Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War is a thought-provoking work that invites us to rethink the role of contemporary international humanitarian law. The author who has examined the relationship between international human rights law and global neoliberalism in his previous works and continues his critique on liberal humanism in the present book. To explain the overlapping spaces between the humanitarian project and continued imperial aggression, the author analyses the trajectory of two historical projects: the international peace movement and the humanitarian law movement.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part concerns the way in which the demand of the peace movement to end war dominated debates on warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Commencing with Leo Tolstoy, who condemned humanizing war and compared it to humanizing slavery, the book offers an eventful history of the transatlantic peace movement that attempted to use international law to ban warfare (Ch. 2). The yearnings of a generation of peace activists such as Bertha von Suttner is juxtaposed with the approach of pioneer humanitarians such as Henry Dunant and Gustave Moynier. While the former strived to eliminate war, the latter were sceptical of the possibility of eternal peace and pushed for international treaties that regulate warfare (Ch. 3). The author reminds us of a range of events, from the establishment of the League of Nations to the Nuremberg trials, in order to explain the dominance of the peace imperative during this epoch (Ch. 4). The second part of the book examines the displacement of the peace discourse. America's post-Vietnam endeavour to reform its image (Ch. 5), Jean-Pictet's initiative to rebrand jus in bello as international humanitarian law, and the rise of the international human rights movement that took an interest in monitoring conflict situations (Ch. 6) converged in making a new paradigm that has become dominant since the 1990s. This new paradigm, which does not concern itself with the legality of war but rather with the legality of how the war is fought, has become convenient to the United States, which has invented new forms of warfare characterized by drone attacks and targeted killings (Chs. 7 and 8). Furthermore, the author suggests that the endeavour to humanize war has led towards legitimizing the endless war the United States has unleashed on foreign territories.

The book introduces a range of thinkers belonging to both pacifist and humanitarian traditions, spanning across more than a century. Readers acquainted with Moyn's previous work would identify the recurrence of familiar categories of minimalism and maximalism in the analysis. The limitation of the minimalist approach to war (humanitarianism) is explained in comparison to the maximalist imperative (pacifism). Although the discussion focuses mainly on debates that occurred in the United States, any reader would still benefit because the account provides useful insights on an important aspect of contemporary imperial dominance. The book could perhaps have been even more interesting if it had included a discussion on the way in which humanizing warfare might favour imperial states with technological superiority over peripheral states and irregular combatants lacking the sophistication to engage in targeted killings.