We learned of a colloquium at the
University of Edinburgh, focusing on the theme of legacies of empire and war.
Here the programme:
The Edinburgh Centre for
International and Global Law presents
Legacies of War and Empire -
New Work in the History of International Law Part 2
This roundtable will bring
together scholars working in the history of international law, with a
particular focus on the legacies of empires and of war for the structure of
international law and for contemporary international legal norms.
Dr Boyd van Dijk, Lecturer
in Modern European History, University of Amsterdam
Making Common Article 3 in
Southeast Asia: A Third World Approach to the 1949 Geneva Conventions
Most scholars agree that modern
empires framed their colonial wars as ‘emergencies’ in order to escape
international scrutiny. After 1945, however, those same imperial powers invited
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to intervene in their wars
of decolonization, despite resisting an official state of war. This article
seeks to solve this puzzle by drawing attention to the ICRC’s critical part in
reshaping the international legal system for colonial war in the critical years
before the Algerian War and the Bandung Conference. In this formative period,
the organization played, together with anti-colonial activists, a
transformative role in contesting accepted ideas of global governance and
international law while providing a new stage for anticolonial resistance, with
far-reaching consequences not just for the ICRC’s own institutional future, but
also for the legitimization of postcolonial sovereignty in the twentieth
century.
Dr Megan Donaldson, Lecturer in
International Law, University College London
The Afterlife of François de
Callières: Secrecy, Espionage and the Ethos of Diplomacy
The paper examines a crucial
turning point in the evolving relationship between espionage and diplomacy:
interwar efforts to rehabilitate diplomacy from widespread critiques of its
imbrication with secrecy and deception. It shows that writings by and for
diplomats in the 1920s and 30s sought to shift moral concern from the secrecy
of diplomacy as such to deceptive dealings; and then to distance diplomacy from
deception. These interwar writings on diplomacy had surprising longevity,
remaining leading references well after WWII. Moreover, they illustrate an
enduring pattern in which the practice of espionage is rhetorically excluded
from diplomacy, while the boundary between diplomacy and espionage remains
undefined. Diplomacy can thus be presented as a practice of peace and
conciliation, or as liberal bargaining, softening the sharper edges of
hierarchy. Yet in instances like Australia’s recording of the East Timorese
cabinet during crucial treaty negotiations, it becomes clear how closely
espionage and diplomacy are intertwined—and how profoundly this complex of
activities, once seen outside a Cold War contest of superpowers—accentuates
rather than palliates inequality.
Dr Rotem Giladi, Teaching Fellow
in International Law, Edinburgh Law School
Approaching Colonial War: Law,
Culture, and the Case of Human Heads
The paper starts with the
observation that while there can be little doubt about the existence of an
international law category of ‘colonial war’ in the late nineteenth century,
establishing its content, contours, boundaries, and intellectual foundations
proves highly elusive. The resulting indeterminacy of the category operates,
then, both doctrinally and epistemologically. Historiographically, in addition,
it leaves us with a highly impoverished, even distorted, account of the origins
and politics of the modern laws of war. While we know that the codification of
the laws of war was central to the modern international law project of the late
1800s, we know little on how the development of the laws of war was linked to
the legal structuring of empire and colonialism, another central concerns of
that generation’s international lawyers. The paper suggests next that the very
elusiveness of colonial war, rather than an obstacle to be overcome, may itself
serve as a source of meaning. Here I propose, tentatively, approaching colonial
war not as a set of indeterminate, uncertain, unstable, or contradictory norms
but, instead, as a register of cultural practices that together may furnish an
alternative historical account of the laws of war its operation, function, and
preoccupation. To illustrate the utility of this approach, I last reflect on a
series of anecdotes involving the fate of human heads— cultural artefacts
present in colonial battlefields, diplomatic conferences, private homes,
popular culture, and public debates—and explore their potential meanings.
Dr Inge van Hulle, Assistant
Professor, Tilburg Law School
Benevolent Aggression and
Exemplary Violence in West Africa (1807-1885)
This paper represents one of the
first attempts to elaborate on the international legal framework that
surrounded the practice of imperial use of force in an African context during
the early and mid-nineteenth century, prior to the Scramble for Africa. I first
discuss the context in which violence was used as an imperial strategy and
highlight the particular environmental conditions in which military campaigns
took place in West Africa. I then elaborate on the justifications that British
imperial personnel resorted to in their use of force and that became accepted
practice in British imperial international law. Violence, though inherently
part of a policy of aggression, was often styled as ‘benevolent’: as a form of
racialised necessity; as an extension of Britain’s humanitarian agenda or as a
supposedly legitimate answer to a perceived African wrong-doing. Apart from
forced interventions, Britain actively pursued the acquisition of a monopoly
over the exercise of violence in frontier regions by pursuing a policy of
mediation in inter-African disputes, imprisonment of so-called African ‘rebels’
and disarmament of neighbouring African states in order to safeguard trade. As
British presence in West Africa increased during the second half of the
nineteenth century so did imperial agents’ resort to violence. Force thus
became a method through which British strategic objectives could be fulfilled
by coercing African rulers into accepting the premises of British imperial
international law.
Dr Cait Storr, Lecturer in Law,
University of Glasgow Law School
International Status, Imperial
Form: Nauru and the Histories of International Law
This chapter is the introduction
to a forthcoming monograph, International Status, Imperial
Form: Nauru and the Histories of
International Law. The book draws on theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy
to construct a detailed sociolegal account of the relationship between
international status and administraive form in the Nauruan case, as a frame
through which to examine how the twentieth century international order
developed in continuaion of European imperial administrative practices of the
late nineteenth century. It argues that as the international status of Nauru
shifted from protectorate, to mandate, to trust territory, to sovereign state,
what occurred at the level of local administration was an accretive process of
internal bureaucratisation and external restatement according to the prevailing
concepts of the period. It concludes that shiftss in international status
toward political independence are better understood as marking not the end, but
the beginning of the process of decolonisation.
