Essentializing “Forever Wars”: How Security is Losing its Human Face 

I am writing about how humanitarian principles are sidelined in global security policy from a cafe in Kyiv. It is a sunny day and patios are open — despite a convoluted municipal bylaw outlawing them. The movements of the city are back to their 120-beats-per-minute tempo, and as most foreigners who come here will opine, Ukrainians are resilient by carrying on with their usual spring day. 

It has already been established that this cliché is evasive and patronizing. It congratulates Ukrainians for making it through another night filled with ballistic missiles and Shahed drones. At the same time, it falls flat on meaningful accountability for Russia and its military invasion, which has forced Ukrainians to be “resilient” since 2014. Perhaps more alarmingly, this formulation shows to what extent war has become normalized. The “resilient Ukrainian” trope essentializes traits such as strength, and as it circulates in discourses from political speeches to journalistic articles, it becomes self-justifying. It implies that Ukrainians can carry on with existing, or even reduced, support due to this apparently innate strength.

When our conversations are backstopped by these essentializing terms, they become both a slippery slope toward and a window into our collective image of “forever wars.” We are in a frog-in-boiling-water situation where the proliferation of global conflict is filtered through Instagram Reels and is met with political messaging that does little more than state “we condemn” violence.  It is within this normalization that security loses its human face. To borrow from climate policy, when the dominant response shifts entirely to adaptation — managing the crisis as given — mitigation often becomes an afterthought. Security loses its human face before any global security policy is deliberated when war is the status quo rather than a failure to be prevented. Rather than emphasizing prevention through diplomacy and deterrence, these policies become reactive and the situations they respond to are normalized too quickly. 

War Normalized 

In 2024, the number of armed conflicts reached a historic high since the end of the Second World War. At the 2025 Global Security Forum, the ICRC’s Director-General warned that “wars today are becoming the graveyards of our humanity,” pointing to the erosion of respect for international humanitarian law and the steady normalization of violence against civilians. In Ukraine, more civilians were killed in 2025 than in the two previous years, with an estimated 70% increase in the number of casualties since 2023. The ICRC President, in a February 2025 call to reinvigorate international humanitarian law, was more blunt: the growing normalization of violations “poses an existential threat to the Geneva Conventions and international law more broadly.” 

In undertaking this grim task of finding statistics on the global proliferation of conflict, I was struck by a revealing irony. The initial results are often from risk analysts and think tanks whose function is to help policymakers prepare for conflicts by quantifying them and ranking which ones should be mitigated only after they break out. Not only are these forums reactive, but quantifying conflict is its own form of normalization, reflecting a bureaucratic adaptation to war as the operating condition of conflict governance. When the dominant analytical task is triage rather than prevention, the architecture of global security thinking quietly concedes the catastrophe before policy deliberation even begins. After a conflict erupts, policymakers from governments, multilateral organizations and the humanitarian sector are often limited in movement. They become restricted to a “green zone” where on-the-ground knowledge is produced and exchanged exclusively within a privileged bubble of downtowns and compounds. 

But what political, diplomatic, and institutional investments could have prevented these conflicts from being quantified into international norms in the first place? How could institutions and the people who constitute them be more prepared, and shocked, by the early warning signs of conflict? As said by Dr. Erica Harper from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, “The reemergence of international armed conflicts, the proliferation of actors willing to violate humanitarian norms, and the erosion of accountability demand more than observation; they require action” – and there is an urgent need for political will to “resist the normalization of war.” Indeed, security policy needs more than quantification and ivory tower observations. It needs to re-center the human face in prevention and resist forms of normalization, including deflective tropes that essentialize the very people it seeks to protect. 

Prevention through Accountability 

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program found that nearly 40 percent of peace agreements since 1975 have collapsed within five years of their signing. According to Harper, “if the aim is to prevent armed conflict globally, the most effective and efficient means is to ensure that peace sticks.” In Ukraine, this means that policymakers are well-informed about the realities of wartime society, including topics that are taboo within the green zone echo chamber, such as mobilization. It also means meaningful accountability for Russia. In May of this year, thirty-six countries and the European Union committed to joining the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (The Tribunal). It seeks to prosecute the senior Russian officials who orchestrated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and then again in 2022 with the crime of aggression, including by holding trials “in absentia.” These proceedings will “signal society’s condemnation, establish a historical record, and uphold the rule of law,” and importantly, they will enable victims their day in court. 

Far from being a panacea, the establishment of this Tribunal is an excellent use of political will and serves as an example for future conflict governance. Initiatives like these are anchored in reaction through prevention, and through dialogue, dynamism and agency, re-center the human face within global security policy.