A world history of war crimes : from antiquity to the present / Michael Bryant.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bryant, Michael, 1962- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

War crimes--History.

War crimes.

Crimes against humanity--History.

Crimes against humanity.

War (International law).

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 289 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London, UK ; New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016.

Summary:

A World History of War Crimes provides a truly global history of war crimes and the involvement of the legal systems faced with these acts. Documenting the long historical are traced by human efforts to limit warfare, from codes of war in antiquity designed to maintain a religiously conceived cosmic order to the gradual use in the modern age of the criminal trial as a means of enforcing universal norms, this book provides a comprehensive one-volume account of war and the laws that have governed conflict since the dawn of world civilizations. Throughout his narrative, Michael Bryant locates the origin and evolution of the law of war in the interplay between different cultures. While showing that no single philosophical idea underlay the law of war in world history, this volume also proves that war in global civilization has rarely been an anarchic free-for-all. Rather, from its beginnings warfare has been subject to certain constraints defined by the unique needs and cosmological understandings of the cultures that produce them. Only in late modernity has law assumed its current international humanitarian form. The criminalization of war crimes in international courts today is only the most recent development of the ancient theme of constraining when and how war may be fought. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The Roots of the Law of War in World History 11

Stone Age warfare 11

The rise of kingship and the excesses of warfare 12

The softening of royal power: a pre-Axial change? 16

Ancient China and the Law of War 18

Ancient India and the Law of War 21

Ancient Israel and the Law of War 28

The Law of War in Archaic and Classical Greece 31

Conclusion 38

2 The Law of War in Rome, the Islamic World, and the European Middle Ages 39

The Romans and the Law of War 39

The Islamic world and the Law of War 48

Medieval Europe and the Law of War 50

Conclusion 68

3 Making Law in the Slaughterhouse of the World: Early Modernity and the Law of War 71

The practice of the Law of War, 1300-1648 71

The theory of the Law of War in early modernity 84

Conclusion 105

4 The Law of War in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 107

The eighteenth century 107

The nineteenth century 115

Conclusion 134

5 The First World War and the Failure of the Law of War 137

German crimes in the First World War 137

The collapse of the plan to try the Kaiser 142

The debacle of efforts to prosecute other German war criminals 149

Turkish crimes against Armenians 154

Conclusion: the First World War and the quest for justice 155

6 The Second World War and the Triumph of the Law of War 157

German crimes in the Second World War 157

The International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-6 169

The American National Military Tribunal (NMT) at Nuremberg 178

The US Army military trials in Europe 186

Japanese crimes in the Second World War 189

Conclusion: assessing the two world wars as sources for the modern Law of War 196

7 Into the Twenty-first Century: War Crimes and their Treatment Since the Second World War 197

The Geneva Conventions and the problem of irregular warfare 197

Chemical weapons conventions: the legacy of the First World War in the postwar world 210

International humanitarian courts: ad hoc and permanent 211

The "Global War on Terror" and the Law of War 217

Conclusion 224.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781472510624

1472510623

9781472507907

1472507908

OCLC:

907391051