an institution has, the less privacy it should have and conversely the mere individual deserves the most privacy from the state. I don't think privacy for individuals is a myth yet. That's a dystopian future that is possible and very possible but we're really still quite a waste from that which is a good thing. About torture doctors and medical doctors and psychologists who engage or help with torture programs, there is some reckoning and that's a good thing. There's some lawsuits, I don't think there's going to be any prison time or any kind of criminal sanction which is too bad. Is there a parallel with lawyers? Yes, I think so. Will there be a kind of reckoning? Well, I doubt it. There has been in some ways. I mean with John Yu. Now John Yu is an extra spicy Bush Cheney Neocon, my law professor back at Berkeley who co-authored the torture memos. He's still known as someone who just went too far. His colleague who co-authored the torture memos was elevated to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, just one layer of judicial authority under the Supreme Court, J. Bybee, and when hears nothing about him and I don't know whether it's because the medium of critique is academics who are more up in arms about something defiling academia than an actual appellate judge who has real power. I think they should be viewed as very similar but I don't think that's coming. I think John Yu was horrible but the torture that he authorized has killed fewer people than the drone strikes that were authorized by Harold Coe who's a good liberal who's done genuinely good work as a lawyer and okay work as a scholar too. Some people are marvelous. To answer your question last, I think it's certainly a good thing to use the language of human rights and to take advantage of it, to exploit it but one has to be aware of the hazards when you unlearn other languages when the mask sticks to your face. You can really start to limit what starts out as a coy and clever strategy can really limit what you're capable of even saying later and I see this especially about drone assassinations where the space of dissent is filled with human rights critiques legal critiques but it's shocking to me constantly how opponents of drone strikes say nothing about the real security liability to the United States domestic territory that drone strikes create by stirring up ill feeling by creating new terrorists. That to me is an ace in the hole argument for why this is a bad program. If a national security program is a net liability to national security that should be the end of discussion and two of the most serious recent terror attempts in the United States the attempt to blow up Times Square in May of 2010 by Faisal Shazad and then the Najibullah Zazi attempt to blow up the New York subway. Both defendants when apprehended said loud and clear in courtrooms that they were angered by drone strikes on their native Pakistan and Afghanistan respectively that should be a card that is played an argument that is made against this horrible program. I mean it's not the only argument to be made but I think it's a very compelling one. The human rights crowd is incapable of talking about naked interests or talking candidly about interests like this. Instead it's just what we need more legal paperwork or maybe if we have a little more transparency. That's, you know, that we need to learn new languages as well and it's okay to be polyglot but there are other arguments to make whether consequentialist principled arguments and that's something that's badly needed. I'll just say something really briefly also about this last question. I agree. In a sense but I think this is a standard question that leftist lawyers struggle with so it's a collaboration question to what extent are you willing to collaborate with people and, you know, the inherent non-transparency and emptiness and moral vacuousness of their discourse but what if you can achieve something good by doing that, right? So I mean one camp of, you know, critical legal thinkers and scholars and activists will say yes we need to continue deploying the language of human rights after we've gone through a very specific distributional analysis and we figured out who's going to be the winners and who's the losers and that's the best of our ability but we'll never know more than the two best of our ability and we're willing to then take that risk but it is asking a lot of lawyers and I don't think in practice especially not within my field that happens and within the law of word field that happens very often but not impossible in theory and then the other response is to say that no the cost of collaboration in general is just too much and we need to think about, you know, the structure of law but not abandoning law entirely which is where I tend to fall down but I mean the point is we'll take in and it's a perennial problem It's what a way in real could be too and I don't disagree with anything that you said and my point is really it's about the complacency of international lawyers that we've created the ICC or we've drafted the Geneva Conventions and now we can kind of retire to our chairs and relax and I think my point is just that progressive change to say nothing about revolutionary change is really really difficult it's dangerous and it's not going to tend to be brought about by international lawyers I'm thinking about your question I'm actually not sure if we knew everything that we know now about the torture regime back when you was a younger lecturer at Berkeley or by being considered for the Ninth Circuit that they would be in their positions today and so to me the people that I admire are the Chelsea Manning's and the Edward Snowden's of the world who by releasing that information have brought about a great personal cost to themselves have done far more for the progressive cause in international law than any leftist international lawyer will ever do not all of us are able to do that I'm old I had my days lying down in front of trucks carrying nuclear triggers to rocky flats and you know I like just teaching now and I'm too old to go like hang out with the students and they were occupying the Brunei suite I'm completely on their side but like it's just not me that's the problem that we just think that we can bring about progressive change through law and we can to some extent but that's always going to require the grunt work that not everybody is willing to do any more questions Trader? I would like to know what exactly is the point of international law knowing the fact that Russia is leading to war at the moment and the USA for example are using drone as we say so what's the point what international law are going to do against that I don't know international lawyer are going to force you to bloody not put in going to do what? I have an answer to your philosophical question and you know this hypothetical comes up you know if international law is so bad then what would the world look like without international law why do we even need it I think this sounds like a reasonable hypothetical that it's something that might happen certainly the United States there's a lot of both elite and popular distrust and hostility towards the very notion of international law I don't know I think in other larger powers that's probably the case too but looking at this hypothetical more closely what would things be like without international law without the laws of war it's incredibly far fetched you can no more imagine a modern military force without laws of war then you can imagine a human being without lungs it's simply something that is part of the system and how our systems work in the modern world and it cannot function without it it's essential to our self-image and even you know illiberal countries make use of law both publicly in the international sphere and internally and this is true about international law too this is simply how states communicate with each other make arguments to each other with different audiences it's the language the coordinating language for international relations and so rather than ask what's the point I mean you can ask it but it's just going to be with us no matter what extirpated from international relations no matter how much of a butch flinty realist you are I mean law is needed to be part of the system and I'm not saying that proudly as a lawyer anything I'm just describing and then behind you maybe one last round of questions yep my question is rather nice but I'll ask it anyway I'm from Pakistan and my name is Tajreen I'm with my masters in globalization and multinational cooperation my question is that in Pakistan for example there have been some rights and nationally there has been outrage over it but it's not a very organized outrage but we have human rights activists we have human rights lawyers who are speaking against it my question is how can they collaborate with the international community or how can they collaborate with the international community of leftist human rights lawyers for example and be a powerful force to maybe pressurize the governments the local governments to take a stance against drone strikes how can they become a force and then right behind you there is a question I have a question about drone strikes I was really thinking I know that NATO came up with this one question what would happen when China and Russia would have drone capacity and then start to join the Middle East maybe Russia and Eastern Europe and how does that how does the language that we are setting today we are basically giving them all the arguments to intervene in Eastern Europe with all the frozen contracts that we have how does I mean I see all the the code of conduct could be translated from the US and given to Russia so do you see this happening thank you one last question who wants it a little bit I agree with what you were saying about how left needs to be a little bit more Darth Vader unless this is Simpson as you put it but in terms of what you were talking about with the talking more strategically about interests like the drone program is actually counterproductive to the interest it's trying to further I think that this sort of discourse sort of reinforces the same false promises we see in a lot of human rights law that you can somehow reconcile state interest with human rights that somehow a lot of the law seems to be focused around as you were saying there's a proper way to conduct war and the focus is on when things happen to go wrong in the course of it and I think that a lot of this also applies to when we talk about state interests that when we're talking about the United States going into Libya or Syria or Afghanistan it's not like these are irrational things it's not like there actually isn't an actual interest for all the things that happen to go wrong there is still an interest there and it's not like the left can just be all sneaky and be like oh you know what's actually better for American imperialism if you don't kill the children but all the other stuff is okay I think that I tend to agree that more much deeper radical change is needed and it's not like definitely we need to talk about those naked interests but not necessarily in the sense of you know what you were saying it would be better for the drone program like national security even the framing of national security fits a certain interest in itself can I respond? I'll do it in reverse order I'm glad you said what you said but we plainly disagree about it and I think that it's very important to face these interests head on and these changes that we want you know they can happen at very different tempos and very different horizons because these deeper changes that need to be addressed are going to be most likely longer term in being achieved there's a long middle ground with a lot of blood and money in the meantime and I think using the naked language of interests is a good way to do it and I don't think it's sneaky I think it's honest so I want to see leftists being more like populist demagogues and appealing to you know the real interest whether it's security or money I think there's not enough of that in the United States certainly I feel like nibbling around the edges about you know well it should be a little more lawful or this you know I think there's a role for that too but I think that there needs to be a much more directly speaking plain speaking sense of interest and politics and just to relax the grip on morals and principles because once that ground is seated to the ground of interest to elites and right wing bosses and big capital then you've already mostly lost I think the most you can hope for nibbling reforms I think interest in talking about that you know what a national interest is is something very inchoate very fluid very malleable and I think leftists need to assert a vision of what a national interest is that in most cases it's going to be very different from what the really more conservative guardians and faux owners of what national interests are and you know talking about national interest does not exclude internationalism either and I think that to say it just reinforces nationalism and reinforces a kind of instrumental mentality I just find that a bit squeamish I think it's good to get hands dirty get dirt under the fingernails and accept the consequences using the rhetoric of what's real out there I mean that may sound horribly crude and horrible but that's telling you honestly about will drones and the law of drones change when China and Russia get drones you know I don't see drones themselves their new technology is being the utter game changer and paradigm shift that some enthusiasts and some excitable journalists think they are I mean the history is full of military tactics new military tactics being introduced that look like they were going to revolutionize everything and then they ended up barely making any impact the torpedo boat to naval warfare is one of these where France developed this it looked like they would you know unseat Britain is the top naval power but you know then Britain and then later Germany developed anti torpedo destroyers that restored the balance to the status quo anti and that happened very quickly so I hope that if anything I'm optimistic for you know better regulation and real restrictions on drones once China and Russia because the greater powers may decide that it's in their interest to not be so you know profligate in launching drone strikes that there's mutually reinforcing suspicion and interest to make the US tone it down a bit about coordination between Pakistan's human rights groups that are doing on the ground research in the FATA and I think that's critically important I you know I'm not connected with that struggle but I do know I have a friend who's a human rights guy and a lawyer who's written reports for various legal clinics at law schools and done some research in FATA and I'm sure he's I'd be shocked if he hadn't connected with those local on the ground researchers so I think some collaboration is happening the problem is there's not much demand for knowledge in the United States from you know what it's like on the ground people just don't want to know it is readily assumed that drone strikes are good for security and that it's just maybe a matter of principle that they're bad and you know so I wish I had cheerier news for you because I think it's very important that I admire the courage of these activists in Pakistan and you know in other places in the global south and who don't get their due but I think there should be collaboration this season. I just want to really briefly about the drone question as well and you know this is the short-sightedness of the United States that the US loves international law rules when it's the only one that gets to take advantage of them but that's the nature of law and international law is it is generally applicable and these rules can be appropriated by other states and you know frankly as critical of the US military as I am I'm a little bit more comfortable with them having drones than I am the Russian and the Chinese militaries but the US can't criticize China when it invokes unwilling or unable to try to blow up a drug smuggler who's hiding in Burma it's exactly the same rule that the US says that they're entitled to rely on but just to end since this is my last comment there's also something kind of utopian there as well I mean the reason we don't abandon international law completely is even though we need to have the post-colonial critique we need to have the critique that says that the international law is largely a product of the global north again these are tools that can be used for utopian law purposes as well the right of self-determination that kind of underlay a lot of decolonization you know that came from the aftermath of World War I and an interest in protecting ethnic minorities and in the aftermath of the Nazis protecting ethnic minorities and you know was the West thrilled when those rules were then appropriated by states in Africa that wanted to decolonize? Probably not but it's not so easy to respond when it's exactly the same legal rule that you've been advocating in other situations so there are always limits to what international law can accomplish but it is still a tool in some circumstances for progressive change and so I don't want to suggest that as an international lawyer I think my entire field is completely useless and counterproductive I do think it's important to have a firm sense of the limits and the need to talk about interests very openly Great, well on that note, thank you so much for coming and for interacting with us I invite you to join us for a little reception outside and continue the conversation Get you one quickly because we didn't expect to see people show up