Overview

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.

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9780191831577

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"""By re-reading the literary tradition, Pablo Kalmanovitz shows how the balance between military necessity and humanity in the modern laws of war arose from the realization that sovereign statehood needs to be protected. The formalization of regular war appears both as a hypocritical veil over sovereign violence and an effort to open the way for prudential statesmanship. This is a sharp and intelligent historical analysis of the dificulties and paradoxes of responsible statesmanship and the limits of law in a violent world."" - Martti Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki ""Kalmanovitz painstakingly reconstructs the dilemmas confronted by influential figures in the development of the modern laws of war, and reveals their persistent entanglement within a politics of statecraft that legitimizes state violence. This is an exciting, rigorous, and original contribution that exposes the historical roots of contemporary predicaments faced by those who seek to humanize war through the laws of war."" - Catherine Lu, McGill University ""This book takes the study of the historical and theoretical foundations of the modern laws of war onto a new plane. Insightful, judicious, and learned, Kalmanovitz's study is now the indispensable starting point for understanding our current approach to regulating war. And it is essential for pondering whether the fears of our ancestors that drove regulation have been incurred-and their fondest hopes fulfilled."" - Samuel Moyn, Yale University ""Kalmanovitz's superbly argued study covers an impressive wealth of material from Spanish scholasticism to nineteenth-century humanitarianism. There is no other study which puts the laws of war so competently at the heart of international thought. Kalmanovitz provides a fresh look on canonical authors, offering in the process new interpretations of theories of just war, solemn war, and regular war in intellectual history."" - Peter Schr�der, University College London"

""By re-reading the literary tradition, Pablo Kalmanovitz shows how the balance between military necessity and humanity in the modern laws of war arose from the realization that sovereign statehood needs to be protected. The formalization of regular war appears both as a hypocritical veil over sovereign violence and an effort to open the way for prudential statesmanship. This is a sharp and intelligent historical analysis of the dificulties and paradoxes of responsible statesmanship and the limits of law in a violent world."" - Martti Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki ""Kalmanovitz painstakingly reconstructs the dilemmas confronted by influential figures in the development of the modern laws of war, and reveals their persistent entanglement within a politics of statecraft that legitimizes state violence. This is an exciting, rigorous, and original contribution that exposes the historical roots of contemporary predicaments faced by those who seek to humanize war through the laws of war."" - Catherine Lu, McGill University ""This book takes the study of the historical and theoretical foundations of the modern laws of war onto a new plane. Insightful, judicious, and learned, Kalmanovitz's study is now the indispensable starting point for understanding our current approach to regulating war. And it is essential for pondering whether the fears of our ancestors that drove regulation have been incurred-and their fondest hopes fulfilled."" - Samuel Moyn, Yale University ""Kalmanovitz's superbly argued study covers an impressive wealth of material from Spanish scholasticism to nineteenth-century humanitarianism. There is no other study which puts the laws of war so competently at the heart of international thought. Kalmanovitz provides a fresh look on canonical authors, offering in the process new interpretations of theories of just war, solemn war, and regular war in intellectual history."" - Peter Schr�der, University College London

Author Information

Pablo Kalmanovitz, Research professor, Centro de Investigaci�n y Docencia Econ�micas (CIDE) Pablo Kalmanovitz is research professor at the Centro de Investigaci�n y Docencia Econ�micas (CIDE) in Mexico City.

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