Traditions of War Occupation, Resistance and the Law

• Controversial and provoking revision of International Relations theoretical approach to war
• Examines the ideology and creators of the International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions
• In-depth analysis of the legal and moral rights of people subjected to enemy invasion and military occupation

examines wars and military occupation, and the ideas underlying them. The search for these ideas is conducted in the domain of the laws of war, a body of rules which sought to regulate the practices of war and those permitted to fight in it. This work introduces three ideologies: the martial, Grotian, and republican. These traditions were rooted in incommensurable conceptions of the good life, and the overall argument is that these differences lay at the heart of the failure fully to resolve the distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants at successive diplomatic conferences of Brussels in 1874, the Hague in 1899 and 1907, and Geneva in 1949. Based on a wide range of sources and drawing on a plurality of intellectual disciplines, this book places these diplomatic failures in their broader social and political contexts, bringing out ideological continuities through an illustration of the social history of army occupation in Europe and resistance to it.

Readership: Scholars and students of international relations, history of political thought, international law, philosophy, and European history.