Call for Contributions: Edited volume on "The Laws and Customs of Colonial War"

The editors of the forthcoming volume on "The Laws and Customs of Colonial War" have issued the following call for contributions:

Following an author workshop held in London in February, we are inviting 2-3 additional contributions for an edited volume on The Laws and Customs of Colonial War.

The past few decades have firmly demonstrated the centrality of empire and colonialism to the advent and expansion of modern international law. Still, and notwithstanding the growing scholarly interest in the history of the laws of war or the genealogy of asymmetrical warfare, historical works on the law governing colonial warfare remain few and far between. Our understanding of the origins of modern day ‘international humanitarian law’ remains, accordingly, framed in Eurocentric terms—reinforced by the use of that very moniker. And so, while a growing body of works points to the legal nexus between state-making and war-making, the relations between international law-making, empire-making, and colonial violence remains severely under-explored.

To address these lacunae, we invite scholars interested in the history of colonial warfare and international law to submit an abstract for additional chapters to be included in the edited volume. We are particularly interested in involving early-career scholars, scholars from former colonised societies and the Global South, as well as from non-legal disciplines in order to include a broad variety of perspectives on the topic. Chapters might address, for example, one or more of the following themes:

• Colonial war as a legal phenomenon, category, and idea
• Colonial war and the advent of the modern laws of war
• The legal regulation of colonial war
• Otherness, inclusion and exclusion in colonial wars
• Subjecthood, agency, and status
• Subaltern voices and perspectives
• The use of force
• Colonial war, international institutions, and governance
• Knowledge and power in colonial wars
• Colonial war and the Red Cross
• Case studies and comparative inquiries
• The circulation and migration of norms and wartime practices
• Extermination, genocide, atrocity, and accountability
• Continuity, persistence, and legacies of colonial war
• Colonial war and decolonization
• Colonial war and contemporary violence

Interested scholars are asked to send a 300-400 word abstract, by 20 May 2023, to vonbernstorff@jura.uni-tuebingen.de and/or Rotem.Giladi@roehampton.ac.uk. Oxford University Press has already expressed preliminary interest in the edited volume. Should you have any inquiries, please do not hesitate to contact either one of us.