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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
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)More information on Springerlink.
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)
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)
16h15 - 17h45 Session 1: Rencontres rapprochées entre ennemis
- 15h40 - 16h10 Introduction Jasper Heinzen, Mareike König, Odile Roynette
Chair: Odile Roynette
- When soldiers met the locals: the Balkan Wars as a contact zone among combatants and non-combatants, Panagiotis Delis (Athens/Burnaby)
17h45 - 18h00 Break
- Confrontation of “formless” formations? Thinking and making physical contact on the post-Franco-Prussian War “modern” battlefield, Jean-Philippe Miller-Tremblay (Paris)
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)
10h30 - 11h00 Break
- Les hôpitaux maritimes français pendant la guerre de Crimée : Des espaces de contacts (1854-1856), Benoît Pouget (Aix-Marseille)
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)
12h30 - 14h00 Lunch Break
- The armée comes to town. Social problems of military presence and barracks supplying in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy (1805-1814), Vittoria Princi(Oxford)
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)
15h30 - 16h00 Break
- Closing Pandora’s Box? Anglo-French cooperation to contain the sinews of war in the Caribbean, 1803–1810, Flavio Eichmann (Bern)
16h00 - 17h00 Roundtable
Context in the History of International Law (Andrew Fitzmaurice)More information on Brill's Books and Journals Online website.
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)
