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3 - All’s Fair in Love and War or the Limits of the Limitations

Juridification of Warfare and Its Revocation by Military Necessity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2024

By
Miloš Vec
Edited by
Matt Killingsworth  and
Tim McCormack
Matt Killingsworth
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania
Tim McCormack
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania
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Summary

Humanity and civility were established as new leading principles of international law during the last decades of the nineteenth century. But the restriction of war itself was a battlefield. Some authors conceptualised the restrictions on warfare explicitly as of a social custom quality or as ‘chivalric practices’ of ‘moral value only’. Probably the most fundamental attack on international law’s limits came from the idea of ‘military necessity’. It was limiting law’s limitations. And in its most radical variant, it was evoked not only in those cases which explicitly referred to it but in any regulation of warfare. This was a specific, particularly militaristic understanding of ‘necessity’, and its effect was unleashing: the laws of war would lose their binding force. Necessity could revocate any ties, be they moral or legal. Pre-1914 international law was in some areas pretty far away from humanisation, universalism, and also from positivism. It was relativising and legitimating excessive violence.

Keywords

legal pluralismjuridificationmultinormativitymilitary necessitylegal positivismde-juridificationlegal sourceslegal principlesinternational humanitarian lawlaw of warpeace
Type
Chapter
Information
Civility, Barbarism and the Evolution of International Humanitarian Law
Who do the Laws of War Protect?
 , pp. 34 - 60
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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