This chapter discusses the development and application of international humanitarian law (IHL) and its interrelationship with human rights law. It further examines this special relationship, which is of particular importance for the protection of civilians, especially where the applicability of IHL is contested or where IHL constitutes an exception to certain rights, such as the right to life, or fails to prevent and/or provide effective remedies for violations. The chapter seeks to identify the scope of application of IHL and demonstrate the degree to which the two can be reconciled. Moreover, a special case is made for the law applicable in situations of military occupation whereby human rights are subordinate to IHL. Despite this subordination, in practice because international human rights tribunals are not mandated to apply humanitarian law they necessarily interpret and enforce the rights of the victims on the basis of the rights found in their respective statutes. As a result, the jurisprudence of human rights tribunals is not always consistent with IHL. Yet, such tribunals are hard pressed to accept jurisdiction over situations which would otherwise be resolved on the basis of IHL alone. This chapter therefore goes on to discuss the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction by human rights tribunals.

The book is bought to a close by the invasion and occupation of Poland, the radical inner colonization of the Warthegau, ethnic cleansing of Poles, the simultaneous ghettoization of Jews, Lebensraum and the conquest of Eastern Europe, Christaller and his organizational plans for the conquered East, Zamosc, the Holocaust, and the post-war legacy. Posen and West Prussia were cleared of Germans and Poland successfully inner colonized this space. The Junker estates of East Germany were broken up. West Germany accepted 8 million expellees from Eastern Europe and, in their final act, the inner colonizers helped settle many of them on farms.

This chapter describes the Tokugawa status order and its change over time by highlighting its constituent groups and their status-mediating functions. The Tokugawa state relied on locally specific status groups to govern the population. These groups were defined by land and occupation and possessed a high degree of autonomy in regulating their own affairs. The chapter characterizes the most common types of groups – retainer bands, villages, block associations (chō), monastic communities, guilds, and outcaste associations – and explains how status was assigned, expressed, and negotiated between the state and these groups, drawing on notions of occupation, privilege, duty, and household as well as on a system of household registration. The chapter surveys the development of the status order in three stages: the formative period of pacification in the sixteenth and seventeenth century; its maturation under Tokugawa rule; and the conditions and process of its dismantling around the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

While much of the literature on nationalism focuses on the formation or construction of national identities and nation-states, the story does not end with the creation of a polity claiming to embody a nation’s identity. Conceptions of nationhood continue to be contested and to change over time within the framework of national sovereignty, even as the breadth and depth of popular attachment to, and identification with, the nation-state wax and wane under changing conditions. This is just as true of long-established nation-states as it is of recently formed ones. Terminological usage may obscure this, insofar as nationalism is commonly used to describe movements or efforts directed at gaining a people’s independence or asserting its purported rights to contested territory or resources. Loyalty to a long-established country is more often referred to as patriotism – and by virtue of being consigned to this category, has been subject to less thorough analytical scrutiny in the theoretical and comparative literature on nationalism.

This chapter discusses how states ought to behave in tiems of armed conflict, highlighting the role of such mechanisms as proportionality and military necessity

This chapter discusses the classification of armed conflcits into international armed conflicts (IACs) and non-international armed conflicts ( NIACs) by examining the relevant criteria. WIth regard to NIACs it disusses the criteria of organisation and intensity. The chapter also considers the geographical and temporal scope of armed conflicts. It then goes on to consider occupation, wars of self-determination, terrorism and cyber war, as well the character of conflicts when international forces are involved.

A comparison of the behavior of the German army in World War I and World War II in occupied Eastern Europe shows the human cost of the difference between Wilhelmine and Nazi nationalism. Hitler aimed not at the paternalistic civilizing of conquered peoples but rather the elimination, evacuation, and instrumentalization of non-Aryan populations. Yet the fact that Hitler is the exemplar of this kind of instrumental violence indicates the rarity of behavior thought to be so common in international relations models. This has great normative implications. As much as moral philosophy seeks to maintain a separation between the way the world is and the way that it should be, all normative arguments rest on (even if only implicitly) empirical claims about what is possible. We know by the empirical rarity of those who think like Hitler that he was mistaken about the amoral nature of man, and therefore that normative theorizing still has a place. Once we understood where Hitler’s crude struggle-based biological determinism went wrong, by failing to recognize what is uniquely about humans among other animals – their morality – biology buttresses rather than undermines liberal ethics. Morality is more than a social construction.

The final phase of Vichy’s dealings with Rome brought the sharpest divergence in its relations with the two Axis governments. The full occupation of France ended the last vestiges of French sovereignty. However, the power relationship between Vichy and Rome evolved very differently to that between Vichy and Berlin. Vichy’s negotiations between the conflicting demands of the German and Italian authorities were, characterised by opportunism, not fully appreciated when focusing exclusively on the German occupation. Whereas Vichy chose to work with Rome to offset Berlin’s demands on the Service du Travail Obligatoire, it resolutely chose collaboration with Berlin over the opportunities afforded by Rome when it came to the treatment of Jews. Vichy’s willing collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitic policies saw it oppose the Italian attempts to prevent the deportation of Jews in their occupation zone. The fall of Mussolini ended the prospect of any fruitful cooperation with Italy. With growing internal pressure from French collaborationist forces to engage in a more radical and ideological form of collaboration, Vichy’s alignment with Nazi Germany finally became definitive.

The conclusion ties together the book’s argument, linking diplomatic relations to local-level negotiations and ideological dimensions to demonstrate how Vichy’s engagement with the Axis saw it caught in a double bind. It reflects on the absence of public memories of the Italian occupation and the tendency to focus on Germany in the scholarship. This chapter also highlights how French responses to the challenges arising out of the Italian armistice terms, Fascist territorial claims and the Italian occupation were critical to shaping Vichy’s wider policies on collaboration. The Italian dimension to Vichy’s actions, therefore, necessitates a reconceptualisation of state collaboration and its relationship to collaborationism as well as the relationship between collaboration and resistance.

Chapter 5 deals with the years 1942 and 1943, as the Germans reached the peak of their military success and then began to decline. Chaplains were part of the brutal regimes of occupation that characterized Nazi German domination of territories and people. The chapter uses the concept of "genocidal culture" to analyze how Christianity, embodied in the chaplains and symbolized by the cross, helped the Germans construct a story of justification that erased their victims and presented themselves as suffering heroes. Examples from France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union are presented, and personal accounts from Jewish survivors reverse the gaze, to provide a look at the Germans and their religious practices from outside the group. Amidst the extreme yet everyday brutality of German occupation, the Wehrmacht chaplains turned inward to focus on providing comfort to the men they served and interpreting the war and their role as the ultimate sacrifice. They faced disinterest and at times hostility from soldiers and officers but insisted they were effective “handmaids of the troop leadership.” Chaplains who died or were killed became important figures in a redemptive story of the war.