10.1177/0090591705279530 Political Theory Kinsella / Gendering Grotius Gendering Grotius Sex and Sex Difference in the Laws of War Helen M. Kinsella University of Wisconsin, Madison I construct a genealogy of the principle of distinction; the injunction to distin- guish between combatants and civilians at all times during war. I outline the influence of a series of discourses—gender, innocence, and civilization—on these two categories. I focus on the emergence of the distinction in the seven- teenth-century text On the Law of War and Peace, authored by Hugo Grotius, and trace it through the twentieth-century treaties of the laws of war—the 1949 Geneva Protocols and the 1977 Protocols Additional. I draw out how the prac- tices of and referents for our current wars partially descend from and are gov- erned by the binary logics of Christianity, barbarism, innocence, guilt, and sex difference articulated in Grotius’s text. These binaries are implicated in our contemporary distinction of “combatant” and “civilian,” troubling any facile notion of what “humanitarian” law is or what “humanitarian” law does, and posing distinct challenges to theorizations of the laws said to regulate war. Keywords: sex difference; laws of war; Grotius; genealogy I n 2001, a Judge Advocate General for the United States military advised against a military strike on a Taliban convoy, concerned that such a strike would violate international humanitarian law. She based her decision on “indications that women and children might be in the convoy.” 1 In June of 2002, U.S. Central Command apologized for the bombing of an Afghan wedding party. Partially justification and partially explanation, the apology noted that it was impossible to tell “women from men, children from adults.” 2 Immediately before its 2004 offensive in Fallujah, the U.S. military turned 161 Political Theory Volume 34 Number 2 April 2006 161-191 © 2006 Sage Publications 10.1177/0090591705279530 http://ptx.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Author’s note: For their assistance, the author is deeply indebted to Mary Dietz, Lisa Disch, Adam Sitze, and Stephen White as well as the two anonymous reviewers. Parts of section II of this article develop arguments found in the author’s recent work “Securing the Civilian: Sex and Gender in the Laws of War” in Power in Global Governance, ed. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249-72.