MILITARY HISTORY THROUGH THE LENS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

To answer convincingly this book's policy questions, we must first ask a more elemental empirical one: Do the Geneva Conventions really contribute much to restraint in war, to better treatment of enemy soldiers and civilians? Or, do the Conventions merely coordinate relations among states with preexisting cooperative interests, having no independent effect on their behavior? Claims that relaxing legal restraints on combating terrorists will have dire consequences for human protection assume that these restraints have been effective. Yet how different would the last century's history of warfare have been if there had been no Hague or Geneva Conventions? These questions presume that, when engaged in practical moral reasoning, we need to take consequences seriously, including consequences that are unintended but foreseeable.

Restraint in war has many sources in addition to those imposed by law. How important is the law, really, when compared to these other sources? There has always been intermittent evidence throughout military history for what might be called a sociology of martial restraint. In early modern Europe, historian Geoffrey Parker observes, especially at the local level,