About the event: Histories of political science and of the laws of war identify the nineteenth-century scholar Francis Lieber as their modern founder. His 1863 General Orders 100 codified the modern laws of war, internationalizing his political thought. Yet relatively unremarked is that Lieber wrote his foundational texts during U.S. settler colonization, which he justified in whole. I argue that GO100 facilitated settler colonial violence by defining modern war as a public war, arrogating it to sovereign states; distinguishing revenge from retaliation, attributing revenge to the “savage”; and elevating a certain racialized/gendered governance, ascribing it to the Cis-Caucasian race. Producing Native peoples and Native wars as lacking in the proper characteristics of sovereign belligerency resulted in a subordination of status and a legitimation of exterminatory tactics that were subsequently universalized and (re)internationalized through GO100’s determinative influence on the laws of war. Tracing GO100 further exposes the founding of the discipline in Native peoples’ dispossession and extermination.

About the speaker: Helen M Kinsella is a Professor of Political Science & Law, Affiliate Faculty of the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and a Visiting Scholar, The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.  

She writes on gender and armed conflict and on the histories of international humanitarian law and humanitarianism. She has published in the American Political Science Review, Review of International Studies, International Theory, Political Theory, International Studies Quarterly, Feminist Review, among others.
She is the author of the award winning book The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press) and recently  “Settler Empire and the United States: Francis Lieber on the Laws of War,” in the American Political Science Review.

She is currently writing on two longer projects on U.S. Native peoples and Native wars the the development of the laws of war, and on sleep in war.

https://www.helenmkinsella.com

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.