3 - Grounding an Absolutist Approach to the Laws of War

Summary

Gentili sought to develop a set of rules to help regulate warfare. However, given his positions on absolutism and the value of the reason of state tradition, it is hard to see what resources he had available for encouraging sovereigns to actually play by those rules. In this chapter, I argue that Gentili squared the circle through a dichotomy at the heart of his legal framework: the distinction between violence carried out by a “public” entity and all other forms of violence. In Gentili’s framework, those carrying out the latter would immediately be discredited as “pirates” or “enemies of mankind.” The key, of course, was what Gentili meant by “public.”