Gendering Grotius: Sex and Sex Difference in the Laws of War

Political Theory, Volume 34 Number 2, April 2006, 161-191

Posted: 16 Feb 2019

See all articles by Helen M. Kinsella

Helen M. Kinsella

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Date Written: April 1, 2006

Abstract

I construct a genealogy of the principle of distinction; the injunction to distinguish between combatants and civilians at all times during war. I outline the influence of a series of discourses — gender, innocence, and civilization — on these two categories. I focus on the emergence of the distinction in the seven-teenth-century text On the Law of War and Peace, authored by Hugo Grotius, and trace it through the twentieth-century treaties of the laws of war — the 1949 Geneva Protocols and the 1977 Protocols Additional. I draw out how the practices of and referents for our current wars partially descend from and are governed by the binary logics of Christianity, barbarism, innocence, guilt, and sex difference articulated in Grotius’s text. These binaries are implicated in our contemporary distinction of “combatant” and “civilian,” troubling any facile notion of what “humanitarian” law is or what “humanitarian” law does, and posing distinct challenges to theorizations of the laws said to regulate war.

Keywords: sex difference; laws of war; Grotius; genealogy

Suggested Citation

Kinsella, Helen M., Gendering Grotius: Sex and Sex Difference in the Laws of War (April 1, 2006). Political Theory, Volume 34 Number 2, April 2006, 161-191, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3328125

Helen M. Kinsella (Contact Author)

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities ( email )

1414 Social Sciences
267 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
United States

HOME PAGE: http://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/kins0017

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