The Laws of War in International Thought

Kalmanovitz's superbly argued study covers and impressive wealth of material from Spanish scholasticism to nineteenth-century humanitarianism. There is no other study which puts the laws of war so competently at the heart of international thought. Kalmanovitz provides a fresh look on canonical authors, offering in the process new interpretations of theories of just war, solemn war, and regular war in intellectual history. * Peter Schroder, University College London * This book takes the study of the historical and theoretical foundations of the modern laws of war onto a new plane. Insightful, judicious, and learned, Kalmanovitz's study is now the indispensable starting point for understanding our current approach to regulating war. And it is essential for pondering whether the fears of our ancestors that drove regulation have been incurred-and their fondest hopes fulfilled. * Samuel Moyn, Yale University * Kalmanovitz painstakingly reconstructs the dilemmas confronted by influential figures in the development of the modern laws of war, and reveals their persistent entanglement within a politics of statecraft that legitimizes state violence. This is an exciting, rigorous, and original contribution that exposes the historical roots of contempotary predicaments faced by those who seek to humanize war through laws of war. * Catherine Lu, McGill University * By re-reading the literary tradition, Pablo Kalmanovitz shows how the balance between military necessity and humanity in the modern laws of war arose from the realization that sovereign statehood needs to be protected. The formalization of regular war appears both as a hypocritical veil over sovereign violence and an effort to open the way for prudential statesmanship. This is a sharp and intelligent historical analysis of the difficulties and paradoxes of responsible statesmanship and the limits of law in a violent world. * Martti Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki *