Lauren Benton: Limiting War, Sparking Atrocity

The Moynihan Institute’s Practice of Global Politics Series presents Toynbee Foundation Prize recipient and Yale Professor Lauren Benton.

Armed conflicts today are typically defined as ruptures of international law and order, and responses tend to focus on strategies to limit the scope and intensity of fighting. The long history of imperial violence suggests instead that small wars form an integral part of the global legal order and that efforts to limit violence may lead directly to atrocities. These patterns are especially clear in the history of truces and of armed intervention in European empires between 1400 and 1900. 

Lauren Benton is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and professor of law at Yale University. Her books include “They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence” (Princeton University Press, 2024); “Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law” (coauthored with Lisa Ford; Cambridge University Press, 2016); and “A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires” (Cambridge University Press, 2010). In 2019, Benton received the Toynbee Foundation Prize for significant contributions to global history.