Are the Geneva Conventions Losing Their Deterrent Power?

Hero photo: Philippine Red Cross Manila Chapter emblem — Cookie Nguyen, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

01 The warning from Geneva

The head of the institution that guards the Geneva Conventions has used the strongest language in its modern history. In a statement delivered to the United Nations General Assembly, Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, warned that respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) is “in crisis, threatening the very humanity these laws seek to preserve.” Speaking ahead of the same session, she put it more bluntly: atrocities are now committed “in plain sight, signalling the unacceptable is becoming normalised,” and if states do not act, “the brutality of today's wars will become the baseline for conflicts tomorrow.”

The scale behind the warning is documented: the ICRC now records more than 120 active armed conflicts worldwide, many marked by intense urban violence, attacks on health care and aid infrastructure, and restrictions on humanitarian access. At the Munich Security Conference, Spoljaric connected the legal erosion directly to economics — destruction that is “stretching international systems to their breaking point,” astronomical rebuilding costs, and market instability that radiates far beyond the war zones.

Analysis — not prediction. N43 and Hermes AI grounds every scenario in the documented record and verified reporting as of September 19, 2026; where evidence is incomplete we say so.

02 What deterrent power actually means

It is worth being precise about what the Geneva Conventions were built to do, because the word “deterrent” is doing heavy lifting. Spoljaric herself makes the distinction: international humanitarian law “was not created to prevent war” — it was created to prevent barbarity within war. Its deterrent power rests on three mechanisms. First, reciprocity: a state that mistreats prisoners gives its adversaries permission to do the same. Second, predictability: when both sides know medics, detainees and civilians are off-limits, wars stay containable. Third, consequence: the grave breaches regime obliges every state party to prosecute wilful killing, torture and inhuman treatment, wherever committed.

That third mechanism is the hinge. A rule deters only if breaking it predictably costs something. The ICRC president's argument, repeated across speeches in Normandy, Bangkok, New York and Munich over the past year, is that the consequences have become selective — applied to adversaries, waived for allies — and that selective application converts the law from protection into politics.

03 The permissiveness problem

What keeps me awake, Spoljaric told a Normandy audience in her Tocqueville Conversations speech, is not that IHL is regularly violated — that is as old as the law itself. It is “the permissiveness of its interpretation by the warring parties and their allies.” The formulation matters: the danger is not open rejection of the conventions but the stretching of their meaning until the stretching becomes the norm. “When the rules of war are applied selectively, they lose their protective power,” she said. “Double standards not only undermine the law. They fuel impunity, prolong suffering, and erode trust among people and states.”

She frames the resulting structure as a prisoner's dilemma. The best outcome for every party is universal compliance; but if one side believes the other will defect — and worse, if allies of the defector shield it from consequences — compliance starts to look like unilateral disarmament. Wars fought with a “total victory” or “because we can” mentality, she warned in Bangkok, plant a permissiveness where the law is bent to justify killing rather than restrain it. The ICRC's own Sixth Committee statement is blunter about the observable pattern: violations are met with “no or insufficient responses, allowing them to continue.”

04 The enforcement gap

The enforcement architecture written into the treaties is not weak on paper. Common Article 1 obliges every state not only to respect the conventions but to ensure respect for them — a duty the ICRC reads as extending to third parties, including conditioning arms transfers and using diplomatic leverage on allies. The grave breaches provisions create universal prosecution obligations. The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission exists under Additional Protocol I, awaiting states that agree to recognize it.

The gap is in the using. The International Criminal Court has been undermined by great powers and several states have signalled withdrawal from the Rome Statute. The wider treaty landscape is fraying in parallel: Lithuania became the first state ever to withdraw from the Convention on Cluster Munitions; five European states notified withdrawal from the Ottawa anti-personnel mine ban, and Ukraine moved to suspend it, all citing security threats. Arms transfers continue to actors implicated in serious violations. A UN record of the IHL initiative's consultations states the conclusion flatly: the absence of accountability ensures that cycles of violence repeat.

05 Geneva’s counter-move: the Global Initiative

The ICRC has not confined itself to warnings. In September 2025 it launched a global initiative on IHL with six states spanning four continents — Brazil, China, France, Jordan, Kazakhstan and South Africa — explicitly designed to rebuild political will rather than draft new law. By the 2026 General Assembly the initiative counted 89 participating states and rising; its working groups with ICRC legal teams are due to issue practical recommendations on preventing violations by the end of 2026, and the founding states' leaders have jointly called for integrating IHL into national legislation and military training, ahead of a high-level meeting on upholding humanity in war.

The initiative's most consequential finding, per Spoljaric, is that behind-the-scenes consultations revealed “broad support for protective, rather than permissive, interpretations” of the law — states still want the rules to bind, even when they violate them. That is the remaining stock of deterrence the initiative is trying to convert back into enforcement.

06 What re-deterrence would actually require

The recipe the ICRC keeps repeating is less about new treaties than about operationalizing the old ones. It includes: national committees to implement IHL in domestic law; military training and rules of engagement written before war breaks out — including the unglamorous infrastructure of compliance, such as internment facilities for prisoners of war that meet the conventions' standards for shelter, sanitation and medical care; third states using the leverage they actually hold, which Spoljaric summarizes as “not denouncing your enemies but calling your ally”; and conditionality in arms exports tied to compliance. The UN consultation record adds one more: states must ensure they are not enabling violations through joint operational planning or weapons transfers.

The self-interest argument is the one she presses hardest on European audiences: states prioritizing defence spending while cutting humanitarian assistance are, in her framing, betting their own populations' future protections on a law they are letting decay. “If states accept that the laws that fundamentally protect our own people are hollowed out,” she said in a recent interview, “it is a question of time until their own people find themselves in a situation where those putting them under pressure will say: there are no rules, anything is allowed.”

07 The verdict

The verified facts: the Geneva Conventions have been ratified by every state on earth — the only universal treaty regime in existence. The ICRC records more than 120 active armed conflicts. Its president has warned, in succession, that respect for IHL is “in crisis,” that permissive interpretation is the core risk, that double standards fuel impunity, and that today's brutality risks becoming tomorrow's baseline. The Global Initiative launched with six states in September 2025 now counts 89 and will issue recommendations by end-2026. Meanwhile the Ottawa treaty and the cluster munitions convention have seen their first withdrawals, and accountability mechanisms are under open pressure from great powers.

The analysis: the conventions are not losing deterrent power because they are obsolete — universal ratification proves states still want their protections, including the states violating them. They are losing it because consequences have become selective, and a rule enforced selectively is a tool of politics rather than protection. Spoljaric's prisoner's dilemma is the right model: deterrence collapses not when one party cheats, but when everyone can see that cheating by the right party is free. What happens next depends on the 2026 high-level meeting, and on whether the states that want protective interpretations — which, on the ICRC's evidence, is most of them — begin attaching costs to violations again. The alternative is not the sudden death of the Geneva Conventions. It is their slow conversion into something they were never meant to be: evidence of how the war was won, rather than limits on how it was fought.