Abstract
This book constitutes an impressive feat of scholarship, exhibiting extensive engagement with key thinkers on war including Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Christine de Pisan, and Honore Bonet, as well as with the Geneva Conventions and other key bodies of international humanitarian law. Further, Kinsella’s deep grasp of social theory – particularly the work of Arendt and Foucault – has enabled an appropriately critical exploration of how the principle of distinction between the categories of combatant and noncombatant has evolved over time and across a variety of spatial and cultural contexts.
The author is quite right to claim, as she does in the introductory chapter, that the principle of distinction ‘does not so much rest on a categorical difference between combatant and civilian as produce it’ (p. 6). In the chapters that follow, the book’s enterprise takes the reader beyond this well-worn verdict on the constructedness of social categories, embarking on an archeology of the three key discourses that have worked to produce the combatant and the civilian: gender, innocence, and civilization. These categories themselves, the work demonstrates, must constantly be renegotiated and reproduced, rendering the combatant/civilian distinction perpetually unstable.
Some aspects of the book may perplex or dissatisfy some readers. Most significant of these is the author’s choice to focus on cases of civil war, to the exclusion of international or extra-territorial conflict. This presents a missed opportunity to examine how constructions of difference have operated in cases of interstate wars. The choice of cases is especially puzzling given the profound role that international wars have played in shaping the principle of distinction and its legal underpinnings, as the author herself documents. On the other hand, the focus on civil wars does allow the author to shed light on some examples that are underrepresented in existing literature.
A second point of critique involves the organization of the empirical chapters around the particular civil wars. While the author’s reasoning here was likely that other modes of organization – such as separate chapters for the particular discourses – would not allow for an examination of the co-constitution of these discourses, it does create a certain amount of redundancy in the book, as the discourses of gender, innocence, and civilization are examined in each case. A more streamlined approach may have been to address the interaction of these discourses with wider regional and global shifts such as decolonization, as the chapters largely wind up devoting substantial space to these broader phenomena anyway.
Finally, the study is ‘peopled’ in two primary ways – by illuminating the perspectives of elite decision-makers and by elaborating on the plight of civilian victims. However, it provides little focus on the perspectives of combatants themselves (which is more difficult, but not impossible, to explore). This is unfortunate, as combatants’ sense of self and of their role is a crucial element of the ‘compliance question’ and of the question of responsibility.
Despite these quibbles, Kinsella has produced an invaluable contribution to the literature on conflict, one that should be required reading for scholars of militarism and militarization.