This podcast is a recorded panel discussion on “War and Peace: America's Humane War and the Crisis in Ukraine.” The panel was part of the Annual Conference of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC) held on May 12, 2022 at the University of Connecticut in Hartford. The conference was entitled, “Human Rights and Global Challenges: Geopolitics, Environment, Migration,” and brought together 100 scholars and practitioners from the United States and Europe. The webpage of the HRRC Consortium is here. 

The discussion considers the recent book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, written by Samuel Moyn, and its relevance to the current war in Ukraine. The event featured the author (Moyn), as well as Silja Voeneky, of the University of Freiburg, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and Frauke Lachenmann, of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium. James Cavallaro, of the University Network for Human Rights, Yale Law School and Wesleyan University, was the moderator. The public address questions to the panelists in the second half of the event.

About the participants:

Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His newest book is Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Prof. Dr. Silja Vöneky (Voeneky) is Co-Director of the Institute for Public Law, Professor of Public International Law, Comparative Law and Ethics of Law and an associated member of the Institute for Philosophy of Law. Since October 2019, she has served as the Vice Dean of the Freiburg Law Faculty. Her research focuses on international law and legal ethics, in particular Human Rights Law, International Environmental Law, the Law of the Sea, Security Law and Humanitarian Law, the interdependence of Ethics and Law, questions of Legitimacy, Democracy, Biomedicine and the Governance of Scientific and Technological Innovations. She has been a fellow of the interdisciplinary research group, ‘Responsible Artificial Intelligence’ at FRIAS. Since January 2019, she has been a member of the Freiburg CIBSS Cluster of Excellence for Legal and Ethical Issues in Biotechnology, and is one of the heads of the "Human Rights, Science and Technology" working group of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC).

Frauke Lachenmann is an international lawyer and holds a PhD in English literature. She has worked for the UNHCR in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for International Law and the Max Planck Foundation for the Rule of Law in Heidelberg and has been a Visiting Researcher at Yale. The focus of her research and publications is United Nations Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, ICJ Jurisprudence and Rule of Law Assistance. She was Co-General Editor of the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law (Brill) and is Co-General Editor of the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law with OUP.

James (Jim) Cavallaro is the Executive Director of the University Network for Human Rights. He teaches at Wesleyan University, Yale Law School and UCLA Law School. Prior to co-founding the University Network, he served as a professor of law at Stanford Law School (2011-2019) and a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School (2002-2011). In June 2013, Cavallaro was elected to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He served as President of that body from 2016-2017. Cavallaro has over three decades of experience in human rights advocacy, mostly in Latin America. He has authored or co-authored dozens of books, reports, and articles on human rights issues and is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.