Since at least the Middle Ages, the laws of war have
distinguished between combatants and civilians under an injunction
now formally known as the principle of distinction. The principle
of distinction is invoked in contemporary conflicts as if there
were an unmistakable and sure distinction to be made between
combatant and civilian. As is so brutally evident in armed
conflicts, it is precisely the distinction between civilian and
combatant, upon which the protection of civilians is founded,
cannot be taken as self-evident or stable. Helen M. Kinsella
documents that the history of international humanitarian law itself
admits the difficulty of such a distinction.
In The Image Before the Weapon, Kinsella explores the evolution
of the concept of the civilian and how it has been applied in
warfare. A series of discourses including gender, innocence, and
civilization have shaped the legal, military, and historical
understandings of the civilian and she documents how these
discourses converge at particular junctures to demarcate the
difference between civilian and combatant. Engaging with works on
the law of war from the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition,
including St. Thomas Aquinas and Christine de Pisan, to
contemporary figures such as James Turner Johnson and Michael
Walzer, Kinsella identifies the foundational ambiguities and
inconsistencies in the principle of distinction, as well as the
significant role played by Christian concepts of mercy and
charity.
She then turns to the definition and treatment of civilians in
specific armed conflicts: the American Civil War and the
U.S.-Indian Wars of the nineteenth century, and the civil wars of
Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Finally, she analyzes the
two modern treaties most influential for the principle of
distinction: the 1949 IV Geneva Convention Relative to the
Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War and the 1977
Protocols Additional to the 1949 Conventions, which for the first
time formally defined the civilian within international law. She
shows how the experiences of the two world wars, but particularly
World War II, and the Algerian war of independence affected these
subsequent codifications of the laws of war.
As recognition grows that compliance with the principle of
distinction to limit violence against civilians depends on a firmer
grasp of its legal, political, and historical evolution, The Image
before the Weapon is a timely intervention in debates about how
best to protect civilian populations."
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