Kim Ezra Shienbaum

Britain’s post colonial reckoning can be summed up in a single sentence delivered last June at the Glastonbury music festival when rapper duo Bob Vylan shouted “You want your country back? You’re not getting it back!” to an overwhelmingly white, middle-class audience roaring its approval. The message was unmistakable: Britain has been colonized – and its dominant culture not only accepts, but celebrates, it. Britain’s transformation has been driven not by invasion, but by invitation. The country’s population, political culture and national cohesion has been radically reshaped by immigration – one wave in the 1950s, driven by post-World War Two labor shortages, and another following Brexit.

When Donald Trump called on Iran’s Ayatollah to “surrender” during Israel’s recent war the word struck many as jarring – almost antiquated. No major global leader has used that language publicly since the unconditional surrenders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.But Trump’s invocation, intentional or not and soon abandoned by his call for a “ceasefire,” points to a deeper issue: Are the rules that governed mid-20th century warfare still relevant in the 21st century? Why has “surrender” disappeared from the language of modern warfare? And what, exactly, do today’s ever-growing humanitarian laws offer nation-states forced to operate under them, in a world that looks nothing like the one left smoldering in 1945?