BOOK: Alberico GENTILI, Les trois livres sur les ambassades (transl. Dominique GAURIER) [Cahiers de l'institut d'anthropologie juridique] (Limoges: PULIM, 2015), 286 p. ISBN 9782842876715, € 25

(image source: LCDPU)

Book abstract:

Dominique Gaurier poursuit avec ce second ouvrage traduit d'Alberico Gentili la série de ses traductions. Celles-ci avaient déjà permis aux lecteurs francophones d’avoir affaire à des textes plus fidèlement traduits que les anciennes traductions anglaises qui avaient été principalement faites non par des juristes, mais par des professeurs de latin dans leur ensemble, peu connaisseurs du droit romain. Cette dernière traduction vient se rajouter aux deux autres précédentes portant sur cette même question du droit des ambassades, déjà publiées par les PULIM. Comme à son habitude, le traducteur présentera dans de nombreuses notes également les traductions des passages repris du droit romain auxquels l’auteur renvoie`; Il espère que cette dernière traduction favorisera un meilleur accès à un auteur que tout le monde cite souvent sans vraiment avoir pu consulter facilement ses ouvrages en langue latine, devenus souvent rares, voire introuvables.

Table of contents:

Livre I  sur les ambassades du très illustre jurisconsulte Alberico Gentili
- Chapitre 1  Ceux qui sont appelés du nom d'ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 2  L'appellation multiple de cet ambassadeur dont nous allons parler et sa définition
- Chapitre 3  De l'ambassade sacrée
- Chapitre 4  Les répartitions des ambassades à partir des personnes de ceux qui sont envoyés et de ceux à qui elles sont envoyées
- Chapitre 5  Des différentes sortes d'ambassades suivant les commissions
- Chapitre 6  De l’ambassadeur de guerre
- Chapitre 7  Des ambassades officieuses
- Chapitre 8  De l’ambassade libre
- Chapitre 9  Ceux au soin desquels se trouve chez les Romains le soin d’envoyer et de recevoir les ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 10  Discussion sur un passage de Tacite [pour savoir] si ceux qui s’acquittent des ambassades étaient peut-être emmenés
- Chapitre 11  Des solennités des ambassades
- Chapitre 12  Du fécial et du père patrat
- Chapitre 13  Des herbes sacrées et des silex
- Chapitre 14  Explication du début de D. 33, 10, 7
- Chapitre 15  De l’endroit et du moment pour recevoir les ambassades
- Chapitre 16  Des présents et autres droits d’hospitalité que les Romains fournissaient aux ambassadeurs qui venaient à Rome
- Chapitre 17  Quel [était] l’usage des Grecs dans les ambassades ?
- Chapitre 18  Du caducée, des rameaux [d’olivier] entourés de bandelettes  et des autre solennités
- Chapitre 19  Glanage [de ce qui a échappé]
- Chapitre 20  De la cause et de l’ancienneté des ambassades
Livre II sur les ambassades du très illustre jurisconsulte Alberico Gentili
- Chapitre 1  Du droit des ambassades
- Chapitre 2  De l’ambassade mensongère
- Chapitre 3  Les ambassadeurs seront-ils en sécurité même avec ceux vers qui ils n’ont pas été envoyés ?
- Chapitre 4  De l’ambassadeur espion et sans foi
- Chapitre 5  De l’ambassade interdite
- Chapitre 6  Celui qui a outragé les ambassadeurs d’autrui n’espérera pas conserver pour les siens le droit d’ambassade
- Chapitre 7  Y aura-t-il un droit d’ambassade avec des rebelles ?
- Chapitre 8  Il n’y a pas de droit d’ambassade avec des brigands
- Chapitre 9  Lors de désaccords civils, le droit d’ambassade restera-t-il ?
- Chapitre 10  Les ambassadeurs ne sont à bon droit envoyés ni par des sujets, ni à des sujets
- Chapitre 11  Des ambassades des criminels
- Chapitre 12  Du droit de la libre ambassade, [de l’ambassade] officieuse  et [de l’ambassade] résidente
- Chapitre 13  Du droit de l’ambassade [qui a été] reçue
- Chapitre 14  Si le droit d’ambassade est dédaigné
- Chapitre 15  Des gens de la suite et des autres compléments ajoutés des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 16  Des contrats des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 17  Du juge des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 18  Si un ambassadeur a comploté contre le prince auprès duquel il est ambassadeur
- Chapitre 19  Si un ambassadeur a commis quelque méfait, son prince ne doit pas être consulté
- Chapitre 20  Si un ambassadeur a mal parlé envers le prince, de la liberté de parole
- Chapitre 21  Des autres infractions et peines des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 22  Du droit des ambassadeurs avec les leurs
- Chapitre 23  Du droit des coutumes envers ses propres ambassadeurs
Livre III sur les ambassades du tres illustre jurisconsulte Alberico Gentili
- Chapitre 1  Combien de grandes qualités devront se rassembler dans un ambassadeur our qu’il puisse exécuter son office
- Chapitre 2  Les choses extérieures que nous voulons voir rassembler dans un ambassadeur
- Chapitre 3  Un ambassadeur ne peut être privé de la nature et de bonnes [qualités]
- Chapitre 4  Les bonnes choses de la fortune doivent se rassembler dans un ambassadeur
- Chapitre 5  Il faut un ambassadeur qui se signale par son intelligence
- Chapitre 6  Pour qu’un ambassadeur soit un orateur [par excellence]
- Chapitre 7  L’ambassadeur tiendra l’idiome de celui chez lequel il agit
- Chapitre 8  On requiert dans un ambassadeur une grande connaissance de l’histoire
- Chapitre 9  Dans quelle mesure la philosophie conviendra-t-elle à un ambassadeur ?
- Chapitre 10  Des ambassadeurs lettrés
- Chapitre 11  De la loyauté des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 12  Du courage des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 13  De la modération des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 14  De la prudence des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 15  De la prudence et de la loyauté des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 16  Un ambassadeur devra-t-il tromper son prince, s’il croit que c’est de l’intérêt [de ce dernier] ?
- Chapitre 17  De la force d’une libre commission
- Chapitre 18  De la prudence et du courage des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 19  Du fait de défendre la dignité de l’ambassade
- Chapitre 20  De la prudence et de la tempérance des ambassadeurs
- Chapitre 21  Des raisons d’un ambassadeur prudent
- Chapitre 22  Du parfait ambassadeur
Index des personnages cités dans l’ouvrage

The book comes with a CD-ROM (MS-DOS/Macintosh).

(more information with the publisher)

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Jorge E. VIÑUALES, "The Organisation of the Anthropocene", Brill Research Perspectives in International Legal Theory and Practice I (2018), 1, pp. 1-81 (ISSN 2452-204X)

(image source: Brill)

Abstract:

This essay introduces the legal dimensions of the Anthropocene, i.e. the currently advocated new geological epoch in which humans are the defining force. It explores in this context two basic propositions. First, law as a technology of social organisation has been neglected in the otherwise highly technology-focused accounts by natural and social scientists of the drivers of the Anthropocene. Secondly, in those rare instances where law has been discussed, there is a tendency to assume that the role of law is to tackle the negative externalities of transactions (e.g. their environmental or social implications) rather than the core of the underlying transactions, i.e. the organization of production and consumption processes. Such focus on externalities fails to unveil the role of law in prompting, sustaining and potentially managing the processes that have led to the Anthropocene. After a brief introduction to the Anthropocene narrative and the possible role of law in it, it focuses on three main questions: the disconnection between natural and human history, the profound inequalities within the human variable driving the Anthropocene, and the technological transition required to reach a sustainable societal organisation.

More information with the publisher.

PAPER on SSRN : Anthony J. GAUGHAN, D-Day, Collateral Damage, and the 1923 Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare

(Source: SSRN)

Anthony J. Gaughan has published a paper on SSRN dealing with the 1923 Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare and D-Day

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the question of whether the adoption of the 1923 Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare as binding international law might have changed the outcome of the D-Day invasion during World War II. The delegates to The Hague conference proposed a severe restriction on the use of air power in urban areas, but the rules were never adopted as international law.

Two decades later, the international community’s failure to adopt the 1923 Hague Draft Rules had a significant impact on the D-Day invasion. On June 6, 1944, the Allies mounted the largest amphibious operation in history as 150,000 troops stormed the Normandy beaches of Nazi-occupied France. The landings succeeded in no small part because of the Allied air forces, which mounted a massive interdiction campaign to prevent the German army from rushing to the French coastline and destroying the Normandy beachhead. Operation Overlord, the code name for the D-Day invasion, marked a major turning point in the war, accelerating the collapse of Nazi Germany, which surrendered 11 months later. As the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, Operation Overlord marked “the beginning of the end for the Third Reich.”

The D-Day air campaign, however, came at a severe cost for French and Belgian civilians. At least 12,000—and possibly more than 25,000—French and Belgian civilians died as unintended casualties of the Allied bombing campaign. Although the Allied air strikes clearly played a critical role in interdicting the German army, it was by no means clear that the vast scale of the bombing was necessary. Whether the interdiction objectives could have been achieved by a more modest—and less destructive—air campaign was an open question at the time and remains so for many historians today. 

One of the principal reasons why the Allies implemented a massive area bombing campaign against French and Belgian rail centers was because international law did not provide clear guidance regarding air warfare. But it might have had the 1923 Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare been adopted as binding international law. The Draft Rules prohibited area bombing in urban areas, which is precisely what the Allies engaged in during the D-Day air campaign. Had the Rules been in effect in 1944, the Allied air campaign in support of the D-Day operation may well have been much more modest in nature. But would the reduction in collateral damage have come at the cost of jeopardizing the invasion’s success? The story of The Hague Draft Rules and the controversy over the D-Day air campaign demonstrates the unique challenges and inherent complexity of the effort to use international law to protect civilian populations during wartime.

The paper can be found here.

(source: ESCLH blog)

PODCAST: Histoire de la justice: De La Haye à Bogoro, quand l'art et les sciences sociales travaillent la justice internationale [La Fabrique de l'Histoire] (France Culture)

(image source: France Culture)

La Fabrique de l'Histoire, France Culture's flagship history podcast, welcomed a series of legal historians to discuss the history of justice.

The penultimate episode focuses on art, social science and international criminal justice.


More information here.

ADVANCE ARTICLES: Leiden Journal of International Law, June 2018

(image source: Cambridge Core)

The Leiden Journal of International Law published advance articles with a historical subject.

Empire, Racial Capitalism and International Law: The Case of Manumitted Haiti and the Recognition Debt (Liliana Obregón)

Abstract:

Before 1492, European feudal practices racialized subjects in order to dispossess, enslave and colonize them. Enslavement of different peoples was a centuries old custom authorized by the law of nations and fundamental to the economies of empire. Manumission, though exceptional, helped to sustain slavery because it created an expectation of freedom, despite the fact that the freed received punitive consequences. In the sixteenth century, as European empires searched for cheaper and more abundant sources of labour with which to exploit their colonies, the Atlantic slave trade grew exponentially as slaves became equated with racialized subjects. This article presents the case of Haiti as an example of continued imperial practices sustained by racial capitalism and the law of nations. In 1789, half a million slaves overthrew their French masters from the colony of Saint Domingue. After decades of defeating recolonization efforts and the loss of almost half their population and resources, Haitian leaders believed their declared independence of 1804 was insufficient, so in 1825 they reluctantly accepted recognition by France while being forced to pay an onerous indemnity debt. Though Haiti was manumitted through the promise of a debt payment, at the same time the new state was re-enslaved as France's commercial colony. The indemnity debt had consequences for Haiti well into the current century, as today Haiti is one of the poorest and most dependent nations in the world.

The Moving Location of Empire: Indirect Rule, International Law, and the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (Luis Eslava)

Abstract:

 Between 1935 and 1937, the International Missionary Council conducted the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. The objective was to produce silent educational films and screen them to ‘native’ people via mobile cinemas in the British territories in East and Central Africa. Embracing the principle of ‘indirect rule’, and its role in training colonial subjects in economic self-sufficiency and political self-rule, as then advocated by leading colonial figures and the League of Nations, the films strived to capture ‘the native point of view’ through an ‘ethnographic sensitivity’ towards local cultures, concerns and needs. Hoping to educate the natives from ‘within’, they used local actors, familiar locations and pedagogical instructions that were believed to meet the target audience's cognitive capacity. Though in many respects unsuccessful, the experiment cemented the use of cinema in the late colonial project and, more importantly, embodied the clear move at the time towards a more dynamic and disaggregated, yet perhaps never fully post-imperial, international order. I argue in this article that the Bantu Experiment is thus a telling instance through which to examine both the mobility and multiplicity of late imperial locations and the system of modern international administration that emerged during the interwar period. I suggest that this mobility and multiplicity continue to characterize the workings of today's international order, indicating the key role that ‘indirect rule’, as a silent principle of international law, still plays in its functioning today.

The Birth of an Imperial Location: Comparative Perspectives on Western Colonialism in China (Luigi Nuzzo)

Abstract:

The thematic horizon within which this article takes place is the colonial expansion of the Western powers in China between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the foundation of the British, French and American concessions in Tianjin, it aims to reconstruct the Western strategies of colonial governance and the role played by law in the process of production of a new social space. Opened as a treaty port in 1860, Tianjin is the only Chinese city where up to nine foreign concessions coexisted, becoming a complex, hybrid space (in)between East and West, defined by social practices, symbolic representations, and legal categories, which does not coincide simply with the area defined by the entity as a state, nation, or city.

Aliens in Latin America: Intervention, Arbitration and State Responsibility for Rebels (Kahtryn Greeman)

Abstract:

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the question of state responsibility for injuries done by rebels to foreign nationals, or ‘aliens’, in its territory became an important one for international law. Initially, it was common for disputes regarding such responsibility to be resolved through diplomacy, backed up, not infrequently, by the threat and even the use of force. Later it became a matter which also led increasingly to arbitration; beginning around the middle of the nineteenth century a growing number of arbitral tribunals dealt with claims against states for injuries done to aliens by rebels. From the first, established in 1839, there followed a series of 40 mixed claims commissions which touched on state responsibility for rebels. Nearly three-quarters of these arbitrations involved a Western state against one of the new Latin American republics. In this article, I explore how intervention in Latin America, and particularly its turn to arbitration, produced the highly-contested doctrine of state responsibility for rebels. Reading this history in the context of decolonization, capitalist expansion and economic imperialism in Latin America, I argue that the doctrine of state responsibility for rebels was produced out of and used to manage the transition from old colonialism to new imperialism in the region so as to guarantee foreign trade and investment. Understanding this history, I argue, helps us to put back together the pieces of alien protection which fragmented after 1945 and illuminates how international law continues to protect foreign investment against rebels in the decolonized world.

British War Crimes Trials in Europe and Asia, 1945–1949: A Comparative Study (W.L. Cheah & Moritz Vormbaum)

Abstract:

 Between 1945 and 1949, the British military conducted a large number of war crimes trials in Europe and Asia. Based on historical archival records, among other sources, this article evaluates and compares the British authorities’ implementation of the 1945 Royal Warrant and war crimes trials in Europe and Asia, with a specific focus on trials organized in Germany and Singapore. By examining the British war crimes trial experience in those two jurisdictions, the article analyzes factors shaping the evolution of the Royal Warrant's legal framework and trial model in different contexts. It therefore contributes to the growing historical work on post-Second World War trials and current debates among scholars of transitional justice and international criminal law on the contextual factors that impact on war crimes trials.

 (source: Cambridge Core)

BOOK: Patrick William KELLY, Sovereign Emergencies : Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics [Human Rights in History] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ISBN 9781316730225, $ 24.00

(Source: Cambridge University Press)

Cambridge University Press has just published the eBook of a new book which deals with the role of Latin America in the making of global human rights politics during the 1970s. The paperback and hardback are to be released in August 2018.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The concern over rising state violence, above all in Latin America, triggered an unprecedented turn to a global politics of human rights in the 1970s. Patrick William Kelly argues that Latin America played the most pivotal role in these sweeping changes, for it was both the target of human rights advocacy and the site of a series of significant developments for regional and global human rights politics. Drawing on case studies of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, Kelly examines the crystallization of new understandings of sovereignty and social activism based on individual human rights. Activists and politicians articulated a new practice of human rights that blurred the borders of the nation-state to endow an individual with a set of rights protected by international law. Yet the rights revolution came at a cost: the Marxist critique of US imperialism and global capitalism was slowly supplanted by the minimalist plea not to be tortured.

- Draws on archival research and oral interviews spanning ten countries in Latin America, Europe, the United States, and Australia

- Offers a highly interdisciplinary lens, drawing on political science, anthropology, law, and sociology to paint a broad historical canvas

- Historicizes the birth of global human rights politics with a minimalist focus on civil and politics rights in the 1970s

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick William Kelly, Northwestern University, Illinois

Patrick William Kelly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University. He is currently writing a global history of AIDS.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of figures

Introduction

1. Torture in Brazil

2. The emergency in Chile

3. Transnational solidarity

4. Redefining sovereignty

5. The origins of American human rights activism

6. The global specter of Argentina's disappeared

7. Argentina and the inter-American system

Epilogue: the promise and limits of the human rights cascade

Index.

More information with the publisher

(source: ESCLH Blog)

CALL FOR PAPERS: The League of Nations and International law, 1919-1945 (Copenhagen, 13-14 JUN 2019); DEADLINE 1 NOV 2018

(image source: study.eu)

The historiography of international law of the 19th and 20th centuries has grown rapidly in the last decades around the excellent work of the legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi and the new Journal of the History of International Law. However, this new wave of scholarship focuses primarily on intellectual history based on biographical studies of leading jurists. Generally, scholars of international legal history have not followed in the footsteps of recent historiographical developments in the fields of human rights or EU law, where historians have systematically used archival resources to go beyond intellectual history and explore the actual legal practice situated in different societal contexts. As a result, historiography of international law has to some extent neglected how the rise of international organisations, and in particular the foundation of the League of Nations (LoN) system, created new legal techniques and shaped the development of international law. Turning to the new historiography of international organisations a similar pattern emerges.
While historians in the last decade have fundamentally reassessed the history of the League of Nations, they have not explored its legal dimension. The same goes for recent studies of the technical international organisations that were established from the mid-19th century onwards and became part of the LoN system after 1919.

This conference wants to promote a new legal history that explores how the LoN system influenced the development of international law from 1919-1945 based on systematic research of international,
state and private archives and a contextual approach to the object of study.
This call is interested in archive based research papers that address:
- How the League of Nation system, including the ILO and the Permanent Court of International Justice, shaped the development of international law.
- The role of law, legal techniques and jurists in the institutional and administrative development of the League of Nation system.
- The role of law and legal techniques in the development of LoN policies and regulatory efforts.
- The professionalisation of academics and practitioners of international law
- Network or biographical approaches to exploring the key actors of the legal history of League of Nation system.
- Analyses of how League of Nation member states (as well as key non-member states such as the United States) incorporated international law and legal techniques in their foreign policy.

The conference is meant to be a first meeting between researchers sharing the agenda outlined above. The aim is that methodological challenges can be identified and the contextual approach to legal history can be further refined. There will be a follow-up conference by the end of 2020 aimed to prepare the papers for a final publication with a leading international publishing house.

The conference is part of a new collective research project running at the University of Copenhagen from 2018 to 2020 entitled: Laying the Foundations – The League of Nation and International Law, 1919-1945 - https://internationallaw.ku.dk.

We welcome abstracts (in English) of a maximum of 400 words by 1 November 2018. Abstracts should be sent to Associate Professor Morten Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen)  mortenra@hum.ku.dk.
The organization will cover expenses of 2-3 nights of hotel accommodation as well as travel expenses.

(source: ESCLH Blog)

BOOK: Flavia LATTANZI & Emanuela PISTOIA (eds.), The Armenian Massacres of 1915–1916 a Hundred Years Later. Open Questions and Tentative Answers in International Law [Studies in the History of Law and Justice, ed. Georges MARTYN & Mortimer SELLERS, vol. 15] (Heidelberg: Springer, 2018), 332 p. ISBN 9783319781693, €118,99

Book abstract:

This peer-reviewed book features essays on the Armenian massacres of 1915-1916. It aims to cast light upon the various questions of international law raised by the matter. The answers may help improve international relations in the region. In 1915-1916, roughly a million and a half Armenians were murdered in the territory of the Ottoman Empire, which had been home to them for centuries. Ever since, a dispute between Armenians and Turkey has been ongoing over the qualification of the massacres. The contributors to this volume examine the legal nature and consequences of this event. Their investigation strives to be completely neutral and technical. The essays also look at the broader issue of denial. For instance, in Turkey, public speech on the matter can still trigger criminal prosecution whereas in other European States denial of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity is criminalized. However, the European Court of Human Rights views criminal prosecution of denial of the Armenian massacres as unlawful. In addition, one essay considers a state’s obligation to remember by looking at lessons learnt from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Another contributor looks at a collective right to remember and some ideas to move forward towards a solution. Moreover, the book explores the way the Armenian massacres have affected the relationship between Turkey and the European Union.

Table of contents:

Introduction (Flavia Lattanzi & Emanuela Pistoia)
Historical Introduction: World War I and the Dynamics of the Armenian Genocide (Marcello Flores)
Searching for a Legal Definition
The Armenian Massacres as the Murder of a Nation? (Flavia Lattanzi)
On the Applicability of the Genocide Convention to the Armenian Massacres (Chiara Cipoletti)
Is Customary Law on the Prohibition to States to Commit Acts of Genocide Applicable to the Armenian Massacres? (Alessandra Gianelli)
Which Possible Legal Consequences?
Metz Yeghern and the Origin of International Norms on the Punishment of Crimes (Antonio Marchesi)
Armenian Cultural Properties and Cultural Heritage: What Protection under International Law One Hundred Years Later? (Federica Mucci)
What Reparations for the Descendants of the Victims of “the Armenian Genocide”? (David Donat Cattin)
Denying the Armenian Massacres
The Armenian Massacres and the Price of Memory: Impossible to Forget, Forbidden to Remember (Agostina Latino)
Denying the Armenian Genocide in International and European Law (Monica Spatti)
Criminalizing the Denial of 1915–1916 Armenian Massacres and the European Court of Human Rights: Perinçek v Switzerland (Carmelo Domenico Leotta)
The Armenian Massacres and the European Union: Active Player or Festin de Pierre?
Is the Denial of the “Armenian Genocide” an Obstacle to Turkey’s Accession to the EU? (Pierluigi Simone)
The European Parliament as the Human Rights Gatekeeper of the Union? (Alessandro Rosanò)
The EU and the Turkish Recognition of the Armenian “Genocide” in the Broader Framework of the EU External Action: A Tale of Possibilities Yet to Be Explored (Emanuela Pistoia)

More information on Springerlink.
(Source: ESCLH Blog)

CONFERENCE: War as Contact Zone in the Nineteenth Century (Paris: DHI/IEA), 28-29 JUN 2018

(image source: IEA Paris)

Summary:

The workshop seeks to encourage further debate on the mechanics of encounter and transfer processes in war during the "long nineteenth century" (1789-1914). It wiil also explore how historians working on this subject can use new digital methods and impact case studies to make their findings accessible to the public. The choice of period is informed by this era’s manifold innovations in such fields as communication, mass transport, weaponry, international law and the conduct of war, which have generated fruitful dialogue on the question whether the nineteenth century set the path for a totalitarianisation of warfare or should instead be evaluated on their own terms.

Long description: 

Military history has come a long way in the last fifty years. Popular media such as the History Channel and the biographies of great generals on the shelves of many bookstores might suggest at first glance that the field is still dominated by ‘drum and trumpet historians’ that speak to audiences well on the right of the political spectrum. However, the ascendancy of ‘new military history’/’nouvelle histoire-bataille’ and the ‘cultural history of war’ has in fact advanced our understanding of human conflict enormously. We know more than ever before about the multilayered webs of entanglement that connect army and society, as well as the way in which soldiers and civilians experience violence. Work in this vein has shown that instead of being an exceptional state and thus marginal to society’s ‘true’ concerns, war has been implicated in some of history’s most far-reaching changes, such as the evolution of the modern idea of citizenship. While military conflicts are undeniably destructive in terms of their human and material cost, they also have unintended creative consequences. The German historian Ute Frevert has aptly termed wars ‘inter- and transnational events par excellence’ because no other phenomenon - with the possible exception of migration - brings so many people in such close contact with each other. Napoleon may have failed to establish a lasting European empire, but the veterans of the Grande Armée could boast familiarity with all parts of Europe after having marched across the Continent for almost a quarter of a century. Of course, when such large bodies of men fuse together or interact with civilian populations, the nature of these encounters differs widely. Some manifestations are benign, including the bonds of comradeship that can blossom into ‘fictive kinship’ (Jay Winter) among soldiers, whereas atrocities and genocidal mass exterminations represent the opposite form of encounter. Both extremes of the spectrum have been the subject of extensive scholarship in recent decades, thanks to a process of analytical cross-fertilisation through interdisciplinary borrowing. Just as it is no longer good practice to write about morale and combat effectiveness without attention to sociological or anthropological theories that explain unit cohesion, investigations into the causes of war crimes have underscored the benefits that accrue from close analytical attention to the psychological triggers of violence and the spaces in which these acts take place. Finally, the fruits of transnational history and global history remind us that any attempt to explain war-as-encounter must have a firm grounding in cultural studies, especially with a view to uncovering how patterns of communication evolve and the transfer of knowledge occurs. Building on these insights, the workshop seeks to encourage further debate on the mechanics of encounter and transfer processes in war during the ‘long nineteenth century’ (1789-1914). In a second step we wish to explore how historians working on this subject can use new digital methods and impact case studies to make their findings accessible to the public. The choice of period is informed by this era’s manifold innovations in such fields as communication, mass transport, weaponry, international law and the conduct of war, which have generated fruitful dialogue on the question whether the nineteenth century set the path for a totalitarianisation of warfare or should instead be evaluated on their own terms.

 Programme:

Thursday, 28 June
Institut d'études avancées de Paris

• 15h30 - 15h40 Welcoming words Gretty Mirdal (Directrice de l’IEA Paris) and Stefan Martens (Directeur adjoint de l’IHA)

• 15h40 - 16h10 Introduction Jasper Heinzen, Mareike König, Odile Roynette

16h15 - 17h45  Session 1: Rencontres rapprochées entre ennemis
Chair: Odile Roynette

• When soldiers met the locals: the Balkan Wars as a contact zone among combatants and non-combatants, Panagiotis Delis (Athens/Burnaby)

• Confrontation of “formless” formations? Thinking and making physical contact on the post-Franco-Prussian War “modern” battlefield, Jean-Philippe Miller-Tremblay (Paris)

17h45 - 18h00 Break
18h - 19h10 Keynote: War as contact zone: a useful concept of analysis? Jasper HeinzenFriday, 29 June
Institut historique allemand
9h00 - 10h30 Session 2: Souffrances partagées en temps de guerre
Chair: Mareike König

• Rencontres entre militaires blessés et civils à l’époque napoléonienne, Nebiha Guiga (Paris)

• Les hôpitaux maritimes français pendant la guerre de Crimée : Des espaces de contacts (1854-1856), Benoît Pouget (Aix-Marseille)

10h30 - 11h00 Break
11h00 - 12h30 Session 3 : Mobiliser une société pour la guerre : le cas italien
Chair: Jürgen Finger

• Defeat as opportunity. The debate on the need for a militarised society in Italy from the Risorgimento to the First World War, Marco Mondini (Trient)

• The armée comes to town. Social problems of military presence and barracks supplying in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy (1805-1814), Vittoria Princi(Oxford)

12h30 - 14h00 Lunch Break
14h00 - 15h30 Session 4: Rencontres asymétriques dans la guerre impériale
Chair: Jasper Heinzen

• Inter-imperial contact zones and military occupations in Boxer-War China: Beijing and Baoding (1900 – 1901), Dominique Biehl (Basel)

• Closing Pandora’s Box? Anglo-French cooperation to contain the sinews of war in the Caribbean, 1803–1810, Flavio Eichmann (Bern)

15h30 - 16h00 Break
16h00 - 17h00 Roundtable

(source: Calenda)

JOURNAL: Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international XX (2018), No. 1 (ISSN 1388-199X)

 (image source: Brill)

The new issue of the Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international has just been published.

Contents:

Context in the History of International Law (Andrew Fitzmaurice)

Breach of Treaties in the Ancient Near East (Gábor Sulyok)

Henry Maine and the Modern Invention of Peace (Jorg Kustermans)

Colonial Laws: Sources, Strategies and Lessons? (Martti Koskenniemi)

Fifty Years since the 1967 Annexation of East Jerusalem: Israel, the United States, and the First United Nations (Ofra Friesel)

Book review:
Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 , written by Arnulf Becker Lorca (Fabia Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso)

More information on Brill's Books and Journals Online website.