This article presents estimates of the financial costs incurred by Portugal with the Colonial War (1961-1974). The results obtained show that, on average, the extraordinary expenses most directly related with the war represented 22% of Portuguese state expenditure, equivalent to 3.1% of GDP. They also show that the total costs incurred by Portugal with the Colonial War amounted to between 21.8 billion euros and 29.8 billion euros, at today's prices and in the present-day currency. By estimating a dynamic model, it was also possible to identify a positive relationship between the extraordinary military expenditure on the defence and security of the overseas provinces—which included the budgetary costs of war—and Portuguese economic growth. The conclusions reached represent a valuable contribution to contemporary economic history.

The forced removal and resettlement of population was a main feature of late European colonialism, in Africa and elsewhere. Both were crucial to the formulation and enactment of securitarian projects and developmental schemes, and to their recurrent intersection and close interdependence. The repertoires of repressive developmentalism—the shaping of development strategies by securitarian concerns and the contamination of schemes of security by socioeconomic rationales—were diverse, inspiring the various authorities and guiding many specific operations on the ground. This text provides one telling example of these repertoires, the Operação Robusta (1969–1974), which entailed the forced removal of thousands of men, women, and children from the district of North Cuanza to the district of Zaire (both in the north of Angola, under Portuguese rule, and in the middle of an armed conflict that started in 1961), and was seen as a model for similar actions. Assessing the drives and the prospects associated with the operation, this text also addresses its violent dynamics and effects, namely the substantial separation of families, the meagre provision of welfare, and the intense processes of land expropriation.

The article explores the demise of the ‘colonial war’ category through the employment of French colonial troops, under the 1918 armistice, to occupy the German Rhineland.

It traces the prevalence of – and the anxieties underpinning – antebellum doctrine on using ‘Barbarous Forces’ in ‘European’ war. It then records the silence of postbellum scholars on the ‘horror on the Rhine’ – orchestrated allegations of rape framed in racialized terms of humanity and the requirements of the law of civilized warfare. Among possible explanations for this silence, the article follows recent literature that considers this scandal as the embodiment of crises in masculinity, white domination, and European civilization.

These crises, like the scandal itself, expressed antebellum jurisprudential anxieties about the capacity – and implications – of black soldiers being ‘drilled white’. They also deprived postbellum lawyers of the vocabulary necessary to address what they signified: breakdown of the laws of war; evident, self-inflicted European barbarity; and the collapse of international law itself, embodied by the Versailles Diktat treating Germany – as Smuts warned, ‘as we would not treat a kaffir nation’ – as a colonial ‘object’, as Schmitt lamented.

Last, the article traces the resurgence of ‘colonial war’. It reveals how, at the moment of collapse, in the very instrument embodying it, the category found a new life. Article 22(5) of the League of Nations Covenant (the Covenant) reasserted control over the colonial object, furnishing international lawyers with a new vocabulary to address the employment of colonial troops – yet, now, as part of the ‘law of peace’. Reclassified, both rule and category re-emerged, were codified, and institutionalized imperial governance.