Readings: Sir Adam Roberts on the Importance of History and State Practice

Twenty years ago, Adam Roberts made the following observation in his essay, "Land Warfare: From Hague to Nuremberg," in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (1994, pp. 116-139):

There is little tradition of disciplined and reasoned assessment of how the laws of war have operated in practice. Lawyers, academics, and diplomats have often been better at interpreting the precise legal meaning of existing accords, or at devising new law, than they have been at assessing the performance of existing accords or at generalizing about the circumstances in which they can or cannot work. In short, the study of law needs to be integrated with the study of history: if not, it is inadequate.

Are we any better in this regard today? In asking the question, of course, I should own that I don't think we are, though I'm open to hearing why that's excessively pessimistic or simply methodologically mistaken, today, in 2014 and not 1994.  As it happened, I nearly quoted this very passage from Sir Adam in a review of Caroline Moorehead's 1998 history of the Red Cross movement, Dunant's Dream, in the Times Literary Supplement, but didn't, and then forgot about it until Hays Parks used it as a handout at a meeting a few years ago. I'm at work on a high altitude critical essay on--well, working title probably says it all, "The Laws of War Between Purity and Danger ..." This passage (one that Hays used powerfully in urging a doctrinally-grounded yet pragmatic, operationally-centered approach to LOAC) came back to me, looking at the range of conflicts playing out today across the globe. The quote as I used it in my TLS review of Dunant's Dream is perhaps also worth adding here. It is John Keegan reviewing this same 1994 The Laws of War in the TLS, November 24, 1995 (quoting from my TLS review to make clear who is saying what), Keegan first quoting Sir Adam and then responding: "The experience of land war in two world wars," Adam Roberts observes in The Laws of War, the book Keegan is reviewing, "'must necessarily raise a question as to whether formal legal codification is necessarily superior to notions of custom, honor, professional standards, and natural law' in making for battlefield decencies."  Keegan answers simply, "There is no substitute for honor as a medium for enforcing decency on the battlefield, never has been, and never will be."