The international laws of civil and colonial wars: A history, 1918-1949

Fuhrmann, Rémi (2025) The international laws of civil and colonial wars: A history, 1918-1949. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis interrogates, from the perspective of legal history, the particular legal constructs that international law has developed to capture civil and colonial wars as objects of international legal (ir)relevance. At the same time, it is a story of the distribution – or lack thereof – of rights, duties, status and privileges to various political communities and actors involved in the affair of civil and colonial wars. The angle proposed is a legal history of the international legal discourses produced during the period between 1918 and 1949. Including both the interwar period and the Second World War and its aftermath, this period differs from more traditional periodisations. But when tailor-made for the specific question of the relationship between international law and civil and colonial wars, the work of periodisation reveals 1918-1949 as a decisive yet under-researched period of legal history. One of the claims made in this thesis is that civil and colonial wars followed distinct trajectories within the legal discourses produced between 1918 and 1949. Their integration within a shared legal category with the 1949 Geneva Conventions constitutes, in this sense, something of a historical anomaly.

This thesis examines the reproduction of legal discourses inherited from the late nineteenth century, their transformation, as well as the challenges they faced from emerging, experimental, and sometimes short-lived legal discourses. The core argument is that 1918-1949 is a crucial period whereby traditional legal discourses on civil and colonial wars either lost their grip or reach their limits to the point that they became increasingly impractical and vulnerable to discursive rivals. They were discourses, although still dominant, whose structures became unsuitable terrains for translating the many projects pursued by various actors belonging to the discipline of international law or using its language.

In the case of civil wars, the traditional discourses of state-centrism came to be either rejected or radically re-imagined, whereas the discourse of humanitarianism experienced a substantial transformation allowing it to extend its reach to civil wars. A more institutional vision led to the emergence of legal discourses in which civil war was seen as a crucial aspect of the international legal order, directing it towards localising and suppressing civil wars. Conversely, in the case of colonial wars, the traditional discourse of ‘civilisation’ proved its robustness. But it did so in revealing its own inability to fulfil beyond a cosmetic way the logic of ‘conditional inclusion’ upon which it was nevertheless founded. Colonial war remained the limit situation of the period in which the strongest exclusive dimensions of the discourse of civilisation not only endured but were also pushed to their paroxysmal logics.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: K Law > K Law (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Law
• Supervisor's Name: Rasulov, Professor Akbar, Goldoni, Professor Marco and Lovat, Professor Henry
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-85374
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 11 Aug 2025 09:32
• Last Modified: 11 Aug 2025 09:34
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85374
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85374