The Laws of War in International Thought (The History and Theory of International Law)

Two broad competing normative conceptions of war can be distinguished in the history of legal and political thought. The first and nowadays more familiar belongs to the tradition of "just war." It sees war as an instrument of justice, indeed the most extreme form of supra-national lawenforcement, justified only in the most serious cases of violation of right. The second conception has been labelled "lawful", "legitimate", or "regular war", where war is not enforcement of justice, but a legally regulated procedure governing the pursuit of conflicting legitimate claims amongequal and autonomous political entities.This book sheds light on the relationship between law and morals in armed conflict, and can be read as a historical argument against the disappearance of the regular war concept. Kalmanovitz highlights three important contemporary challenges: the juridification of aggression and the "turn to ethics"in international law; the progressive individualization of war; and the predominance of asymmetrical warfare and armed nonstate actors.This study of the regular war tradition brings historical and theoretical perspective to these recent conceptual transformations, which undermine the fundamental and long-standing distinction between war and police action. It contributes to clarify the stakes in the erosion of internationalpluralism and the normative depoliticization of war. In revisiting the regular war tradition, a clearer sense of these ongoing transformations is realised, inspiring fresh perspectives on the justifiability of war. The Law of Armed Conflict is usually understood to be a regime of exception that applies only during armed conflict and regulates hostilities among enemies. It assigns privileges to states far beyond what they are allowed to do in peacetime, and it mandates certain protections for non-combatants, which can often be defeated by appeals to military necessity or advantage. The Laws of War in International Thought examines the intellectual history of the laws of war before their codification. It reconstructs the processes by which political and legal theorists built the laws' distinctive vocabularies and legitimized some of their broadest permissions, and it situates these processes within the broader intellectual project that from early modernity spelled out the nature, function, and powers of state sovereignty. The book focuses on four historical moments in the intellectual history of the laws of war: the doctrine of just war in Spanish scholasticism; Hugo Grotius's theory of solemn war; the Enlightenment theory of regular war; and late nineteenth-century humanitarianism. By looking at these moments, Pablo Kalmanovitz shows how challenging and polemical it has been for international theorists to justify the exceptional and permissive character of the laws of war. In this way, he contributes to recover a sense of the historical foundations and many still problematic aspects of the Law of Armed Conflict. The Law of Armed Conflict is usually understood to be a regime of exception that applies only during armed conflict and regulates hostilities among enemies. It assigns privileges to states far beyond what they are allowed to do in peacetime, and it mandates certain protections for non-combatants, which can often be defeated by appeals to military necessity or advantage.0The Laws of War in International Thought examines the intellectual history of the laws of war before their codification. It reconstructs the processes by which political and legal theorists built the laws' distinctive vocabularies and legitimized some of their broadest permissions, and it situates these processes within the broader intellectual project that from early modernity spelled out the nature, function, and powers of state sovereignty.0The book focuses on four historical moments in the intellectual history of the laws of war: the doctrine of just war in Spanish scholasticism; Hugo Grotius's theory of solemn war; the Enlightenment theory of regular war; and late nineteenth-century humanitarianism. By looking at these moments, Pablo Kalmanovitz shows how challenging and polemical it has been for international theorists to justify the exceptional and permissive character of the laws of war. In this way, he contributes to recover a sense of the historical foundations and many still problematic aspects of the Law of Armed Conflict La 4ème de couv. indique : "In the past few decades the understanding of the relationship between nations has undergone a radical transformation. The role of the traditional nation-state is diminishing, along with many of the traditional vocabularies which were once used to describe what has been called, ever since Jeremy Bentham coined the phrase in 1780, "international law". The older boundaries between states are growing ever more fluid, new conceptions and new languages have emerged which are slowly coming to replace the image of a world of sovereign independent nation states which has dominated the study of international relations since the early nineteenth century. The redefinition of the international arena demands a new understanding of classical and contemporary questions in international and legal theory. It is the editors' conviction that the best way to achieve this is by bridging the traditional divide between international legal theory, intellectual history, and legal and political history. The aim of the series, therefore, is to provide a forum for historical studies, from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century, that are theoretically-informed and for philosophical work that is historically conscious, in the hope that a new vision of the rapidly evolving international world, its past and its possible future, may emerge." This book investigates the intellectual history of the laws of war. It reconstructs the distinctive ways of thinking about the legal regulation of war in history, contrasts these to more familiar just war and realist approaches, and shows how closely connected they have been to the process of spelling out the nature, function, and powers of state sovereignty. This text investigates the intellectual history of the laws of war. It reconstructs the distinctive ways of thinking about the legal regulation of war in history, contrasts these to more familiar just war and realist approaches, and shows how closely connected they have been to the process of spelling out the nature, function, and powers of state sovereignty