Abstract
In this chapter I identify, demonstrate, explain, and critique two narratives used, traditionally, in the writing of the past of international humanitarian law (IHL). One tells of IHL’s ineluctable progress, the other of its timeless, culture-less, universal immanence. These appear at odds: one narrates the dynamic process of restraining—and humanising—war through law; the other emphasises a constant and immutable idea of humanitarian restraint that inheres in any human civilisation. Culturally, nonetheless, these two narratives share the same function: both are used to affirm, to exogenous and endogenous audiences, faith in the project to humanise war. Deconstructing these narratives as forms of social memory suggests, however, that both types express and deal with epistemic anxieties about the present achievements of that project; both, in fact, allow IHL practitioners to come to terms with the present state of the project to humanise war by deferring the fulfilment of its promise to the indefinite future.
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Notes
- 1.
Butterfield 1965, p 111.
- 2.
Tuchman 1966, p 413.
- 3.
Anghie 1999, pp 7–8.
- 4.
Ibid. (international law presents the colonial “past as inconsequential, both in terms of the theory of international law and the systems of power and inequality it brought into being. The conventional approach studies the nineteenth century in order to show how it has been overcome”).
- 5.
Alexander 2015, p 109 traces the nomenclature’s recent origins.
- 6.
Korff 1924, pp 246–248 offers a similar dichotomy.
- 7.
Pertinently, a former ICRC director observed that “Organizations, like people, have a memory” and noted how “Collective memory, like that of individuals, is always selective and often unreliable—but this does not alter the fact that a myth, a misconception, even an outright lie can influence behaviour just as much as the truth”: Bugnion 2003, p 3. I examine the notions of collective and social memory below.
- 8.
For a useful survey, see van Dijk 2022a.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Levie 2000, p 339.
- 11.
Sassòli et al. 2011, p 139 (“The laws of war are probably as old as war itself. Even in ancient times, there existed interesting—though primitive—customs and agreements containing ‘humanitarian’ elements, and almost everywhere in the world and in most cultures, these customs had very similar patterns and objectives”).
- 12.
Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, adopted 22 August 1864, 129 Consolidated Treaty Series 361 (entered into force 22 June 1865).
- 13.
Vité 2009.
- 14.
Pictet 1985, 7 (enslavement indicating and generating progress: slave labour erecting “huge constructions at whose vestiges we still marvel. This brought about genuine progress…”). Enslavement as improvement to earlier practices is a favourite historical theme: e.g. Levie 2000, 339–340 (“Of course, any one of these alternatives [to killing prisoners], inhumane as they may appear, was more humane than the earlier practice which had existed at the time of the period covered by the Bible”). Cf Scheipers 2010.
- 15.
Kalshoven and Zegveld 2001, p 15; Hay, Forward, in Dunant 1986, p 1 (“The beginnings were modest indeed: a group of five men managed to have a 10-article Convention adopted … One hundred and twenty years later … [IHL] has also developed considerably: the four Geneva Conventions … and their Additional Protocols … contain more than 600 articles providing for … protection”); cf Kahn 1999, p 154: “Progress had a … quantitative dimension in its extension into the full range of state-to-state relations including (most importantly) war. From the international-law scholar’s point of view, it may have been more important that war proceed under legal norms than that the amount of violence actually be reduced.”
- 16.
Meron 2000b, p 246.
- 17.
Butterfield 1965, p 14.
- 18.
Sassòli et al. 2011, p 139.
- 19.
Convention (II) with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, adopted 29 July 1899, 187 Consolidated Treaty Series 429 (entered into force 4 September 1900) (Hague Convention II), preamble; Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, opened for signature adopted 18 October 1907, 205 Consolidated Treaty Series 277 (entered into force 26 January 1910) (Hague Convention IV); Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, adopted 12 August 1949, 75 UNTS 287 (entered into force 21 October 1950) (Geneva Convention IV).
- 20.
Meron 2000b, pp 245–246 (of 15 articles on occupation, “only three relate to the physical integrity of civilian persons. The other provisions deal essentially with the protection of property”. By contrast, Geneva Convention IV protects “personal, rather than proprietary, rights of the population of occupied territory”: Schwarzenberger 1960, p 12.
- 21.
ICRC (2004) Occupation and IHL: Questions and Answers. http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/634kfc.htm. Accessed 20 December 2021.
- 22.
- 23.
Bothe et al. 1982, p 203; Giladi 2010, p 410 describes how the conceptual basis of the prohibition was “humanised” in 1977: Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, opened for signature 8 June 1977, 1125 UNTS 609 (entered into force 7 December 1978) (Additional Protocol I).
- 24.
Progressive history is a “whig interpretation of history”: “the tendency … to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present”: Butterfield 1965, p v.
- 25.
Ibid., pp 3–4: (“the historian has been Protestant, progressive, and whig, and the very model of the nineteenth-century gentleman. Long after he became a determinist he retained his godly role as the dispenser of moral judgments, and like the disciples of Calvin he gave up none of his right to moral indignation”). Breisach 2007.
- 26.
Captured astutely by Bhuta forthcoming to whom I am indebted for sharing the manuscript.
- 27.
- 28.
Moyn 2010, p 5 (“Almost unanimously, contemporary historians have adopted a celebratory attitude toward the emergence and progress of human rights, providing recent enthusiasms with uplifting backstories…”).
- 29.
Altwicker and Diggleman 2014, p 432 (“the success of the progress argument depends neither on the technique applied to convey the message of progress nor on the level of subtlety of the argument” but rather “the plausibility of certain ‘strategic’ assumptions which underlie the argument”).
- 30.
Skouteris 2010.
- 31.
Miller 2008, p 446.
- 32.
- 33.
Miller et al. 2008, p 9.
- 34.
Farrer 2008, p 445.
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
Dunant’s, marking since 1948 the World Red Cross/Red Crescent Day.
- 38.
Root 1913, p 466 (“if our society … were about to choose a patron saint … my voice for one would answer ‘Francis Lieber’”).
- 39.
Now Sassòli et al. 2011.
- 40.
Forsythe 2005 p 91, 297.
- 41.
Ibid., pp xi, 65; see n 23 above (Protestantism).
- 42.
- 43.
- 44.
- 45.
Deuteronomy 20:19–20; Schmitt 2000, p 266.
- 46.
- 47.
- 48.
Pictet 1988 (accompanied by chapters on “African”, “Asian”, “Socialist”, “Islamic”, “Latin American” and, last, “Western” IHL concepts).
- 49.
Cf claims that the influence of “Western culture and European Powers” has waned since the 1970s so that “the humanitarian ideas and concepts formalised in [IHL] treaties are shared by many different schools of thought and cultural traditions”: Sassòli et al. 2011, p 97; Sandoz 1987, p xxxiv (“great satisfaction that for the first time, all the nations of the world participated in this codification … [reflecting] a universal sentiment which is not merely a façade, but is very real... This should encourage all States… to ratify [the Protocols] …”).
- 50.
E.g. Mani 2001 illustrating how the local and universal relate.
- 51.
- 52.
- 53.
Pictet 1985, p 6 (IHL’s roots “are very much deeper than some Europeans authors ... had long believed ... In reality, the laws of war are as old as war itself, and war is as old as life on earth”). Mani 2001, p 59 (IHL “must be as old as armed conflict itself. Resort to arms is, by and large, a demonstration of that barbaric aspect of human nature…”). Sassòli et al. 2011, p 95 (“History has shown that the appearance of any reality in a society—be it highly organized or not—sparks the concomitant appearance of laws applicable to it”).
- 54.
Ibid., pp 97–98.
- 55.
- 56.
Henckaerts and Doswald-Beck 2005, p xxxi (IHL “has its origins in the customary practices of armies as they developed over the ages and on all continents”).
- 57.
- 58.
Kellenberger, “Foreword” in Henckaerts and Doswald-Beck 2005, p xv.
- 59.
- 60.
Pictet 1988, pp 3–4 (“humanitarian principles are common to all human communities wherever they may be. When different customs, ethics and philosophies are gathered for comparison, and when they are melted down, their particularities eliminated and only what is general extracted, one is left with a pure substance which is the heritage of all mankind”).
- 61.
van Creveld 1991, p 27.
- 62.
The resonance with Red Cross/Red Crescent’s “Principles” is patent.
- 63.
Butterfield 1965, pp 23–25.
- 64.
E.g. the “perfidy” of 1977 in some respects is narrower than the “treachery” of 1899/1907: Giladi 2010, p 411.
- 65.
ICRC 1956; the ICRC treaty database reports: “As there was virtually no reaction by governments, no further action could be taken at the time. It is particularly noteworthy that many of the provisions in these Draft Rules resemble provisions finally adopted in the 1977 Protocols…”: http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/420?OpenDocument. Accessed 20 December 2021. Sandoz 1987, pp 400, 587–588.
- 66.
Butterfield 1965, pp 10, 14, 20, 27–30.
- 67.
Parker 1994, p 42; Tilly 1975, 1985. Consider the frequent reference to Rousseau’s definition of war as “a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State” to justify e.g. the humane treatment of soldiers hors de combat: Rousseau 1923, p 11. The corollary denunciation of “private war” and the republican ideology underpinning Rousseau’s war definition are rarely noted: e.g. Greenwood 2008, pp 19–20.
- 68.
- 69.
- 70.
Sassòli et al. 2011, p 115 (Grotius); Baxter 1963 (Lieber); cf Lauterpacht 1946, pp 8–9 (Grotius’ law of nature does not “invariably fulfils a humanizing function in the cause of alleviation of suffering and of progress conceived as an assertion of the liberty of man…”); Best 1994, pp 24–25 (commentators ascribing own universal values to early actors). On license: Giladi 2012c; Moyn 2021.
- 71.
Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, signed at Paris, 16 April 1856, 115 Consolidated Treaty Series 1; https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/vwTreatiesHistoricalByDate.xsp. Accessed 20 December 2021; Giladi 2012a, 2020.
- 72.
- 73.
Ibid. Kipling 1898.
- 74.
- 75.
Butterfield 1965, p 32.
- 76.
For amnesia and the laws of war: Giladi 2017. Amnesia concerns, first and foremost, IHL’s colonial past, yet I leave this aspect of IHL’s history outside the scope of this chapter. If, as Kinsella 2011, p 55 acutely observes, scholarship “remains governed by its failure to think through” the “constitutive relations between the defining moments of the laws of war and the emergence of colonization”, then this black hole of IHL’s history deserves its own inquiry.
- 77.
- 78.
Sassòli et al. 2011, p 139. Bugnion 2003, p 4 (Solferino’s “starting point” “should [not] be taken” as “the origin of humanitarian law; every civilization has imposed constraints upon” war. “Through the ages communities have created humanitarian rules … limiting the evils of war and protecting its victims. No period in history, and no civilization, can take sole credit for the ‘invention’ of humanitarian law. That being said, Solferino was unquestionably the inspiration for modern humanitarian law, enshrined in treaties, having a secular basis and aspiring to universality”).
- 79.
Illustrated by how Sandoz 1987, pp 585–586 historicises the principle of distinction.
- 80.
Franck 1988.
- 81.
See n 54 above.
- 82.
Hence the emphasis on membership of the Geneva Conventions compared to the UN’s, discussed below.
- 83.
Mégret 2006.
- 84.
- 85.
E.g. Geneva Convention IV, above n 17, Article 144 or Additional Protocol I, above n 21, Article 83.
- 86.
Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Explosive Projectiles Under 400 Grammes Weight, St. Petersburg, signed 11 December 1868, 138 Consolidated Treaty Series 297 (St. Petersburg Declaration), preamble: (“only legitimate object which the States should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy”). IHL validates many more of the essential beliefs of the fighting class: discipline, professionalism, service to order, and that killing in war is legitimate if one but fights by the rules. The interplay between ethics, law, and armies exceeds the scope of this inquiry.
- 87.
Additional Protocol I, above n 21, preamble, para 5. On the irrelevance of causes: Giladi 2008.
- 88.
Text following n 51 above.
- 89.
Meron 2000b, p 246.
- 90.
Institut de Droit international 1881–1882.
- 91.
The Martens clause is discussed below.
- 92.
Pictet 1988, pp 3–4.
- 93.
E.g. Greenwood 2008, 27.
- 94.
Anderson K (2013) Who Owns the Rules of War?. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/magazine/who-owns-the-rules-of-war.html. Accessed 20 December 2021.
- 95.
IHL’s asserted achievement obtained by wide treaty ratification and state recognition of its customary character is disconcerting; its universality is the outcome of state consent—and what promises to liberate it from formalist fetters; Sassòli et al. 2011, pp 149–151.
- 96.
Giladi 2014b.
- 97.
Emphasis added; Pictet 1975, p 19.
- 98.
- 99.
Hague Convention II, n 17 above, preamble.
- 100.
- 101.
Giladi 2014a offers a critical reading of this conventional wisdom.
- 102.
Emphasis added; Kalshoven and Zegveld 2001, p 22.
- 103.
- 104.
Koskenniemi 2002, p 41.
- 105.
Lukes 1972, p 4: “The French word ‘conscience’ is ambiguous, embracing the meaning of the two English words ‘conscience’ and ‘conscientiousness’. Thus the ‘belief and sentiments’ comprising the conscience collective are, on the one hand, moral and religious, and, on the other, cognitive”. Durkheim 1893, p ix (French term “has resemblance to the term ‘unconscious’ in psychoanalysis, rather than to consciousness in logical theory”).
- 106.
- 107.
Collective conscience/consciousness was a mode of cohesion of primitive societies, held together by a mechanical solidarity of likeness, or social resemblances, and repressive, punishment-centred law. Advanced societies, by contrast, are held together mainly by bonds of organic solidarity, or the division of labour in society, and restitutive law: Durkheim 1893, pp 49–69; Lukes 1972, pp 4–5.
- 108.
- 109.
Olick 1999, p 336.
- 110.
- 111.
Olick 1999, p 343.
- 112.
Hobsbawm 1983, pp 1–3; at 4–5, noting the prevalence of invented traditions during rapid social transformation and, hence, the relevance of invented traditions to modern societies. Whereas he emphasised continuity, I would include breaks from the past in “invented tradition”; both progressive and immanent histories, for him “in Marxian terms … belong to ‘base’ rather than ‘superstructure’”; ibid., p 3.
- 113.
- 114.
Quoted in Durand 1996, p 532.
- 115.
Best 1980, p 31.
- 116.
St. Petersburg Declaration above n 80, preamble.
- 117.
Moynier wrote in the preface to the Oxford Manual, cited n 84 above, pp 157–158; “indeed, the manual was “in accord with both the progress of juridical science and the needs of civilized armies”. Cf Hague Convention II, note 17 above, preamble (cited below).
- 118.
Note the title of the 1974–1977 Diplomatic Conference on the “Reaffirmation and Development” of IHL. Para 3 of the Final Act thus records “the work of the Conference, which was of a fundamentally humanitarian nature” as “the progressive development and codification of [IHL] applicable in armed conflicts [which] is a universal task”: Federal Political Department (1978) p 7. In international law vocabulary, development inexorably means progress: the UN Charter and the law of treaties temporise two modes of law-making: codification (broadly corresponding to “reaffirmation”) and “progressive development”: Charter of the United Nations, adopted 26 June 1945, 1 UNTS 16 (entered into force 24 October 1945) (UN Charter) Article 13; Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, opened for signature 23 May 1969, 1155 UNTS 331 (entered into force 27 January 1980).
- 119.
- 120.
- 121.
- 122.
Kalshoven 2000, p 1379; see n 81 above.
- 123.
- 124.
Moynier’s ambivalence is notable; compare his treatment of war’s “inexorable necessities” in the Oxford Manual, n 84 above, p 157. This may reflect a change of perspective over time, or simply different audiences: in 1863, Moynier defended the Red Cross idea to peace movement detractors; the 1880 Manual, designed to serve as a model for national legislation, was addressed to states.
- 125.
Emphases added.
- 126.
See n 68 above.
- 127.
As Moynier wrote in the Oxford Manual, n 84 above, p 157.
- 128.
Kahn 1999, cited n 13 above.
- 129.
See n 93 above.
- 130.
Sassòli et al. 2011, p 94 note “the inherent limits of IHL”: “it does not prohibit the use of violence”; “it cannot protect all those affected by an armed conflict”; “it makes no distinction based on the purpose of the conflict”; “it cannot bar a party from overcoming the enemy”; “it presupposes that the parties … have rational aims”.
- 131.
Butterfield 1965, pp 62–63.
- 132.
Emphasis added; ICRC 2004a, p 214.
- 133.
Ibid., pp 243–244, emphasis added.
- 134.
Schlesinger 1971, p 382.
- 135.
E.g. Hartigan 1982.
- 136.
Best 1994, p 40 (it “must have been more than a happy coincidence that this should have happened in the same decade as witnessed … the birth of modern warfare”). For a different reading of the consequences of the commitment “to make more humane”: Moyn 2021; I share neither Moyn’s observation that the humanization of the laws of war in the 1970s did “cleanse war of its historic brutality” nor his verdict that under the APs, the law “would become constraining rather than permissive”: ibid., p 196, 200.
- 137.
I paraphrase a favourite ICRC quote of Nelson Mandela: ICRC 2002, p 30 (“what matters is not only the good the ICRC brings, but even more the bad it prevents”).
- 138.
- 139.
In a similar vein, Neff 2005, p 395 (“It is not easy to say whether fundamental ideas about war are today significantly more advanced than they were in the age of Cicero. It may even be contended that the post-1945 version of just-war doctrine is greatly inferior to that of the ancient stoics and the medieval Christians…”).
- 140.
Best 1994, pp vii, ix.
- 141.
Consider the marginal role in IHL literature of critical accounts such as Jochnick and Normand 1994, p 50 (“historical development … reveals that despite noble rhetoric … the laws of war have been formulated deliberately to privilege military necessity at the cost of humanitarian values. As a result, the laws of war have facilitated rather than restrained wartime violence. Through law, violence has been legitimated”); Rosert 2010.
- 142.
- 143.
For “trauma time”: Edkins 2003.
- 144.
Clapham 2021.
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Treaties
Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, signed at Paris, 16 April 1856, 115 Consolidated Treaty Series 1
Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, adopted 22 August 1864, 129 Consolidated Treaty Series 361 (entered into force 22 June 1865)
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Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, opened for signature adopted 18 October 1907, 205 Consolidated Treaty Series 277 (entered into force 26 January 1910)
Charter of the United Nations, adopted 26 June 1945, 1 UNTS 16 (entered into force 24 October 1945)
Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, adopted 12 August 1949, 75 UNTS 287 (entered into force 21 October 1950)
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, opened for signature 23 May 1969, 1155 UNTS 331 (entered into force 27 January 1980)
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, opened for signature 8 June 1977, 1125 UNTS 609 (entered into force 7 December 1978)
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Giladi, R. (2023). Rites of Affirmation: The Past, Present, and Future of International Humanitarian Law. In: Krieger, H., Kalmanovitz, P., Lieblich, E., Mignot-Mahdavi, R. (eds) Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, Volume 24 (2021). Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-559-1_2
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