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A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the PresentMichaelBryant., Second edition. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

2023; Wiley; Volume: 48; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/pech.12598

1468-0130

Daniel R. Brunstetter,

South Asian Studies and Conflicts

As the twenty-first century rumbles forward, there is, alas, no shortage of war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is just the latest of an ever-growing list of wars that populate newsfeeds, animate debates in the policy world, and shock the moral conscience for those of us who ask how, after so many thousands of years of human carnage, is this still possible? Michael Bryant's A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present, in its expanded second edition, offers insights by introducing the reader to “the broad spectrum of societies that have produced their own unique Law of War” (5–6). As the ambitious title suggests, the book covers codes of war across several millennia, from the Stone Age to the United States' Global War on Terror. The author, Professor of History and Legal Studies at Bryant University, specializes in war crimes and international humanitarian law, and in particular on the influence of the Holocaust on the law. The book begins with an introduction that justifies the breadth—cultural and chronological—of the enhanced second edition (the first edition was published in 2015). The reader will find expanded sections that cover warfare in prehistory, a pair of new chapters on the rules of warfare of Native American peoples and on war crimes committed by Europeans who would later wage war with these groups, and a final chapter that offers insights into why humans are prone to commit extreme violence in warfare. The book unfolds with nine chronologically organized chapters that provide excellent material for use in undergraduate classrooms. Chapter 1 covers the Stone Age and the Ancient world. Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Israel provide the focal points to tease out one of the main themes that cuts across the book, namely that constraint in warfare has been linked across time and different cultures to religious ceremonialism. Chapter 2 exposes the Law of War in Pre-Columbian America, including the Aztecs, Plains Indians, and the Iroquois. This chapter is illustrative of the expanded scope of the volume. Notably, the author here restores agency to these groups by showcasing—without passing judgment—their views of warfare and restraint. While some of their war practices might easily qualify as war crimes today—such as ritual torture, human sacrifice, and extermination of one's enemy—these actions, the author explains, formed part of a broader interpretive framework that structured their civilizations and their wars. Foreshadowing arguments to come, Bryant carefully reminds the reader that while we may wish to view these practices as barbaric, doing so is a precursor to eroding the restraints in our own version of the Law of War. The period from Antiquity to the Middle Ages is the subject of Chapter 3. One of the takeaway points from this vast chapter is that the pillars of the Western conception of the Law of War, including the idea of ius gentium (the law of nations), the just war tradition, and the code of chivalry, did not have an immediate, systematic effect of restraining violence. Rather, Bryant points to the tensions within them, their circumscribed impact, as well as their place within the longue durée of such ideas and practices. For example, the law of nations suggests restraint and decorum against other civilized groups, but it legitimizes violence against barbarians. The figureheads of the just war tradition in the Middle Ages straddle the line between just war and religious war. Chivalry set a standard such that those who breached the codes of war could be punished, but this juridical restraint did not apply to wars against infidels. These are themes that resurface time and again across the chapters. “Making Law in the Slaughterhouse of the World,” the title of Chapter 4, affords no illusions regarding the level of carnage in the early modern period, even amidst parallel attempts to constrain said violence. The author explores how, despite the growing incidence of siege warfare, rebellion, and religious fractionalization which fostered a climate of extreme violence, changes in the Law of War were afoot. The core of the chapter examines the development of natural law by stalwarts of the just war tradition, including Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, and Alberico Gentili. While theoretically solidifying norms of restraint considered binding for combatants, Bryant also illustrates how these theoretical developments re-enforced “casual brutality” against non-European peoples (129). The real restraint did not emerge out of theory; rather, the remainder of the chapter shows that it came from governments that imposed and enforced professional military codes of conduct. Chapter 5, which explores the Law of War and colonialism, offers an important parallel to the themes covered in Chapter 2 by looking at the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the British conquest of Ireland and North America. The upshot is that inherent to all the developments of just war thinking aimed at restraining violence circulating at the time—the oft-lauded theories proffered by the like of Vitoria, Grotius, and Emmerich de Vattel—the very theories they put forth also legitimized extreme violence against the Other. The Aztecs, the Pequot, and the Narragansett, among others, were subject to extreme violence because Europeans suspended the conventional Law of War in the wars they waged with them. The new additions to the second edition ask important questions that probe the tensions inherent in the Law of War across history: Who gets to decide what terms like “civilized” and “barbarian” mean? When, if ever, is it justified to suspend the Law of War? What do we do with the knowledge that inherent to the Law of War are the very mechanisms of its erosion? The remainder of the book brings us closer to the legal architecture of the present day. Chapter 6 focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, illustrating how reciprocal restraint in war ultimately helped to produce ordinances of war and military codes of conduct that, in turn, eventually gave rise to laws governing warfare. Bryant discusses here the development of the all-important Leiber Code, promulgated by the US government in 1863, and its use in attempts to prosecute American soldiers for war crimes in the subsequent Philippines-American war. World War I and World War II are the subjects of Chapters 7 and 8, respectively. In these chapters, the author adopts a more legalist tone, in part because he is analyzing actual war crimes trials. The “failure of justice” to hold the German Kaiser and those who committed war crimes during World War I accountable may have been a disaster at the time, but Bryant shows that these failures set the tone for the justice to be served at the end of World War Two, with war crimes trials that did hold accountable (some) Germans and Japanese who committed atrocities. The chapters are lucidly written and give the reader a strong overview of the origins and development of the international legal doctrines that persist today. Writing this review in the shadow of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one aspect of this period in the last century stood out and deserves comment, because it showcases the salience and centrality for victims of aggression of the Law of War today. Bryant observes that the debacle of the World War I war crimes trials led to several deliberate steps being taken during World War II to ensure that those who breach the Law of War could be held accountable: “By preparing during the war to handle war crimes once it was over, forming an agency to document Nazi crimes during the war and ensuring that suspects were delivered for punishment, the Allies obviated repetition of the failures that plagued the post-First World War settlement” (261). Something similar is happening in Ukraine today, as Volodymyr Zelensky's government is meticulously documenting alleged Russian war crimes in anticipation of eventual post-war trials. This Ukrainian advance preparation may not curb how Russia fights, but it will impact what happens when the war ends—assuming Ukraine wins. This example points to questions that loom in Bryant's analysis, structured by his deliberate choice to use world history methodology: Has there been an evolution of the Law of War towards more restraint, or do victors define the trajectory of the Law of War and make exceptions when it suits them? Is there, or should there be, some objective Law of War lurking in the background that helps the modern-day observer/participant to structure their judgment of actions in war? Or, at the very least, should some actions, because they shock the moral conscience so much, ultimately be excluded from the category of legitimate possibilities in war? Among the many strengths of the second edition is that these questions lurk at every turn. Equally important is that Bryant provides no easy answers, privileging objective complexity instead. Chapter 9, which brings us up to the twenty-first century, is a case in point. While there might be some elements to suggest evolution towards an internationally accepted Law of War—the Geneva Protocols, the Additional Protocols I and II, and the International Criminal Court—there is also evidence to suggest a darker picture. The case study of the (still ongoing) US Global War on Terror illustrates not only that democracies can commit war crimes, too, but, more importantly, it shows how the erosion of the Law of War happens in the present day. The reasons will be all too familiar by this point in the book: namely, the Law of War is deliberately suspended in wars against the Other and in cases of so-called military necessity. By the end of A World History of War Crimes, the reader is left with a bleak picture. Despite the ideal of restraint that ought to govern the Law of War, humans are prone to commit extreme acts of violence in war. The newly penned Chapter 10 concludes the book with an attempt to provide insights into macro-criminality: that is, nondeviant crimes committed on the orders of government authority. It does so by exploring dehumanization theory, the total religion explanation, the authoritarian personality, and dispositional theories (e.g., the Milgram experiments). These theories, and others which Bryant also discusses, stress features of perpetrators' psychology as well as the impact of situational factors on the willingness of human beings to harm others. Still, the reader might get to the end of the book and ask: Why do we even need the Law of War if there is still so much egregious violence? The answer to this important question that I got from reading Bryant's vast survey is threefold. First, every society has attempted in some way to codify war. Understanding the common threads—the importance of religious structural framing, the suspension of the Other from the restraint-oriented rules, etc. —helps the student of war crimes understand why egregious violence happens and when it is a breach of existing dominant codes. Second, exposing how the Western influences oft held up as being the sources of the Law of War themselves contain the seeds of such violence demystifies their aura and puts them into equal conversation with other traditions. And, finally, as the Law of War continues to evolve whenever new conflicts arise, the emergence of talk about deliberately suspending existing legal codes that privilege restraint becomes a flashing red light, and hence deserving of particular attention. For those who seek to prevent future egregious violence, the wide-ranging narrative of A World History of War Crimes yields plenty of evidence to shape critical arguments aimed at preventing such erosion of restraint from happening in the first place. Daniel Brunstetter is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. His work on just war thinking examines both historical and contemporary debates about such issues. His most recent monograph is Just and Unjust Uses of Limited Force: A Moral Argument with Contemporary Illustrations (Oxford University Press, 2021).