Laws of War
Laws of War.The idea of laws of war is ancient and ubiquitous; fragmentary indications appear in the records of most known civilizations and cultures. The inter national laws of war as known today, however, are of relatively modern and regional origin. The Roman concept of a law of nations (jus gentium), persisting through Europe's medieval centuries and ingesting elements of Christian “just war” doctrine, chivalric honor, military professionalism, and commercial prudence, produced by the sixteenth century a body of customary principles and rules purporting to show how to judge whether a war was justified (jus ad bellum) and how wars should ideally be conducted (jus in bello). Reality, always falling short of the ideal, became so horrific in the Thirty Years' War that the Dutch Christian‐humanist‐diplomat Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was prompted to publish in 1625 De jure belli ac pacis (Concerning the Law of War and Peace), usually...
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