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What is IHL history now?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2022

Boyd van Dijk
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Abstract

Over the last few decades, an extraordinary amount has changed in our understanding of the history of international humanitarian law (IHL). This article addresses the latest findings in this new historiography, placing contemporary IHL issues in a broader historical context and sharing the author's own experiences as a researcher exploring the discipline's practice from a historical perspective. Ultimately, he makes a passionate case for history – by showing why this discipline has a lot to offer for practitioners of international law.

Keywords

Geneva ConventionsInternational Committee of the Red Crossinternational humanitarian lawhistoryarchives
Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 104 , Issue 920-921: How International Humanitarian Law Develops , August 2022 , pp. 1621 - 1637
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the ICRC.

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References

1 One important exception is Geoffrey Best's path-breaking book from 1980. Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts, Columbia University Press, New York, 1980.

2 Good examples of this new approach are Giovanni Mantilla, “The Origins and Evolution of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols”, in Matthew Evangelista and Nina Tannenwald (eds), Do the Geneva Conventions Matter?, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017; James Crossland, War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–1914, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018; and Chotzen, Anna, “Beyond Bounds: Morocco's Rif War and the Limits of International Law”, Humanity, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Frédéric Mégret, “From ‘Savages’ to ‘Unlawful Combatants’: A Postcolonial Look at International Humanitarian Law's ‘Other’”, in Anne Orford (ed.), International Law and its Others, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006; and Pitts, Jennifer, “The Critical History of International Law”, Political Theory, Vol. 43, No. 4, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 Alexander, Amanda, “International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I”, Melbourne Journal of International Law, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2016Google Scholar.

6 Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014.

7 Eleanor Davey, “Decolonizing the Geneva Conventions: National Liberation and the Development of Humanitarian Law”, in A. Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti and Roland Burke (eds), Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020. See also Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2019.

8 Matt Craven, “Introduction: International Law and its Histories”, in Matt Craven, Malgosia Fitzmaurice and Maria Vogiatzi (eds), Time, History and International Law, Leiden, Brill Nijhoff, 2006, p. 4.

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11 For a discussion of the archival politics of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda, see Henry Alexander Redwood, The Archival Politics of International Courts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021. See also Barrie Sander, Doing Justice to History: Confronting the Past in International Criminal Courts, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021.

12 The ICRC Assembly also adopted in 2020 a plan to make the organization's archives more accessible through “becoming digital by design”. The ICRC Library also has an impressive digital collection of the drafting history of the Conventions and Protocols. “The Strategy for Archives, Records and Library Collections, 2019–2023”, ICRC Library, Geneva.

13 Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

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18 Another important study reflecting on the history of IHL compliance during the First World War is Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2014.

19 One historian who is trying to overcome this juxtaposition is Kimberly Lowe. Kimberly Lowe, “The Red Cross and the Laws of War, 1863–1949: International Rights Activism Before Human Rights”, in Jean Quataert and Lora Wildenthal (eds), The Routledge History of Human Rights, Routledge, New York, 2020. Another notable exception is Raphaëlle Branche, “Entre droit humanitaire et intérêts politiques : les missions algériennes du CICR”, Revue historique, 1999.

20 The restrictive role of Pictet's family archives is arguably even more important in this context.

21 For a broader context of the insurgency, see Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012.

22 David M. Anderson, “British Abuse and Torture in Kenya's Counter-Insurgency, 1952–1960”, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol. 23, No. 4–5, 2012.

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24 Gathii, James Thuo, “Studying Race in International Law Scholarship Using a Social Science Approach”, Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2021Google Scholar.

25 Before the ICRC archives opened up, most scholars were forced to use only publicly available sources (e.g. the Revue, secondary sources, non-ICRC archives, etc.) in order to reconstruct the ICRC's history, or that of the Geneva Conventions. One example is Dieter Riesenberger, Für Humanität in Krieg und Frieden. Das Internationale Rote Kreuz, 1863–1977, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1992, pp. 214–18.

26 Personal papers of José Oscar Monteiro, Maputo, Mozambique.

27 N. A. Kurz, above note 17.

28 Helen M. Kinsella, The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2011.

29 H. M. Kinsella and G. Mantilla, above note 16, p. 650.

30 Craig Jones, The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020.

31 One example is Mantilla's study of social pressuring mechanisms in the history of IHL's making. Giovanni Mantilla, Lawmaking Under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law and Internal Armed Conflict, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2020.

32 For a broader discussion of the recent method wars in international legal scholarship, see Wheatley, Natasha, “Law and the Time of Angels: International Law's Method Wars and the Affective Life of Disciplines”, History & Theory, Vol. 60, No. 2, 2021CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Orford, Anne, “On International Legal Method”, London Review of International Law, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Anne Orford, “International Law and the Limits of History”, in Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon and Alexis Galán (eds), The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017.

33 Modirzadeh, Naz K., “Cut These Words: Passion and International Law of War Scholarship”, Harvard International Law Journal, Vol. 61, No. 1, 2020, p. 48Google Scholar.

34 See Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights, Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2017.

35 Tannenwald, Nina, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-Use”, International Organization, Vol. 53, No. 3, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Richard M. Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1997.

36 Giovanni Mantilla, “Forum Isolation: Social Opprobrium and the Origins of the International Law of Internal Conflict”, International Organization, Vol. 72, No. 2, 2018.

37 See Brad Smith, “Transcript of Keynote Address at the RSA Conference 2017: The Need for a Digital Geneva Convention”, Microsoft On the Issues, 14 February 2017, available at: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/02/14/need-digital-geneva-convention/.

38 Dijk, Boyd van, “Human Rights in War: On the Entangled Foundations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions”, American Journal of International Law, Vol. 112, No. 4, 2018, pp. 553–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 For a discussion of the debate around the question whether IHL restricts or legitimizes violence, see the classic Jochnick, Chris af and Normand, Roger, “The Legitimation of Violence: A Critical History of the Laws of War”, Harvard International Law Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, 1994Google Scholar.

40 For a discussion of the erasure of IHL history and the Vietnam War, see N. K. Modirzadeh, above note 33.

41 Benvenisti, Eyal and Lustig, Doreen, “Monopolizing War: Codifying the Laws of War to Reassert Governmental Authority, 1856–1874”, European Journal of International Law, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2020CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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43 Janina Dill, Legitimate Targets? Social Construction, International Law and US Bombing, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014; and Reus-Smit, Christian, “Reading History Through Constructivist Eyes”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2008, pp. 397–8Google Scholar.

44 H. M. Kinsella, above note 28.

45 Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2020; and A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021. For a broader discussion of how war entered the human rights field, see Linde Lindkvist, “When the War Came: The Child Rights Convention and the Conflation of Human Rights and the Laws of War”, in Jean Quataert and Lora Wildenthal (eds), The Routledge History of Human Rights, Routledge, New York, 2020.

46 A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Resistance, and Security: International Law and the Transformative Occupation of Palestine”, Humanity, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2017.

47 See Immi Tallgren, Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces?, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming.

48 Hilary Charlesworth, “The Women Question in International Law”, Asian Journal of International Law, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011.

49 For one example, see Tuba Inal, Looting and Rape in Wartime: Law and Change in International Relations, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2013.

50 Important examples of this shift are: Laura Sjoberg, “Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle: Why Gender Analysis Needs Feminism”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4, 2006; and Christine Chinkin, “Rape and Sexual Abuse of Women in International Law”, European Journal of International Law, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1994. For a critical practitioners’ account of this shift, see Helen Durham, “Women, Armed Conflict and International Law”, International Review of the Red Cross, No. 84, No. 847, 2002.

51 See also Helen M. Kinsella, “Securing the Civilian: Sex and Gender in the Laws of War”, in Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (eds), Power in Global Governance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; and Karen Engle, “Judging Sex in War”, Michigan Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 6, 2008.

52 See Boyd van Dijk, “Gendering the Geneva Conventions”, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2, 2022.

53 One example of such an attempt to rescue lost pasts is Katharine Fortin, “Complementarity Between the ICRC and the United Nations and International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law, 1948–1968”, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 94, No. 888, 2012.

54 Nicholas Mulder and Boyd van Dijk, “Why Did Starvation Not Become the Paradigmatic War Crime in International Law?”, in Ingo Venzke and Kevin Jon Heller (eds), Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021.

55 For descriptions of nineteenth-century blockade and privateering, see Jan Martin Lemnitzer, Power, Law and the End of Privateering, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014.

56 E. Davey, above note 7, p. 381.

57 Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011.

58 See also Thompson, Andrew, “‘Restoring Hope Where All Hope Was Lost’: Nelson Mandela, the ICRC and the Protection of Political Detainees in Apartheid South Africa”, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 98, No. 903, 2016, pp. 812–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 See also Srinivas Burra, “Was There the Third World in Geneva in 1949?”, EJIL Talk! – Blog of the European Journal of International Law, 26 September 2019, available at: https://www.ejiltalk.org/was-there-the-third-world-in-geneva-in-1949/.

60 One of the most powerful examples is: Whyte, Jessica, “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War’: Decolonization, Wars of National Liberation, and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions”, Humanity, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2018CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 See Klose, Fabian, “The Colonial Testing Ground, The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Violent End of Empire”, Humanity, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smiley, Will, “Lawless Wars of Empire? The International Law of War in the Philippines, 1898–1903”, Law and History Review, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2018CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Groen, Petra, “Colonial Warfare and Military Ethics in the Netherlands East Indies, 1816–1941”, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 14. No. 3–4, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 One inspiring example of this type of work is Cindy Ewing, “The Colombo Powers: Creating Diplomacy in the Third World and Launching Afro-Asia at Bandung”, Cold War History, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2019.

63 Two good examples of this new type of analysis are Umut Özsu, “Determining New Selves: Mohammed Bedjaoui on Algeria, Western Sahara, and Post-Classical International Law”, in Jochen von Bernstorff and Philipp Dann (eds), The Battle for International Law: South–North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019; and Emma Stone Mackinnon, “Contingencies of Context: Contested Legacies of the Algerian Revolution in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions”, in Ingo Venzke and Kevin Jon Heller (eds), Contingency and the Course of International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021.

64 One successful example is Lingen, Kerstin von, “Legal Flows: Contributions of Exiled Lawyers to the Concept of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ During the Second World War”, Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2020Google Scholar.

65 Pablo Kalmanovitz, The Laws of War in International Thought, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020; Lauren Benton and Richard Ross, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850, New York University Press, New York, 2013; Helen Kinsella, “Francis Lieber and Native American Wars”, forthcoming; and Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018.

66 Alexander, Amanda, “A Short History of International Humanitarian Law”, European Journal of International Law, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 H. M. Kinsella and G. Mantilla, above note 16, p. 651; and A. Alexander, ibid.

68 See B. van Dijk, above note 13.

69 At least according to Article 32 of the 1969 Vienna Convention. See also David J. Bederman, “Foreign Office International Legal History”, Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper Series, Research Paper No. 05-24, 2004, p. 6.

70 John Fabian Witt, Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History, Free Press, New York, 2012.

71 S. Moyn, above note 45.