I am still in the process of embracing the idea that I am a scholar. That is why I was surprised at first when I received the kind invitation to share this essay for H-Diplo’s essay series on “Learning the Scholars’ Craft.” From my perspective, when others recount their lives and careers, they often seem to have a clear, focused, intentional story to tell about having envisioned a path for themselves at a young age and carefully plotted and executed the necessary steps along that path throughout their development. But I would be lying if I tried to tell that same story.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
“Stumbling Into Scholarship from Peace Advocacy”
Essay by Elizabeth Beavers, the University of New Hampshire
8 January 2025 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/E607 | X: @HDiplo | BlueSky: @h-diplo.bsky.social
Series Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
I am still in the process of embracing the idea that I am a scholar. That is why I was surprised at first when I received the kind invitation to share this essay for H-Diplo’s essay series on “Learning the Scholars’ Craft.” From my perspective, when others recount their lives and careers, they often seem to have a clear, focused, intentional story to tell about having envisioned a path for themselves at a young age and carefully plotted and executed the necessary steps along that path throughout their development. But I would be lying if I tried to tell that same story.
I am a nobody from nowhere. Originally from the mountains of West Virginia, my family moved to rural North Carolina when I was quite young, and that is where I grew up. Throughout my childhood, an inevitable question was posed frequently by well-meaning adults: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I never could find a solid, consistent answer. Really, I don’t think I even knew what the options were. I was smart and curious and liked to read, but came of age in an economically depressed, deeply religious, fairly secluded area before ubiquitous Internet access or smartphones.
The best term to describe my development as an aware, informed political being is probably “late bloomer.” I was in high school when the attacks of 11 September 2001 happened and the early-2000s war drums began to beat, but I was in college before I began to fully absorb what the post-9/11 endless war era really looked like. Between being surrounded by the smartest people I had ever met, listening to heated debates about current events that I struggled to keep up with, and learning for the first time about the United States’ long history of imperial rampage in Latin America as part of my Spanish major (which I had chosen for no strategic reason other than I enjoyed learning languages), I started to realize just how much I did not know.
In tandem with my awakening, the world seemed to be going to hell. US soldiers were on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, drones began to swarm more widely across the Middle East and Africa, hundreds of people were detained without charge or trial at Guantanamo, and pictures of American soldiers enacting gruesome torture against prisoners were circulating. Now I wasn’t just curious; I was angry.
That anger forced me to wonder about my own moral compass and philosophical foundations. What were they, really? My exploration felt like pulling out threads from whatever tapestry existed inside my mind, one by one, until the entire thing fell apart and needed to be re-stitched from hand. I became a voracious consumer of political news and commentary, books on American history, and especially enjoyed consuming content on foreign policy and national security.
I graduated from college and went straight into law school, again without any specific strategic reason other than that I wanted to keep studying and questioning and enjoyed learning about law and policy. I hoped that I would figure out my next steps along the way.
The spoiler alert is that I did not, really. Or I suppose I did, but in a roundabout way. I took a lot of national security and human rights classes but I always understood them to be for my own enjoyment and enrichment, not as a precursor to any sort of career. Indeed, upon graduating, I took an unremarkable corporate job, and was still having trouble explaining what I actually wanted to be when I grew up even though the “growing up” part had arrived.
When I stumbled at last onto my ultimate career path, it was an accident. I was still re-stitching my metaphorical tapestry, which had led me to seek out and visit a local Quaker meeting. (I wish I could say I was inspired to do this for a more poetic reason, but the truth is that I took a “What’s my religion?” quiz online that told me I might align well with Quakers.) After a delightful, moving experience in classic Quaker silent worship, I thumbed through some literature on the welcome table. A brochure informed me there was a nonprofit organization in Washington, DC that represented Quaker ideals and focused particularly on advocacy to urge a more peaceful foreign policy.
This was earth-shattering news for me. That was someone’s job? Something felt electric inside me when I looked up the Friends Committee on National Legislation online when I got home. Not only was it someone’s job, but it could be my job. They were hiring! Sure, it was for a low-paid entry-level fellowship that would only last for a year but that did not bother me. I had some savings, no real roots, and an uninspiring career trajectory thus far. Why not spend a year in Washington learning the trade of legislative advocacy while working to end wars and human rights abuses committed in the name of security? I could always come back to corporate life afterward.
Before I knew it, I was in a pickup truck with a little U-Haul attached, moving from North Carolina to the nation’s capital. I will speed up the story here and divulge that I am still here, after more than eleven years. My lobbying career blossomed. This was in large part because seasoned mentors graciously taught me the craft, trained me to think and write like an advocate, and opened the necessary doors for me to build connections and flourish. Many of these titans of the field were lawyers and scholars, and I could not believe—really still cannot to this day—that I landed in a line of work that put me at the table with the people whose work I once only read about. Even more unbelievably, they warmly pulled out a chair for me and welcomed me into the fold.
Ever since I unpacked that U-Haul and settled into Washington, I have gotten to work with and advise some of the most incredible national security and human rights organizations in DC. In support of critical campaigns to demilitarize and democratize US foreign policy, I have organized grassroots activists, lobbied lawmakers, published mainstream commentary, and produced policy analysis. I particularly started to absorb the flow of power—where it comes from, how it can be built and seized, how it can be leveraged and weaponized, and how to work within that context to affect change. At last, I knew exactly how to explain what I wanted to do when I grew up, because I was doing it. To deepen my expertise in what I now understood to be my field, I took the decision to go back to school.
While continuing my advocacy work, I started taking classes part-time to obtain an LLM (Master of Laws) degree in National Security Law. My colleagues ribbed me a bit, one asking: “What, do you think you’re going to learn something you don’t already know?” Or, “What is it you are wanting to do with this degree that you are not already doing?” They were fair questions. At that point, I had been working on national security law and policy for almost seven years and indeed I had developed substantial expertise and experience. Some of the scholars who taught the classes in my program were already my professional peers and friends. But I had never specifically studied for this line of work and I had been craving a focused, intentional educational experience now that my vision of the future was so clear. My only real goals were to fill in any gaps in my knowledge base, shore up my subject matter expertise, and become a better advocate.
It was an exhilarating experience to focus academically on what had become my life’s work. To fulfill the research requirements for my coursework, I took every opportunity to produce rigorously supported papers that bolstered the causes I had taken up as a public interest advocate. I had been working a lot to lobby the United States to stop arming Saudi Arabia in its attacks on Yemen, so in one course I wrote a paper that imagined other mechanisms for accountability and justice for Yemenis. What would it look like to sue US weapons manufacturers for their complicity in the atrocities? I followed the paper trails of weapon shipments, matched them to debris from specific bombing campaigns, scoured the jurisprudence, and wrote up what I thought was the best case might look like.
The paper became my first published academic journal article.[1] I at last understood that scholarship did not have to be dense, inaccessible, and navel-gazing. The brilliant professors in my program, the scholars whose work I leaned on to build my case, and the authors that kept popping up as I dug further into the scholarship on this topic were mostly unafraid to produce ideas that were disruptive, transformative, and even offensive to the holders of the status quo. I started reading Samuel Moyn, Aziz Rana, Aslı Ü. Bâli, Greg Grandin, Maryam Jamshidi, Wadie Said, Darryl Li, and other thinkers who exposed the ugly realities of US militarism, explained American history through the prism of imperialism and colonialism, and shone a light on how the structures of national security laws and institutions service a continuation of US global primacy.[2]
By the end of my LLM, I had published three journal articles that were my attempt to contribute to this conversation. In addition to my blueprint on suing weapons companies for aiding and abetting war crimes in Yemen, I imagined what it would look like in both law and policy to finally and formally end the Korean War.[3] I also wrote on the International Criminal Court, and how it thus far has fundamentally perpetuated a two-tiered system of global justice that disciplines the Global South while the United States and its powerful allies enjoy immunity for rights abuses.[4] This paper helped solidify the overarching themes and focus of my research, which connected to my advocacy work: exploring what it might look like if rules were applied without regard to power and privilege, specifically in the context of accountability for American global misdeeds in the name of security.
A couple of other recent developments are worth mentioning. First, after my LLM, I had some extra spare time on my hands and thus agreed to take over an adjunct position for a class on counterterrorism law for a friend that was no longer able to teach it. Second, I stopped doing antiwar advocacy as my day job.
There is a certain grief in closing that chapter in my career, at least for now. Where once I was elated to discover the field at all, and even more so to be welcomed into it, a decade-plus of metaphorically slamming my head against the brick wall that is the powerful national security establishment has left me demoralized, burned out, jaded, and cynical. The pull of the military-industrial complex and the entrenched commitment to the status quo that stretches across the political spectrum has rendered peace-lobbying work exhausting and seemingly futile. At least, that was how I had begun to feel when I woke up to go to work every morning.
That is exactly the moment when you are supposed to step aside and open space for new energy to step in. I now understand this is what so many mentors were doing for me all those years ago. I am genuinely happy and excited to watch new leadership take over the field and to continue the work of pressing our government to be better. I know deep down the work can and must continue, I just also know it is not mine to carry at this moment.
I still do public interest advocacy, but I am exclusively focusing for the time being on completely different domestic policy issues. It has been a significant career transition but has actually been quite easy because it is not so much that I have abandoned the work of countering the powers that undergird US militarism, it is that I have found a new place for myself within that work. My focus now is on teaching, writing, thinking, and producing ideas that push the conversation forward toward peace and real security. It is hard to convey in words how fulfilling it has been to adjunct my counterterrorism law class. It was a shock to realize that most of my law students were too young to understand, or not yet born, when 9/11 occurred. They simply do not have an active memory of life as an American before endless wars, heavy-handed airport security screenings, “Muslim bans,” the PATRIOT Act, and everything else that was so critical in shaping my own awakening.
It feels like a privilege, then, to deliver that information to them. It is great fun to introduce my students to the wacky world of the early 2000s via pop culture, to help them connect dots to current events, and to bolster them as thinkers and learners. I encourage them to eye everything they encounter in the course critically, whether it is the holdings in our cases, the policy analysis we read, or my own lectures. I want them to know what it took me too long to grasp: that it is not just okay, it is mandatory, to refuse to accept information uncritically. I want them to feel free in my class to push boundaries, propose new ideas, and challenge assumptions. There usually are no “wrong answers” in this class, I tell them, just unsupported analysis.
My emphasis on that point stems in part from the fact that I am still trying to hone that skill in my own research. The same thing that burned me out of day-to-day peace advocacy has given me a burst of creativity and ambition in my writing: the fact that the national security state is thoroughly impenetrable and broken. This places big limits on the possibilities of lobbying, organizing, and activism. But when I put pen to paper in order to imagine how things might be different, the only limits come from the edges of my capacity and courage.
During the down time as I was switching day jobs and making this career shift, I poured myself into a new, forthcoming law journal article that I am very excited about but also nervous to put out into the world.[5] In this one, I propose full abolition of “terrorist” designations, or the mechanisms by which the United States makes lists of individuals, groups, and states as supporting or engaging in terrorism and imposes consequences as a result. I needed to write this article to help myself process and build more analytical support for my emerging perspective that there can be no such thing as counterterrorism done right. This represents a shift in my thinking. Early in my advocacy career, like most advocates in this space, I made arguments that assumed that while terrorism is an ever-present security threat to us all and that there must be a systematic counterterrorism response, that there is a right way and wrong way for the government to go about it. Human rights must be protected, the laws of war must be followed, there must be no racial and religious discrimination, etc. This, as I now understand (but that many others, particularly scholars of color, have already been warning, is farce.[6]
As I explore further in my article, “terrorism” as a concept is totally meaningless in international law, close to useless in domestic law, and fundamentally a political tool by which powerful forces can exaggerate threats in order to exact violence, coercion, economic ruin, and marginalization at their discretion. The very roots of counterterrorism laws are in explicit attempts to suppress Palestinian liberation and bolster US global primacy.[7] Those who receive a “terrorist” or “terrorist-supporting” designation are often far removed from any violent activity,[8] and the attached consequences frequently chill good-faith humanitarian work, and infringe on free speech and dissent.
Samuel Moyn posited in his book Humane that efforts to make war “more humane” has actually allowed war itself to fester and expand. [9] Similarly, I think that efforts to tame counterterrorism policies without rejecting the underlying premises on which they are built ignores a rotten core and redirects political and intellectual capital that is better spent dismantling its structures. This article is what I hope will be the first in a series of arguments along these lines, focused on various pillars of the counterterrorism architecture that has long been in construction but was turbocharged post-9/11.
I see this research agenda as building upon what I have already published: highlighting not just the ways that law is being violated in the name of security, but reflecting on how the laws themselves in both their substance and application are perpetuating injustice and violence. This was most explicit in my paper on the United States’ shunning of the International Criminal Court upon the ICC’s mere suggestion that it may look into acts of torture committed by US officials in Afghanistan. I found this laughable when compared to the US government’s very public push to get other countries—usually African ones—to accept the Court’s jurisdiction and submit to its accountability mechanisms. It was really in the midst of researching that paper that I felt I had no choice to conclude that the very existence of such a two-tiered system of global justice was more harmful than none at all.
That same theme was present in my previous two published papers, as well. When I was digging through Alien Tort Statute jurisprudence for my paper on Yemen, I could not help but be burdened at the clear reality that American lawmakers and courts seemed to expect that this provision was a way to bring “Bad Guys” from “Bad Countries” to account in US courts, even for atrocities committed outside US borders, only to recoil and impose hasty barriers when it seemed the same provision could be used to address American violence, too.
After that, when I built the argument that it should be possible for a peace-minded US president to end the Korean War without going through Congress, I was struck by the fact that the Korean War itself had been launched without going to Congress.[10] Why were there, by contrast, so many potential legal barriers to establishing peace? I wrote another paper for my LLM but never submitted for publication in which I explore how human rights rhetoric and genocide prevention language has been deployed consistently in the service of American militarism and geopolitical maneuvering. Every research question I have taken up has forced me to grapple anew with the many ways that power has entrenched itself even in laws and institutions ostensibly meant to constrain power. My guess is that I will keep pulling on this thread in all my future research endeavors.
I still do not fully know what I want to be when I grow up, but I am at last quite comfortable with that uncertainty. In the meantime, I do have a short answer for those DC cocktail hour conversations when I get asked, “what do you do?” I used to say, “I am an antiwar advocate” or “I’m a national security policy lobbyist,” or I kept it more general and stuck with “I do public interest advocacy.” Now I mostly rely on that last one. But then I check myself and make sure to add the full truth: “also, I am a national security legal scholar.”
Elizabeth Beavers is a national security legal scholar and a public interest policy advocate based in Washington, DC. She teaches remotely as an adjunct professor of counterterrorism law at the University of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce School of Law. She has worked with and advised organizations such as the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Amnesty International USA, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Brown University’s Costs of War Project, and the Charity & Security Network. Her analysis has been featured in numerous media outlets including The New York Times, USA Today, Politico, Reuters, and The Guardian. She has also published several original works of scholarship in prominent law journals. Previously, she ran a consultancy that worked behind the scenes to strengthen leading national advocacy organizations in their work to lobby lawmakers, organize and train grassroots activists, and change the public narrative.
[1] Elizabeth Beavers, “War Crimes, Inc.: The ATS Case against the U.S. Weapons Industry for Aiding and Abetting Atrocities in Yemen,” Florida Journal of International Law 31:2 (2020);179-210..
[2] Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021); Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2010); E. Tendayi Achiume and Asli U. Bali, “Race and Empire: Legal Theory Within, Through and Across National Borders,” UCLA Law Review 67:6 (2021): 1386-1431 ; Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2006); Maryam Jamshidi, “How the War on Terror Is Transforming Private U.S. Law,” Washington University Law Review 96:3 (2018): 559-661; Wadie Said, Crimes of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2015); Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. (Stanford University Press, 2019).
[3] Elizabeth Beavers, “Could the President End the Korean War Without Congress?” UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal 38:1 (2021): 109-130.
[4] Elizabeth Beavers, “Where Do They Go for Justice? The United States-International Criminal Court Dispute and Crimes Against Humanity in Afghanistan,” California Western International Law Journal 52:1 (2022): 85-114.
[5] Elizabeth Beavers, “The Danger in Designations: US Terrorism Designation Lists in Gaza and Beyond,” American University National Security Law Brief 15:1 (forthcoming 2025).
[6] Atiya Husain, “Terror and Abolition,” Boston Review, June 11, 2020, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/atiya-husain-terror-and-abolition/.
[7] Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal, “Anti-Palestine at the Core: The Origins and Growing Dangers of U.S. Antiterrorism Law,” (February 2024):, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/548748b1e4b083fc03ebf70e/t/65d637d9f2843f3855780ae3/1708537837536/Anti-Palestinian+at+the+Core-.pdf.
[8] Nancy Hollander, “The Holy Land Foundation Case: The Collapse of American Justice,” Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice 20:1 (2014): 45-61.
[9] Moyn, Humane.
[10] Louis Fisher, “The Korean War: On What Legal Basis Did Truman Act?” American Journal of International Law 89:21 (1995): 21-39.