Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-282) and index.
Contents:
The roots of the law of war in world history -- The law of war in Rome, the Islamic world, and the European middle ages -- Making law in the slaughterhouse of the world: early modernity and the law of war -- The law of war in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- The First World War and the failure of the law of war -- The Second World War and the triumph of the law of war -- Into the twenty-first century: war crimes and their treatment since the Second World War -- Conclusion: The future of the law of war.
Summary:
"This book provides a truly global history of war crimes and the involvement of the legal systems faced with these acts. Documenting the long historical arc 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"--Page 4 of cover.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.