Theresa Hitchens
Even for nonaficionados, the Red Wedding episode in book 3, A Storm of Swords, in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice saga, and episode 9, “The Rains of Castelmere,” in season 3 of the televised Game of Thrones, has become a notorious example of deadly political and military deception. The events that flow from that horrific, and extremely bloody, betrayal also elucidate how violations of norms can exact economic, political, and strategic costs.
The Red Wedding episode begins with Robb Stark, heir of House Stark and Winterfell and self-proclaimed King in the North, entering into a marriage pact with one of Lord Walder Frey’s daughters in exchange for the allegiance of House Frey against the Iron Throne held by House Lannister in the War of the Five Kings. But Robb subsequently falls in love with another girl and reneges on that promise. In revenge for the marriage pact’s breach, Lord Walder implements a plot (backed up by Lord Tywin Lannister and Lord Roose Bolton) to assassinate Robb. He invites Robb; Robb’s mother, Catelyn; and Robb’s loyal men-at-arms to the wedding of Robb’s uncle Edmure Tully to Roslin Frey as a gesture of reconciliation. As the wedding feast winds down, Frey unleashes his own forces, who slaughter Robb, Catelyn, and most of the visiting Winterfell party.
The Red Wedding is an example of a violation of a societal “norm of behavior” writ large—in this case, the norm of hospitality that sets boundaries on the behavior of hosts and guests. Norms of behavior—both actions that are prescribed and those that are proscribed—not only are the underpinnings of civilizations dating back as far as known history but also serve as an important foundation for international relations and the development of international law in today’s world. Norms not only can be implemented via “customary international law” or “soft law,” but they can also be eventually translated into legally binding accords via international law and bilateral or multilateral treaties.1
The concept that hosts owe guests certain rights (and vice versa), including a guarantee of safety, dates back at least to the ancient Greeks, where the rules were known as xenia (guest-friendship) and were protected by the father of the gods himself, Zeus. Indeed, the Trojan War was a direct result of a violation of xenia by the Trojan prince, Paris, in abducting Menelaus’s wife, thus ensuring Zeus’s wrath and his championship of the Greek side.2 In the pre-Viking Anglo-Saxon world, the rules of hospitality were widespread in custom at all levels of society, and in some cases, they were written into local laws,3 showing how customs can be, and often are, eventually translated into legal instruments (although it should be said that “laws” in the fifth and sixth centuries were rather more fluid than today’s Western concept of “legal” instruments). George R. R. Martin has noted that the Red Wedding concept was based on history, including the infamous 1692 Glencoe Massacre in Scotland—where Clan MacDonald was slaughtered by an army of Clan Campbell after the Campbell Captain asked for shelter from the winter weather on the pretense that the nearby fort was full.4 The massacre was a violation of King James VI’s 1587 edict, “Slaughter under Trust,”5 designed to reduce wars among the Scottish clans by punishing those who tricked their clan enemies into a massacre by offering peaceful terms, and to this day the Claichag Inn in Glencoe sports a sign above the door denying entry to members of Clan Campbell.
While the concept of host-guest rights has lost much of its meaning in the modern Western world, the long-standing normative prohibitions against deception as a means of military strategy for killing or capturing enemies remain in place today—both via customary international law and via treaties. In particular, the Geneva Conventions define this sort of deception as “perfidy.” Perfidy is defined in Additional Protocol I, Article 37(1) and Article 85(3)(f) as an act where one gains the enemy’s confidence by promising protection under the laws of war, for the purposes of intending to kill, wound, or capture them.6 In the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, perfidy is also a crime, though it is not as precisely formulated as it is in Additional Protocol I. The definition of perfidy in the Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(e)(ix), only criminalizes killing or wounding, not capturing.7 In addition, the International Committee of the Red Cross has put together a website that examines perfidy in law and in customary international law by surveying national military manuals and laws, international practice, and legal opinion. For example, pretending to be Red Cross representatives to gain access to adversaries is considered perfidy and a crime.8
Treaties and laws can be enforced by various means—although international law requires states to provide enforcement—and generally spell out both consequences and enforcement measures within their terms. Norms, which are politically but not legally binding and thus by their nature “soft law,” have neither prescribed enforcement terms nor specific methodologies to do so. Even when norms have been deemed “customary international law,” enforcement of violations often does not occur, because states are generally unwilling to act unless their national interests are directly impugned.
In the Game of Thrones universe, the conspirators at first seem to only reap benefits from the violation of the “bread and salt” norm of hospitality.9 House Lannister gets rid of its only real rival for the Iron Throne. Lord Tywin Lannister grants pardons, bestows titles to the houses of the perpetrators, and enacts marriages tying those houses to House Lannister for protection.
However, negative consequences of the Red Wedding ripple out across the rest of the saga, so much so that it totally undermines the stability of Westeros and the belief of the common people in the feudal system of the Iron Throne and the great houses. It also underpins plotlines in each of books 3, 4, and 5. The distrust and disgust sowed by the Red Wedding is a foundational reason of a number of downfalls not just for House Frey but also for House Lannister that are portrayed in seasons 5 and 6 and in the books A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. Neither house can keep allies because of the Red Wedding, and indeed the incident fires the unending rebellion against the Iron Throne. While the Red Wedding ends the immediate threat to House Lannister’s grip on the Iron Throne from House Stark, it shortly thereafter spurs several other lords and houses into broadening and deepening their military attacks. First, the collapse of Winterfell lures House Greyjoy to try to take over the North and further its bid for independence. It also piques Brynden Tully, Catelyn Stark’s uncle also known as the Blackfish, to attack the Freys and take back his family seat of Riverrun. In A Feast for Crows (and episode 6 of season 6, “Blood of My Blood”), Jaime Lannister, one of the three siblings of House Lannister, is sent to help the Freys oust Tully. Jaime wants to end the standoff by offering the Blackfish a peace treaty but is warned by his aunt (who is married to one of the Freys) that this “won’t work.” She says, “Terms require trust. The Freys murdered guests beneath their roof.” In the same book, Lord Rodrik Greyjoy sums up the overall situation in the Seven Kingdoms: “Crows will fight over a dead man’s flesh and kill each other for his eyes. We had one king, then five. Now all I see are crows, squabbling over the corpse of Westeros.”10
Specifically, it is the catalyst for the gruesome incident of the “Frey pies” in A Dance of Dragons, which suggests that Ser Wyman Manderly (a Stark loyalist from the North whose son was killed at the Red Wedding) serves Lord Walder three of his sons in a pie, and for the resurrection of Catelyn Stark in A Storm of Swords as Lady Stoneheart (who doesn’t appear in the show) and her subsequent immortal quest for vengeance.11 Finally, it is also part of the reason that the Sparrows religious sect are suspicious of Cersei Lannister (Tywin’s daughter, whose son ends up on the Iron Throne) and an underpinning to her later arrest by the leader of the order, the High Septon, in A Sword of Stones.
Likewise, today, violation of norms also can, and has, come with costs—political, economic, and strategic. States often comply with norms precisely to avoid such potential costs, including political shaming and isolation or economic sanctions. Some violations, particularly those related to gross violations of human rights, also have seen state action to use military force to punish perpetrators.
In one example of the power of norms, in order to avoid political shaming, many states who are not parties to the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (known as the Ottawa Convention and stemming from norm setting by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines championed by Diana, Princess of Wales) have since decided to comply with the norms set by the treaty, refusing to use landmines and committing to voluntary efforts at destruction. Indeed, the United States (along with China and Russia, a nonsignatory of the Ottawa Convention) now bans the production and acquisition of antipersonnel landmines, as well as their use outside the Korean Peninsula.12
China’s antisatellite (ASAT) weapons test of January 2007 is an example of how norms violation can lead to political censure and force a change of behavior. China’s ASAT test violated not one but two standing norms agreed on by the international community. The first was the long-standing norm against explicit tests of ASATs. Prior to 2007 the last ASAT tests were conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, which subsequently led to a gentleman’s agreement between the two superpowers to discontinue such tests, due to concerns about their destabilizing effect on the nuclear balance and the negative effects for the space environment, because of the creation of debris, which poses risks to operational satellites due to possible collisions. That gentleman’s agreement, in essence, created a norm that had not been violated by other countries up until the Chinese test. The second norm that the test violated was related to the issue of debris creation on orbit. Space debris—that is, pieces of junk emanating from launch, such as spent booster rockets; failure of satellites on orbit; or collisions with other on-orbit objects—has been internationally recognized since the 1990s as a threat to the space environment and the functioning of satellites. The Chinese ASAT test created nearly one thousand pieces of debris in a highly used orbit that could destroy active satellites.13 Further, the test came in the midst of UN negotiations to develop a set of voluntary best practices for reducing the creation of space debris—negotiations in which China was a participant. To make matters worse, China had been chosen as the site of an April 2007 technical meeting supporting those negotiations. International outrage was immediate, and China was forced to back out of its plans to host the April meeting. Since that time, China has not conducted another debris-creating, or an explicit, ASAT test.
The 2013 use by Syria of chemical weapons against cities and civilians in its civil war is an example of when the threat of military force was brought to bear to uphold norms. The attacks were considered particularly egregious because they involved deliberate targeting of civilians in a noninternational conflict, something that is considered prohibited under customary international law. Furthermore, they violated the norm against the use of chemical weapons—despite the fact that Syria was, at the time, not a signatory of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which requires signatories to declare and destroy all chemical weapons stockpiles and production facilities. A UN investigation concluded in December 2013 that there were “reasonable grounds” to prove the use of sarin gas from Syrian Armed Forces stockpiles at several locations.14 This resulted in enormous pressure—including economic sanctions—on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to adhere to the CWC and disarm. It also resulted in a threat by the Obama administration to respond with military force—a threat that was not, however, acted on after Russia proposed a diplomatic plan to dismantle Syrian weapons.15 Following negotiations in late 2013, Syria adhered to the CWC, and inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found that Syria had destroyed all weapons at its “declared” facilities. However, the investigators also stressed that they could not determine whether all Syria’s chemical weapons were destroyed, due to suspicions that Assad hid the existence of some stockpiles. In 2014 and again in 2016, the Syrian government used chlorine gas in attacks on rebels in several cities—although the use of chlorine is banned by the CWC, its production is not.16 However, it wasn’t until April 2017, under the Trump administration, that a chemical weapons attack by the government on Khan Sheikhoun resulted in a missile strike by the United States.17 In April 2018, as a result of three chlorine gas attacks in February, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom joined forces to launch yet more missile strikes on three weapons storage and research centers owned by the Syrian Armed Forces.18
Norms are a foundational element of international relations, as well as military practices. While norms are not always strictly upheld by the international community, violations often do come with negative political, economic, or strategic consequences. Even in the Game of Thrones universe, where seemingly “no good deed goes unpunished,” the ramifications of the gross violation of societal norms exemplified by the Red Wedding came at costs over time to the perpetrators and to the stability of Westeros as a kingdom. Thus, states (whether fictional or real) should think twice before judging norms of behavior as easily discarded in pursuit of short-term aims, and they should beware of strategic thinking in which the ends justify the means.
1. Customary international law is defined as international obligations arising from state practice. According to Article 38(1)(b) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, customary law is one of the sources of international law. It can be shown by citing state practice, or opinio juris. An example is the prohibition on civilian attacks in noninternational armed conflicts (i.e., civil wars). See “Customary International Law,” Legal Information Institute, accessed December 4, 2018, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/customary_international_law. Soft law is defined as rules that are neither strictly binding nor completely lacking legal significance. In international law, soft law refers to guidelines, policy declarations, or codes of conduct, but they are not directly enforceable. United Nations resolutions are a primary example of soft law. See “Soft Law and Legal Definition,” U.S. Legal, accessed December 4, 2018, https://definitions.uslegal.com/s/soft-law/.
2. See “Hospitium,” A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities 1890, ed. William Smith, William Wayte, and G. E. Marindin (London: John Murray, 1890), online at Perseus, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0063:entry=hospitium-cn.
3. Tom Lambert, “Hospitality, Protection and Refuge in English Law,” Journal of Refugee Studies 30, no. 2 (2017): 243–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fev035.
4. Stacy Conradt, “The Real-Life Events That Inspired Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding,” Week, June 5, 2013, https://theweek.com/articles/463588/reallife-events-that-inspired-game-thrones-red-wedding.
5. “Slaughter under Trust,” Clan Donald Heritage, accessed December 4, 2018, http://clandonald-heritage.com/slaughter-under-trust/.
6. Jonas Alastair Juhlin, “Rules of Deception” (research paper, Royal Danish Defence College, May 2015), http://www.fak.dk/publikationer/Documents/Rules%20of%20Deception.pdf?pdfdl=RulesofDeception. See also Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 (Geneva, Switzerland: International Committee of the Red Cross, May 2010), 30, 61, https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0321.pdf.
7. Juhlin, “Rules of Deception.”
8. “Rule 65. Perfidy,” International Committee of the Red Cross, Customary IHL Database, accessed December 4, 2018, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_rul_rule65.
9. The “bread and salt” norm is mentioned by Robb Stark’s mother, Catelyn, in A Storm of Swords just before the start of the Red Wedding; it stipulates that once a guest has eaten of “bread and salt” within a host’s home, the host is bound to “do no harm.” To this day, the concept of “breaking bread” with an enemy is a metaphor for a peaceful encounter. George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (New York: Bantam Books, 2011), 671.
10. George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows (New York: Bantam Books, 2011), 714, 237.
11. George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 437. In the television series, it is Arya Stark who bakes the pies for Lord Walder; David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, “The Winds of Winter,” season 6, episode 10, dir. Miguel Sapochnik, Game of Thrones, aired June 26, 2016, on HBO. In the novels so far, Lord Walder remains alive.
12. Daryl Kimball, “The Ottawa Convention at a Glance,” Arms Control Association, January 2018, https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/ottawa.
13. Leonard David, “China’s Anti-Satellite Test: A Worrisome Debris Cloud Circles Earth,” Space.com, February 2, 2007, https://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worrisome-debris-cloud-circles-earth.html.
14. UN Security Council, United Nations Mission to Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic: Final Report, A/68/663–S/2013/735, December 13, 2013, http://undocs.org/A/68/663.
15. “The Obama Administration on Syria, 2009–2017,” Ballotpedia, accessed December 4, 2018, https://ballotpedia.org/The_Obama_administration_on_Syria,_2009-2017.
16. Colum Lynch, “To Assuage Russia, Obama Administration Backed Off Syria Chemical Weapons Plan,” Foreign Policy, May 19, 2017, http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/19/to-assuage-russia-obama-administration-backed-off-syria-chemical-weapons-plan/.
17. Ashish Kumar Sen, “A Brief History of Chemical Weapons in Syria,” Atlantic Council, April 9, 2108, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/a-brief-history-of-chemical-weapons-in-syria.
18. Helen Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, and Ben Hubbard, “U.S., Britain and France Strike Syria over Suspected Chemical Weapons Attack,” New York Times, April 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/world/middleeast/trump-strikes-syria-attack.html.