Remembering the Russia-Ukraine War: Moral Universalization, War Crimes, and the Construction of Evil

By Anonymous
Since Russia’s recent invasion and pillaging of Ukraine, the international community has widely condemned the country’s violent and imperialist actions. President Biden has used the word “genocide” in reference to the events, and comparisons have been drawn to war crimes committed in Serbia and Yugoslavia, Liberia, and Libya. As missiles and bombs kill and injure both military personnel and civilians, it is clear that Russian actions against Ukraine are unjust according to both historic precedent and the universal sense of human rights.

The various injustices resulting from war activity have prompted discussion of how to sanction Russia’s actions. The standard procedure is a war crimes trial, which would require prosecution in the International Criminal Court. The Court, which was established under the Rome Statute, has the power to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide. However, both Ukraine and Russia are not a part of the Rome Statute, making the prosecution of Russia’s crimes in this war far more challenging. There is no official way to hold the country accountable for its actions on an international stage, which poses a threat to how the war will be remembered in the long term: "It's extremely important for the sanctity and integrity of history to document these crimes,” stated Beth Van Schaack, who is the U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice.

Sociological thinking has been applied to the creation of universal moral standards as a result of great injustice. In his article “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals,” Jeffrey Alexander explores how moral universalism developed as a result of the particular tragedy of the Holocaust. He suggests that evil is not an inherent quality, but rather a constructed category; events must become evil, they are not inherently so. This means that an event like the Holocaust, which is now considered the epitome of all evil (and upon which all morality can be based), was not always construed in this manner. He explains how the processes of coding, weighting and narrating each contributed to the construction of the evilness of the Holocaust. This process of narratization helped memorialize the Holocaust as a singular event that created a universal standard for evil, and by extension, a universalized rubric of morality. 


Due to the development of universal moralism in the wake of the Holocaust and its social construction as the unique embodiment of evil, crimes against humanity at the level of mass war must be labeled with the same terms in order to place evil events on the same moral spectrum. The International Crimes Court is an arbiter of that universal moral system developed by the Holocaust narratization and commemoration. The Court attributes labels such as “war crimes” and “genocide” to faulty actors, in an effort to condemn injustice with universally recognized terms of evil. When actions are marked by these labels, universalized morals make clear what is morally permissible and what is not in violent international conflict. Not only does this universality extend across the globe, it also extends across time—evil actions will be remembered as such by future generations. If Russia is not prosecuted for its war crimes, and the various injustices they have committed are not amply documented, the truth of the war’s brutality and “evility” may be lost to the past. 


Due to the severity and inhumanity of their actions, I believe it will be historically unambiguous that Russia’s deeds constitute true evil. However, Russia’s avoidance of the Court demonstrates its unwillingness to engage with universal and timeless standards of morality and human rights in an effort to deflect responsibility. If their actions are not officially designated by the Court as the universally evil crimes that they are, the truth of their actions will be obscured, and Ukrainian victims will be deprived of justice and dignity not only in the present, but also in historical memory.

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