A preferred technique of warfare in this new era, perpetrated by those who have the power to project technologically and strategically, is “spectacular aerial bombing,” which reproduces “the appearance of classical war for public consumption and which has very little to do with reality on the ground” (p. 3). This is a claim that wants parsing. What, exactly, does “for public consumption” mean here? Presumably, Kaldor wants to signal that the public (e.g., Americans) love the spectacle of the thing, but, most important, this same public does not want to risk the lives of its own combatants. It is better by far to place the lives of their noncombatants at risk—and here, too, there is a blurring of the combatant/noncombatant distinction, although there is little that seems “new” about this. All we need to do is think of massive strategic bombing of German cities during World War II, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to realize that this is an old way to make war. Yet in the old form of warfare, simultaneous with the aerial bombardment, combatants from both or all parties to a conflict were also at risk; in the “new war” scenario, by Kaldor’s understanding this is not the case.

Kaldor goes on to account for the rise of “new wars,” citing an era replete with “fragmentation and integration, homogenization and diversification” (p. 3). Also, the goals of “new wars” depart from those of old wars, where issues focused on territory based on presuppositions of sovereignty. “New war” goals revolve instead around a sort of “ideological cleavage” she defines in overly rigid binary opposites: “cosmopolitanism based on inclusive, universalist, multicultural values, and the politics of particularist identities” (p. 6). Given this loaded definition, it is clear which side Kaldor is on: the new cosmopolitanism, not the new “identity politics” that turns on “idealized nostalgic representation of the past” (p. 7).

The “new wars” of identity politics are particularly brutal because civilians are the targets, and behavior long proscribed by the “laws of war,” including “atrocities against noncombatants,” now becomes the strategy of warfighting: witness the organized rapes as a warfighting strategy in the Bosnian campaign. Without citing evidence (though one suspects what she says is accurate), Kaldor claims that the first civilians targeted in these campaigns of terror are those who “espouse a different politics, who try to maintain inclusive social relations and some sense of public morality” (p. 9).

Throughout this interesting work, Kaldor traffics in oppositions, especially exclusivism versus cosmopolitanism. But does this not simply reproduce the problem? Are there not ways to negotiate what philosophers have long grappled with as the problem of particularism and universalism, forcing us into a corner where it is one or the other? The answer, surely, is yes. The new cosmopolitanism seems too often an option for indigenous jet-setting elites and offers thin gruel to those “on the ground,” with their long-standing loyalties to tribe, clan, linguistic group, region, and religion.

Religion is a huge missing piece of the puzzle in Kaldor’s analysis. Religious identity and commitment can put pressure on harsh particularisms in the name of a transnational form of loyalty, commitment, and identity, or it can, and has, been drawn upon to shore up particular identities in a rigid way. The story is far more complicated than “ethno-nationalism” versus “civilized values,” as she puts it in another context (p. 58). (At yet another point, it becomes cosmopolitan governance versus a narrow form of what might be called “moral manicheanism.”) Given her way of parsing the questions, her prescriptions for change sound like a kinder, gentler form of cultural neocolonialism or tutelage. In the reconstruction of cultures that Kaldor calls for, it is hard to determine who, save cosmopolitan elites, is going to play a central role—especially given the fact that churches, synagogues, and mosques are missing in action.

Kaldor would not be happy with this description of her project, but it is tricky to figure out what cosmopolitan law enforcement is, save a form of imposition by the enlightened, unless structures of political accountability are intrinsic to this process. If the state is badly battered and even on its way out, as Kaldor seems to think, what is to take its place as a mode of political life based on some principle of concrete representation? Kaldor sees the “alliance between international organizations and local advocates of cosmopolitanism” as a way “to reconstruct legitimacy” (p. 123). But with whom? With the majority of the population in a given nation, state, or region? Even if they have not been lofted upward into cosmopolitanism, ought they not have some say?

Cosmopolitan law enforcement is even trickier. Kaldor uses the term “ambitious,” envisaging, as she does, a “new kind of soldier-cum-policeman which will require considerable rethinking about tactics, equipment, and, above all, command and training” (p. 130). To say the least! Under whose auspices is all of this to take place? Who is doing the disarming she calls for? Who creates and constitutes an “independent and trustworthy judiciary and an active civil society”? On what authority? There are many loose threads dangling in Kaldor’s cosmopolitan construction. In sum, New and Old Wars is at its best when Kaldor describes the current situation; it is at its weakest when she turns to what ought to be done.

Crimes of War, as the title suggests, is a gallery of horrors. Proceeding alphabetically from “Act of War” to “Willfulness,” the book is a handbook for journalists, activists, diplomats, and interested citizens. It is not easy reading or easy looking. We want to avert our eyes from many of the photos as we stare at human beings when they are most vulnerable, tormented, anguished, and abused. Such scenes range from children described as “traumatized patients in a Palestinian psychiatric hospital after it was hit by Israeli shells during the Siege of Beirut, 1982” (p. 36) to more horrifying images. For example, “A Chinese woman, raped and impregnated by a Unit 731 researcher named Kobayashi, is vivisected along with her fetus in the laboratory at Pingfang” (pp. 44–45).

Who can bear this? Ping Fan (called “Pingfang” in the photo description—the copyediting loose) was one of a “vast network of death factories” constructed by the Japanese during World War II, with the object of using incarcerated “prisoners of war as guinea pigs in biological and, to a lesser extent, chemical warfare experiments” (p. 43). What sort of knowledge is to be gained from cutting a fully conscious woman open, removing a living fetus, and then vivisecting this tiniest and most vulnerable of human beings?

We are peering here into the heart of human darkness that provides—as if we needed it—more evidence of the thesis of “original sin,” which simply means a propensity to harm others for personal gain, or from ideological ardor, or just for the pleasure of it. The challenge in the twenty-first century is our version of a challenge as old as the human race itself—how to prevent the worst from happening. Have we made moral progress? Sometimes it seems so. But then we pick up Crimes of War—with all its nightmarish photos and scenarios—and we wonder.