Shashank Joshi
speaker
307 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Shashank Joshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Both soldiers were legitimate targets from what we can see.
But I do think amongst the professional military officers I talked to, not to mention lawyers and ethicists, I think there is a significant concern that the laws of war have been eroded away in many recent conflicts.
Russia's campaign in Ukraine, which has involved the torture of civilians, attacks on hospitals, efforts to
freeze civilians in wintertime, that stands out.
We've also seen other developments.
One of them is the revival of what you might call punitive language, threats of reprisals, for example, often shading into collective punishment.
development is threats against entire classes of targets, bridges and power plants, both of which have been threatened collectively and in totality by Donald Trump in Iran.
Military officers would possibly retort that, look, the public misunderstand the laws of war, that these are much more permissive than commonly believed, that we've become quite used to slow, deliberate wars of choice in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that high-intensity wars are different.
If Hamas built a tunnel under a building, it may, under some circumstances, be lawful to topple it.
There is no easy or clean way to fight an enemy.
economy that's deeply woven into and below the urban landscape.
But I think in wars with more powerful adversaries and in a world in which their missiles reach further than ever before and are more precise than ever before.
I think Western populations would be shocked to find the same infrastructure in their own countries, their own bridges, their own power plants, their own critical national infrastructure become targets in the future.
And I think it's hard for them to imagine that they could be the civilians one day in need of the same protections of the laws of war that
are applied to war torn countries today.
In twenty eleven, Steve Pinker, a professor at Harvard, put forward a provocative thesis.
He said the world was becoming less violent in every way, murders, homicides.
He also said war was on the decline.
And that was a common argument.
I think that that's become increasingly difficult to sustain for lots of reasons.
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