The ‘World at War’ Is Becoming Increasingly Lawless
Paul Poast
Fri, September 19, 2025
Protesters and security forces face off during an anti-immigration protest outside a Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham, United Kingdom, Aug. 11, 2024
(Press Association photo by Danny Lawson).
For the past few years, we have been living in a world at war. From Sudan to Gaza to Ukraine, civil conflicts and interstate wars remain at their highest levels since the end of World War II. But perhaps more notable than the “return” of these traditional forms of conflict is that we are also witnessing, both within states and between them, a corresponding general acceptance and even encouragement of violence. Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the world has entered a period of blatant lawlessness and disorder.
Many countries have seen a rise in political violence, notably but not exclusively within the United States. The assassination last week of the ultraconservative political influencer Charlie Kirk is just the latest in a string of such attacks on both activists and politicians. These include the killing of State Rep. Melissa Hortman of Minnesota and the attempted assassination of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania this year, as well as the two attempted assassinations of then-candidate Donald Trump last year.
Of course, this trend didn’t start recently, as the violence committed by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, should remind us. And while the United States is a notable example of such violence, it is not the only one. Brazil saw a similar coup attempt in January 2023, following its presidential election the previous October. Cartel violence in Mexico has taken on an increasingly political nature. And Europe is also witnessing a notable rise in politically motivated violence, against both elected officials and asylum-seekers
Between states, the breakdown of order includes the obvious examples where the norm of territorial sovereignty has been violated. These include not only Russia’s disregard for the U.N. Charter’s prohibition against armed conquest in Ukraine, but also its recent drone incursions into Polish and Romanian airspace, which blatantly flout the very idea of territorial integrity.
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The disorder also relates to how governments are interacting with civilian nonstate actors, demonstrating a further weakening of the presumption against using force to settle disputes or solve problems.
Consider the Trump administration’s recent use of airstrikes to kill alleged Venezuelan drug runners rather than traditional non-lethal interdiction methods, despite lacking any legal justification under U.S. or international law to do so. This was not the first time that Washington has acted in a legally dubious manner to kill individuals who were deemed a threat to U.S. interests. To the contrary, it was a feature of the drone campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia during the war on terror.
International and domestic violence, have long been seen as intrinsically linked, largely because they both can feed on one another, in an open embrace of particularly when it comes to destructive and oppressive behavior.
But those strikes were never intended to cause civilian casualties, and when they did, previous presidential administrations expressed regret and even paid civil damages to the victims’ families. By contrast, the Trump administration not only acknowledged killing civilians aboard two Venezuelan boats so far, but celebrated and even joked about it afterward.
Consider also Israel’s missile strikes in an attempt to kill key Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, last week. This is not the first time that Israel has conducted operations in third-party states aimed at killing leaders of the group. One need only consider the July 2024 assassination of Ismail Haniyeh using explosives placed in the Tehran apartment he was using while attending the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. But last week’s attack on Hamas’ leaders in Qatar was not through a planted bomb that could at least accord Israel plausible deniability. Instead, it was through an airstrike that, like the Russian drones entering Poland or Romania, reflected an equal disregard for global norms.
And while Hamas itself has committed a host of atrocities and celebrated violence, the leaders Israel targeted in Doha were there to negotiate a ceasefire to end the devastating war in Gaza. Indeed, that is a key reason the U.N. Security Council rebuked the strike, though without specifically naming Israel, with even the United States—which almost always vetoes resolutions criticizing Israeli actions—voting in favor. Nevertheless, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be unphased by the criticism, just as Netanyahu has largely disregarded international condemnation of Israel’s overall military approach to the war in Gaza.
It is possible to claim that the surge of openly lawless behavior at home and abroad are disconnected and simply coincidence. Internationally, the surge of disorder between nations has much to do with changing global power structures, namely the decline of U.S. relative power and the rise of multipolarity. Competition among the great powers makes them more prone to conflict with one another and more distracted from addressing disputes and conflicts elsewhere. Domestically, one could argue that surges in political violence within countries, including the United States, are not new and may even be cyclical. In other words, we may simply be in the midst of such a period, the victims of bad timing.
But international and domestic violence have long been seen as intrinsically linked, largely because they can feed on one another, particularly when it comes to destructive and oppressive behavior. This point was made by Martin Luther King Jr. during another time of heightened political violence in the United States. In the late 1960s, having already received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring about racial equality and end state-sponsored repression at home, King began publicly opposing U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. Responding to some critics who thought he should stay focused on domestic issues, King explained why this was impossible in a famous sermon at New York’s Riverside Church in April 1967.
He began by noting the many times his attempts to convince young men in the United States that “social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action” was met with the pointed response, “So what about Vietnam?” If America “was using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted” in the world, they asked him, why should those seeking to end racist oppression not do so at home? King acknowledged that these questions “hit home,” leaving him feeling obliged to speak out against the use of violence not just at home but also abroad. The two, he argued, cannot be separated.
We see those same connections today in the United States, particularly under the Trump administration, whose fixation on projecting a warrior image abroad goes hand in hand with America’s longstanding refusal to regulate guns at home. Additionally, in the United States and elsewhere, refugees fleeing hardship and violence in their home countries—often caused or exacerbated by U.S. and Western military interventions and economic sanctions—have been met with xenophobia, dehumanizing rhetoric and at times violence. Such views, in turn, make it not only acceptable but politically useful to embrace and even take glee in acts of violence against those groups, whether in the U.S. and Europe or abroad.
In his influential bestseller, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” the social psychologist Stephen Pinker argued that violence in all its forms was in decline. But even at the time of the book’s publication in 2011, with long-running wars still raging in Iraq and Afghanistan and brutal civil wars just beginning in Syria, Yemen and Libya, the claim seemed dubious. In the current circumstances, it appears flat-out naive. To the contrary, we are now in a world that is no less violent than it ever was, with violence abroad feeding into violence at home and vice versa. If there is a difference, it is that, both at home and abroad, this violence is increasingly embraced.
Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The post The ‘World at War’ Is Becoming Increasingly Lawless appeared first on World Politics Review.
For the past few years, we have been living in a world at war. From Sudan to Gaza to Ukraine, civil conflicts and interstate wars remain at their highest levels since the end of World War II. But perhaps more notable than the “return” of these traditional forms of conflict is that we are also witnessing, both within states and between them, a corresponding general acceptance and even encouragement of violence. Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the world has entered a period of blatant lawlessness and disorder.
Many countries have seen a rise in political violence, notably but not exclusively within the United States. The assassination last week of the ultraconservative political influencer Charlie Kirk is just the latest in a string of such attacks on both activists and politicians. These include the killing of State Rep. Melissa Hortman of Minnesota and the attempted assassination of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania this year, as well as the two attempted assassinations of then-candidate Donald Trump last year.
Of course, this trend didn’t start recently, as the violence committed by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, should remind us. And while the United States is a notable example of such violence, it is not the only one. Brazil saw a similar coup attempt in January 2023, following its presidential election the previous October. Cartel violence in Mexico has taken on an increasingly political nature. And Europe is also witnessing a notable rise in politically motivated violence, against both elected officials and asylum-seekers
Between states, the breakdown of order includes the obvious examples where the norm of territorial sovereignty has been violated. These include not only Russia’s disregard for the U.N. Charter’s prohibition against armed conquest in Ukraine, but also its recent drone incursions into Polish and Romanian airspace, which blatantly flout the very idea of territorial integrity.
To get more in-depth news and expert analysis on global affairs from WPR, sign up for our free Daily Review newsletter.
The disorder also relates to how governments are interacting with civilian nonstate actors, demonstrating a further weakening of the presumption against using force to settle disputes or solve problems.
Consider the Trump administration’s recent use of airstrikes to kill alleged Venezuelan drug runners rather than traditional non-lethal interdiction methods, despite lacking any legal justification under U.S. or international law to do so. This was not the first time that Washington has acted in a legally dubious manner to kill individuals who were deemed a threat to U.S. interests. To the contrary, it was a feature of the drone campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia during the war on terror.
International and domestic violence, have long been seen as intrinsically linked, largely because they both can feed on one another, in an open embrace of particularly when it comes to destructive and oppressive behavior.
But those strikes were never intended to cause civilian casualties, and when they did, previous presidential administrations expressed regret and even paid civil damages to the victims’ families. By contrast, the Trump administration not only acknowledged killing civilians aboard two Venezuelan boats so far, but celebrated and even joked about it afterward.
Consider also Israel’s missile strikes in an attempt to kill key Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, last week. This is not the first time that Israel has conducted operations in third-party states aimed at killing leaders of the group. One need only consider the July 2024 assassination of Ismail Haniyeh using explosives placed in the Tehran apartment he was using while attending the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. But last week’s attack on Hamas’ leaders in Qatar was not through a planted bomb that could at least accord Israel plausible deniability. Instead, it was through an airstrike that, like the Russian drones entering Poland or Romania, reflected an equal disregard for global norms.
And while Hamas itself has committed a host of atrocities and celebrated violence, the leaders Israel targeted in Doha were there to negotiate a ceasefire to end the devastating war in Gaza. Indeed, that is a key reason the U.N. Security Council rebuked the strike, though without specifically naming Israel, with even the United States—which almost always vetoes resolutions criticizing Israeli actions—voting in favor. Nevertheless, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be unphased by the criticism, just as Netanyahu has largely disregarded international condemnation of Israel’s overall military approach to the war in Gaza.
It is possible to claim that the surge of openly lawless behavior at home and abroad are disconnected and simply coincidence. Internationally, the surge of disorder between nations has much to do with changing global power structures, namely the decline of U.S. relative power and the rise of multipolarity. Competition among the great powers makes them more prone to conflict with one another and more distracted from addressing disputes and conflicts elsewhere. Domestically, one could argue that surges in political violence within countries, including the United States, are not new and may even be cyclical. In other words, we may simply be in the midst of such a period, the victims of bad timing.
But international and domestic violence have long been seen as intrinsically linked, largely because they can feed on one another, particularly when it comes to destructive and oppressive behavior. This point was made by Martin Luther King Jr. during another time of heightened political violence in the United States. In the late 1960s, having already received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring about racial equality and end state-sponsored repression at home, King began publicly opposing U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. Responding to some critics who thought he should stay focused on domestic issues, King explained why this was impossible in a famous sermon at New York’s Riverside Church in April 1967.
He began by noting the many times his attempts to convince young men in the United States that “social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action” was met with the pointed response, “So what about Vietnam?” If America “was using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted” in the world, they asked him, why should those seeking to end racist oppression not do so at home? King acknowledged that these questions “hit home,” leaving him feeling obliged to speak out against the use of violence not just at home but also abroad. The two, he argued, cannot be separated.
We see those same connections today in the United States, particularly under the Trump administration, whose fixation on projecting a warrior image abroad goes hand in hand with America’s longstanding refusal to regulate guns at home. Additionally, in the United States and elsewhere, refugees fleeing hardship and violence in their home countries—often caused or exacerbated by U.S. and Western military interventions and economic sanctions—have been met with xenophobia, dehumanizing rhetoric and at times violence. Such views, in turn, make it not only acceptable but politically useful to embrace and even take glee in acts of violence against those groups, whether in the U.S. and Europe or abroad.
In his influential bestseller, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” the social psychologist Stephen Pinker argued that violence in all its forms was in decline. But even at the time of the book’s publication in 2011, with long-running wars still raging in Iraq and Afghanistan and brutal civil wars just beginning in Syria, Yemen and Libya, the claim seemed dubious. In the current circumstances, it appears flat-out naive. To the contrary, we are now in a world that is no less violent than it ever was, with violence abroad feeding into violence at home and vice versa. If there is a difference, it is that, both at home and abroad, this violence is increasingly embraced.
Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The post The ‘World at War’ Is Becoming Increasingly Lawless appeared first on World Politics Review.
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