Gerd Hankel finds in international law, despite all its shortcomings, the possibility of punishing distant injustice
Images and reports from conflict zones, currently those from Ukraine and the Middle East, provoke horror and protest: the excesses of violence that can be followed almost in real time not only raise the question of how wars can be ended. It is also questionable whether such injustice can be punished. As we know, there is no such thing as a world state.
Political realists therefore attach little importance to international law. But doesn’t the public scandalization of brutal warfare point to a world conscience that can be shaken up – and thus to an approach to a state in which, in Kant’s words, “the violation of rights in one place on earth is felt by all”?
In his book, Gerd Hankel answers the latter question in a differentiated manner: International law here takes on the role of a “civilizational experiment”: not a linear teleology of progress, in other words, but a stage on the path to progress that only becomes visible in the longer historical perspective. This is well argued and well written.
The Hamburg lawyer and linguist begins his book with a scene from Goethe’s “Faust, Part One of a Tragedy”: a conversation between two citizens at Easter about war and the cries of war in distant Turkey. One hears an uplifted mood in view of the contrast between distant suffering and one’s own well-being. Hankel is under no illusions: There are still numerous contemporaries all over the world like those in Goethe’s time.
Nevertheless, something is different now: today there is a juridification of international relations, the UN and international (criminal) courts. They enable the international community to act in the event of massive injustice: Injustice that shakes the “conscience of mankind”, as the preamble to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states.
Hankel illustrates that this is not an entirely new development with his anecdotal depiction of historical perceptions of injustice. Narrative leaps between ancient, (early) modern and contemporary scenes sometimes make reading difficult. However, they make it clear that the problematization of “distant injustice” is not a genuinely modern phenomenon. It took place, for example, in the debates surrounding the Spanish colonization of the American double continent from the fifteenth century onwards.
But what then changed in history? Drawing on the rapidly growing research literature, Hankel locates an era of transformation in international law in Europe in the nineteenth century, which he outlines convincingly. It was here that the previously inconsistent vocabulary of a “humanitarian conscience” in international treaties was consolidated, starting with the fight against the transatlantic slave trade and the codification of the law of war since the Geneva Red Cross Convention of 1864. The development of international criminal law from the end of the nineteenth century to the Rome Statute plays a central role in Hankel’s book. Hankel’s comments on this are particularly interesting due to his decades of work in East and Central Africa, for example in Rwanda.
Hankel considers this juridification of international relations to be so important because it enables a linguistic concretization of perceptions of injustice: According to this, distant injustice speaks to us above all when we can put it into words, when concretized legal texts are the standard before the public. Here, alongside Steven Pinker, Hans Joas and Jürgen Habermas, Hankel also refers to the founder (and unfortunately probably also the door closer) of his home institution, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, and his groundbreaking book “Trust and Violence” (2008): Only the reference to positive law enables trust in the reduction of violence in the modern age. This is interesting because Reemtsma himself considers trust in modernity to be unthinkable beyond a state monopoly on violence.
However, Hankel’s attempt to detach Reemtsma’s argument from nation-state boundaries would have gained even more strength if he had also shed more light on the transformation of the public sphere. For example, the Crimean War (1853/56) mentioned by Hankel is considered the “first European media war” in “visual history”. From then on, war reporting confronted the public with photographs of distant violence. Because distant injustice speaks to us above all when we are shown it in pictures: The gruesome violence in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza causes much more of a stir in the German public today than the “forgotten war” in Sudan. The law alone is not enough to trigger outrage.
Hankel resists any exaggeration of the law. His presentation is anything but naïve. Realpolitik, double standards in legal policy, Eurocentrism and Western-centrism, lack of enforceability, indeterminacy: the author carefully immunizes his argument against the usual objections to the law.
And yet Hankel is ultimately convinced of the emancipatory value of the right to publicly scandalize injustice – and thus convinces the reader: his book vividly shows that the law is a benchmark for the public scandalization of mass violence – despite all ambivalences, regressions and susceptibilities to politicization. But only by acting without contradiction can it become a real civilizational progress, according to Hankel. This can also be read as a plea to democratic governments. In order to realize this plea, however, further attempts at civilization would probably be necessary.
By Hendrik Simon from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 24.01.2025, No. 20, Neue Sachbücher, p. 12. © All rights reserved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt. Provided by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Archive
Gerd Hankel: “Distant injustice, foreign suffering”. On the enforceability of international law.
Hamburg Edition,
Hamburg 2024.
352 p., hardcover, 35,- Euro.