The making of the Geneva conventions : decolonization, the Cold War, and the birth of humanitarian law

Abstract

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 are generally considered the most important codified rules ever formulated for times of war. Conventional wisdom considers them as a liberal humanitarian response to the Second World War. Tracing the international, imperial, and intellectual foundations of these treaties, this dissertation breaks with many traditional explanations by uncovering humanitarian law’s mixed and contested origins. It does so by reconstructing the interwar and postwar drafting debates regarding four principal questions, namely: the protection of civilians, irregulars, the regulation of civil and colonial wars, and of air (and atomic) warfare. It shows in detail how the birth of the Conventions was intimately connected to competing political visions of different key actors. Rising Cold War tensions, the memories of occupation and genocide, the outbreak of civil and colonial wars, and the changing character of the international order, all shaped the way in which they reemerged from the 1940s. The dissertation, which is based upon multinational and newly uncovered archival materials, prompts a fundamental shift with respect to the history of humanitarian law. It uses a comparative approach, focusing on the internal and public debates among and within the four major state and non-state drafting parties of this revision process – France, the ICRC, United Kingdom, and the United States. While adhering to recent approaches to international legal history, it seeks to critically examine the origins of, and the connections between, configurations of humanity and human rights at the start of the Cold War and at the end of empire.