Settler Empire and the United States

Francis Lieber on the Laws of War

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3394783
AutoresHelen M Kinsella (0000-0003-4762-5705, Twin Cities Orthopedics, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen117
Número2
Páginas629-642
Fecha de publicación2023-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Political Science Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0003055422000569
OpenAlexW4289868533
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas67

Histories of political science and of the laws of war identify the nineteenth-century scholar Francis Lieber as their modern founder. His 1863 General Orders 100 codified the modern laws of war, internationalizing his political thought. Yet, relatively unremarked is that Lieber wrote his foundational texts during U.S. settler colonization, which he justified in whole. I argue that GO100 facilitated settler colonial violence by defining modern war as a public war, arrogating it to sovereign states; distinguishing revenge from retaliation, attributing revenge to the "savage"; and elevating a certain racialized/gendered governance, ascribing it to the Cis-Caucasian race. Producing Native peoples and Native wars as lacking in the proper characteristics of sovereign belligerency resulted in a subordination of status and a legitimation of exterminatory tactics that were subsequently universalized and (re)internationalized through GO100's determinative influence on the laws of war. Tracing GO100 further exposes the founding of the discipline in Native peoples' dispossession and extermination

Colonialism · Empire · Just war theory · Legitimation · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Spanish Civil War · Treaty · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · War, Ethics, and Justification