Recipient: Helen M. Kinsella, University of Minnesota

Dissertation: "The Image Before the Weapon: A Genealogy of the 'Civilian' in International Law and Politics."

Dissertation Co-Chairs: Lisa Disch and Kathryn Sikkink, University of Minnesota

Citation: We have selected Helen Kinsella's dissertation (University of Minnesota) The Image Before the Weapon: A Genealogy of the "Civilian" in International Law and Politics for this year's Helen Dwight Reid Award. This dissertation impressively blends the study of international norms, international law, and military practice to make an important contribution to our understanding of the origins and nature of the laws of war. Using a genealogical analysis and drawing from wide-ranging empirical case material, Kinsella successfully demonstrates how discourses of gender, innocence, and civilization together have shaped the development and meaning of the laws of war, particularly the principle of discrimination between "combatants" and civilians.

Going beyond a discussion of compliance with the norm of civilian immunity, Kinsella inquires into the production of the principle of discrimination itself, and indeed into the production of the very categories of the "combatant" and the civilian. She analyzes important historical junctures, including the formulation of the principle of discrimination within Christian canonical law and the chivalric codes of the 11th-15th centuries; Grotius' and de Vitoria's foundational writings on international law which also defended European imperial expansion; the American Civil War; the U.S.-Indian Wars; the decolonization war in Algeria; and the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador. In these cases, as Kinsella shows, discourses of gender, innocence, and civilization converged to produce both the categories of "combatant" and "civilian" and the means with which to distinguish between them.

Throughout, she explores the sometimes contradictory effects of that production of difference on, for example, the treatment of civilians amidst war as well as more broadly on the construction of domestic and international orders themselves. Her genealogy allows her to answer important questions like: how is it possible for "civilians" to be killed in the name of "civilization"; how and why has the principle of discrimination become one by which we govern and judge the actions of our own and other states; how and why has the principle of discrimination constituted the "we" of international politics?

In answering these questions, Kinsella contributes the important finding that the laws of war have, from their very origin, served as much to justify war--to make it morally possible, and even to claim the moral high ground for one's side--as to limit it. Western thinkers used the discourse of "civilization" to limit the application of the laws of war, defining those who are "uncivilized" as "within the reach of the law but outside its protection". Thus the 1095 Council of Clermont, Kinsella points out, proclaimed both the Peace of God, establishing chivalric limits on the application of violence, and the First Crusade, whose Muslim targets were not protected by that code. Kinsella points to similar logic used in the sixteenth century by de Vitoria to justify Spanish depredations against American Indians, and by nineteenth-century U.S. military leaders to justify Indian massacres while at the same time white Southerners were spared such treatment during the Civil War. Her conclusion shows the contemporary relevance of the study, reflecting on the implications of her findings for our understanding of U.S. behavior and rhetoric in Iraq. In tracing the genealogy of the laws of war, Kinsella has forced us to confront not just their uneven application, but the inconsistencies, tensions, and hypocrisy at their very foundations that have long been used to justify brutality in war.