You are listening to Warren The Rocks, a podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the editor. the School to chat about their new book, The Internationalists,

how a radical plan to outlaw war remade the world.

Their argument has been met with some controversy

and I think you'll enjoy the discussion.

One quick note before we begin, please take the time

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really does make a difference. So what made you two decide to write this book?

Well, we were interested in trying to figure out

why international law works the way it does

and why sometimes it doesn't.

And we were trying to look back to understand kind of how is war changed in the world over

time and how did it used to be used but has it always been the same

as it is today as it always been the case that war wasn't allowed and if not why not and so we began digging and we discovered that everything we thought

we knew was wrong and that's when we realized we were on to something.

So you really found things that surprised you and surprised your own narrative of history?

Absolutely. I mean, we never had the idea that we were going to write a book that the

outlawry of war changed the world I mean we were absolute sceptics about that view.

What changed our mind was when we tried to find out

when economic sanctions first came into being. We thought it was maybe the 16th century, 17th century,

18th century, and we couldn't find any examples of neutral states imposing economic sanctions on belligerence

until after World War I and the question was why.

So we just started digging into the history. I started with Hugo Grocious, the so-called father of international law who wrote in the 17th century and

...