The Individualization of War: From War to Policing in the Regulation of Armed Conflicts
The Individualization of War: From War to Policing in the Regulation of Armed Conflicts
Gabriella Blum provides a broad conceptual account of the phenomenon described in the previous chapter. Blum asks us to understand the expansion of the law of war in terms of a shift from “collectivism” to “cosmopolitanism.” In this account, from the end of the nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth, the legal regulation of war operated on the level of the “collective”— that is, through a “state-oriented set of obligations, which viewed war as an intercollective effort.” More recently, however, the law of war has moved toward embracing the commitments of “cosmopolitan individualism,” a theory that understands rights as vested in individuals “regardless of national affiliation or territorial boundaries.” Blum argues that this shift has worked to unsettle and destabilize the foundational distinctions upon which the law of war was predicated.
Keywords: law of armed conflict, collectivism, cosmopolitanism, law and war, intercollective war, regulating warfare
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