Politics & Power Quote by Belva Lockwood

War, Lockwood suggests, is less a tragic inevitability than a procedural failure. Her line reads like an elegant piece of legal reasoning: swap the battlefield for the bench, and the supposedly hard realities of geopolitics start to look like a refusal to use available institutions. The key word is “depend.” Nations don’t need moral lectures; they need credible enforcement, predictable rulings, and a forum that powerful states can’t casually ignore. She’s diagnosing war as what happens when there’s no trusted appeals process for sovereignty.

The bite is in the pairing of “senseless, savage” with the almost boringly technocratic “fair and impartial judgments.” Lockwood isn’t romanticizing peace; she’s bureaucratizing it. That’s the subtextual provocation: civilization advances not by purifying human nature but by building systems that make violence unnecessary and strategically irrational. Her confidence in adjudication is also a veiled critique of power politics dressed up as realism. If leaders prefer war, it’s not because war solves problems better; it’s because courts would limit their freedom to define “justice” as victory.

Context matters: Lockwood was a pioneering American lawyer, the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, and a prominent peace advocate who lived through the Civil War and the rise of international arbitration movements that would later inform the Hague courts and, much later, the UN system. Coming from someone barred from many legal arenas by gender, the argument carries an extra edge: equal standing before law isn’t just idealism, it’s the infrastructure of peace. Her sentence is an indictment of a world that treats violence as normal and due process as utopian.