Op-Ed: If war dead could speak

By Jerry Tetalman

If those killed in war could speak, this is what I imagine they would say. They would claim that war is humanity’s biggest moral failure and that war is the real enemy. They might ask, “Are we savage animals or are we civilized human beings?” and “When will war be outlawed?”

They might state, “We live in a world where the vilest of crimes―murder, torture, and rape―which are punished with severe consequences within most societies, are somehow accepted when committed as part of war.” They might think about how the organized murder of one group of humans by another group of humans, which is the definition of war, is encouraged by so many people.

War has been an integral part of human history for some 11,000 years or so, depending on the definition of war. Iconic anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote an essay in 1940 that declared that, like so many other human practices, war is an invention—we are not doomed to wage war simply because of human nature. She proved her hypothesis simply by describing peoples that not only didn’t ever wage war, but often didn’t even have a concept of what war is.

In the nuclear age, it is the most imminent threat to our continued existence. As modern civilized people, most of us find war abhorrent, but few of us call for the abolition of war or understand why war still exists in the contemporary world.

War exists for many reasons

• One is because human society has been organized around the concept of the in-group and the out-group. The in-group could be a tribe, a city, a nation, a religion, a language group, or several associated nations. The out-group may be tolerated, but in many instances, it is considered the enemy.
• Sociologists point to relative deprivation, that is, when everyone is poor, that isn’t a conflict, but if we see one group living quite well while we are not, that can lead to conflict and has led ultimately to casus belli, a reason to wage war.

The question of our time is: can we create a new story in which humanity as a whole is the in-group? Can we civilize a lawless world by creating a basic system of rules, a system of enforceable global law?

Having an understanding of what behavior is acceptable is the prerequisite to creating law. Law is the basis of civilization and allows for the nonviolent resolution of disputes. We currently live in a state of relative anarchy between nations, in which military power, rather than law, makes the rules. The greatest challenge of our time is bringing the rule of law to the global level, thereby replacing war with courts and parliaments. We have peace and order within most countries because of the enforceable rule of law, but between nations, international law is unenforceable, thus ineffective.

The United Nations has succeeded in bringing almost all countries of the world together for dialogue and has laid the foundation for international law through many multilateral treaties. But the United Nations has fallen short because it lacks the enforcement mechanism that true law requires. The law is what protects individual citizens from criminal abuse. We are relatively safe in society because crimes are prosecuted and have consequences.  But, at the international level, laws between nations lack an enforcement mechanism. The United Nations is based on treaty law, a voluntary system of agreements between nations. Thus, it lacks an enforcement mechanism that true law provides.

A new, more powerful, and democratic United Nations is needed to create peace among the world’s countries.

Fortunately, transforming the United Nations along these lines is possible. Article 109 of the UN Charter provides a mechanism for initiating a UN Charter Review Conference. Such a conference would open the way to engaging the world’s countries in creating a rules-based system of international law that is enforceable rather than voluntary. In this new, more civilized world, based on law and rules rather than on military power, nations would no longer have the need or ability to engage in war.

Under Article 109 of the UN Charter, convening a global Charter review conference requires approval from three-fourths of the members of the General Assembly and nine members of the Security Council. The final approval of the conference results rests with the five permanent members of the Security Council―the United States, China, Russia, France, and Britain―each of which has veto power. If successful, the conference could transform the United Nations into a more effective international institution―one capable of enforcing laws among nations.

Admittedly, the ability of any of the five permanent members of the Security Council (the P5) to veto UN Charter revisions poses a potential obstacle to UN reform. Even so, implementing the UN Charter revision process will take considerable time, during which the most likely nay-sayers among the P5 governments may change, perhaps for the better. Moreover, a P5 recalcitrant might hesitate to exercise a veto at a momentous conference with overwhelming support for change. It is also possible that, when faced with one or two holdouts, the delegates to a UN Charter revision conference would surge beyond their original mandate and create a new, more effective system of global governance.

To begin gathering public and diplomatic support for holding an appropriate Charter review conference, proponents of UN reform turned in September 2025 to launching the Article 109 Coalition during the annual UN General Assembly High-Level Week. Since then, the campaign has been picking up steam, with civil society groups like Citizens for Global Solutions working to mobilize U.S. support.

In their campaign, they can point to important evidence that strengthened governance reduces the likelihood of war.

The countries of the European Union, for example, have achieved peace after thousands of years of warfare, including two world wars, by trading a small portion of their sovereignty for security. They now resolve disputes in the European Union’s parliament and courts. Similarly, countries around the world could achieve peace by establishing a global system of courts and parliaments through a transformation of the United Nations.

Just as slavery was abolished in the nineteenth century and is now illegal in all countries, war too can be abolished by law. Indeed, with the strengthening and enforcement of international law, war could become an obsolete relic of a barbaric past.

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Jerry Tetalman is the Chairman of the Development Committee of Citizens for Global Solutions.