Jeanne Morefield is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford, Fellow at New College (Oxford), and Non-Residential Fellow at the Quincy Institute (Washington, D.C.)
For over half a century, liberal organizations, governments, and lawyers have promoted the idea that wars can be made “humane.” The concept’s triumph in the twenty-first century has only served to justify US belligerence and endless drone warfare abroad.
When the architects of neoliberalism cobbled together their new economic order at Mont Pelerin, they included a moral vision with it. Co-opting the once revolutionary concepts of universal human rights, neoliberals refashioned the idea of freedom by tying it fundamentally to the free market, and turning it into a weapon to be used against anticolonial projects all over the world.