Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Legitimacy and the use of force: can the circle be squared?
- 2 Legality and legitimacy: the quest for principled flexibility and restraint
- 3 Not yet havoc: geopolitical change and the international rules on military force
- 4 Liberal hierarchy and the licence to use force
- 5 The age of liberal wars
- 6 Force, legitimacy, success and Iraq
- 7 War and international relations: a military historical perspective on force and legitimacy
- 8 The judgement of war: on the idea of legitimate force in world politics
- 9 Discourses of difference: civilians, combatants and compliance with the laws of wars
- 10 Fights about rules: the role of efficacy and power in changing multilateralism
- 11 Peacekeeping and enforcement action in Africa: the role of Europe and the obligations of multilateralism
- 12 Identity, legitimacy and the use of military force: Russia's Great Power identities and military intervention in Abkhazia
- 13 Dead or alive: American vengeance goes global
- Index
9 - Discourses of difference: civilians, combatants and compliance with the laws of wars
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Legitimacy and the use of force: can the circle be squared?
- 2 Legality and legitimacy: the quest for principled flexibility and restraint
- 3 Not yet havoc: geopolitical change and the international rules on military force
- 4 Liberal hierarchy and the licence to use force
- 5 The age of liberal wars
- 6 Force, legitimacy, success and Iraq
- 7 War and international relations: a military historical perspective on force and legitimacy
- 8 The judgement of war: on the idea of legitimate force in world politics
- 9 Discourses of difference: civilians, combatants and compliance with the laws of wars
- 10 Fights about rules: the role of efficacy and power in changing multilateralism
- 11 Peacekeeping and enforcement action in Africa: the role of Europe and the obligations of multilateralism
- 12 Identity, legitimacy and the use of military force: Russia's Great Power identities and military intervention in Abkhazia
- 13 Dead or alive: American vengeance goes global
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Why have President Bush and his administration consistently, and publicly, stated their commitment to fully comply with the laws of war protecting civilians while, simultaneously, refusing to fully comply with the laws of war protecting prisoners of war? How do we understand President Bush and his administration's unquestioning acceptance of the protection of civilians, but the rejection of the same for prisoners of war? Are the strategic and normative costs of each so dissimilar as to justify this difference? Considering the recent expose of abuses and torture of prisoners of war held in both Iraq and Cuba, the answers to these questions are not merely academic.
I contend that an understanding of this difference in compliance is to be found through a close analysis of the persistence and influence of discourses of civilisation and barbarism invoked by the administration. First, these discourses of barbarism and civilisation facilitate the construction of a barbarous enemy akin to ‘fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism’, against which ‘civilization’ must be protected, which, in turn, legitimates the suspension of the laws of war extending rights and protection to those detained. Second, what marks President Bush and his administration as the right defenders of ‘civilization’ is their claim to protect ‘civilians’. Indeed, insofar as the war on terror can claimed as war in defence of civilisation, it must be constituted as a war in defence of civilians. Thus, discourses of barbarism and civilisation enable the particular construction of categories of violence – detainee (combatant) or civilian – the treatment of which iterates the fundamental opposition of civilisation and barbarism by which the war on terror proceeds.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Force and Legitimacy in World Politics , pp. 163 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006