1 Regular War, Irregulars, and Savages Pablo Kalmanovitz Published in Peter Schröder (editor), Concepts and Contexts of Vattel’s Political and Legal Thought (Cambridge University Press 2021) One of the most appalling uses of standards of civilization in international legal history is the two-tiered construction of the laws of war in the nineteenth century. The international legal profession in Europe and other ‘civilized nations’ took ‘savages’ to be incapable of showing restraint in warfare, and as such beyond the pale of the limiting rules of civilized, regular warfare. International lawyers sanctioned the deployment of unlimited violence by European powers against non-Europeans in colonial wars; legal norms that were well es- tablished in European practice, such as giving quarter to combatants and sparing women and children from deliberate attacks, were deemed inapplicable in such radically asymmet- rical wars. 1 International legal scholars usually locate the historical roots of this particular form of civi- lizing brutality in the 19 th century. While European imperial and colonial projects contrib- uted decisively to the creation and development of the modern law of nations at least since the time of Hugo Grotius, the harshest forms of legally sanctioned imperial violence re- sulted from the radicalization of European ideals of progress, cultural superiority, and the ‘civilizing mission’ in the 19 th century. 2 Legal treatises in the 18 th century, by contrast, tended to embrace forms of universal pluralism that were in principle open to recognizing non-European peoples as members in full standing of the community of nations and le- gitimate subjects of the law of nations. The laws of war in particular were in principle ac- cessible to and binding on all sovereign peoples, not just on European states. 3 1 F. Mégret, ‘From “savages” to “unlawful combatants”: A postcolonial look at the international humanitarian law’s “other”,’ in International Law and its “Others”, ed. Anne Orford (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 263-317, S. Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants: A Genealogy of the Irregular Figther (Oxford University Press, 2015), 146-187. S. Moyn, Humane: America’s Road to Endless War (Strauss Giroux, 2021), chapter 4. 2 As Mégret writes, ‘the question of the position of non-European peoples in relation to the laws of war […] arose historically over only a small period of time during the second half of the nineteenth century (and only episodically after that), in situations in which savage peoples could still be con- sidered to be relatively autonomous.’ See Mégret, ‘From “savages” to “unlawful combatants”,’ 270. On the colonial origins of international law, see generally M. Koskenniemi, The rise and fall of international law 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 98-178, and A. Anghie, Impe- rialism, sovereignty, and the making of international law (Cambridge, 2005). 3 See e.g. C.H. Alexandrowicz, ‘The Theory of Recognition in Fieri’, British Yearbook of International Law no. 34 (1958), 185, passim, C.H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of International Law in the East Indies (Oxford, 1967). E. Tourme-Jouannet, ‘Des Origines Coloniales du Droit International: À propos du droit des gens moderne au 18ème siècle’, in The