OUVRAGE : S. Scheipers (ed.), Prisoners in War

Catherine MAIA

The issue of prisoners in war is a highly timely topic that has received much attention from both scholars and practitioners since the start of the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ensuing legal and political problems concerning detainees in those conflicts.

This book analyses these contemporary problems and challenges against the background of their historical development. It provides a multidisciplinary yet highly coherent perspective on the historical trajectory of legal and ethical norms in this field by integrating the historical analysis of war with a study of the emergence of the modern legal regime of prisoners in war. In doing so, it provides the first comprehensive study of prisoners, detainees and internees in war, covering a broad range of both regular and irregular wars from the crusades to contemporary counterinsurgency campaigns.

The book revolves around two major developments. First, there has been a continuous increase in the political relevance of prisoners in war, in particular since the emergence of POW camps in the nineteenth century. Secondly, and related, the growth in the legal regime pertaining to prisoners had contradictory consequences. Whilst it enhanced the protection of prisoners in regular conflicts, its state-centric bias tends to exclude combatants who do not fit the template of regular inter-state war. Detainees in the 'war on terror' embody both tendencies, the development of which, however, is by no means a novel phenomenon.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1: Sibylle Scheipers: Introduction: Prisoners in War

Part I: The Emergence of Legal and Ethical Standards Before the Second World War

2: Frédéric Mégret: A Cautionary Tale from the Crusades? War and Prisoners in Conditions of Normative Incommensurability
3: Peter H. Wilson: Prisoners in Early Modern European Warfare
4: Stephen C. Neff: Prisoners of War in International Law: The Nineteenth Century
5: Alan Kramer: Prisoners in The First World War
6: Neville Wylie: The 1929 Prisoners of War Convention and the Building of the Inter-War Prisoner of War Regime

Part II: Prisoners in Regular Conflicts - The Second World War

7: Bob Moore: The Treatment of Prisoners of War In The Western European Theatre of War 1939-1945
8: Rüdiger Overmans: The Treatment of Prisoners of War In The Eastern European Theatre of Operations 1941-1956
9: Philip Towle: Japanese Culture and The Treatment of Prisoners of War In The Asian-Pacific War

Part III: Detainees in Irregular Conflicts

10: Isabel V. Hull: Prisoners in Colonial Warfare: The Imperial German Example
11: Raphaëlle Branche: The French in Algeria: Can There Be Prisoners of War In A 'Domestic' Operation?
12: Huw Bennett: Detention and Interrogation In Northern Ireland 1969-1975
13: Bettina Renz: The Status and Treatment of Detainees in Russia's Chechen Campaigns

Part IV: Contemporary Problems and Challenges

14: Chia Lehnardt: Private Military Personnel as Prisoners of War
15: Matthew Happold: Child Prisoners in War
16: John B. Bellinger III: Legal Issues Related To Armed Conflict with Non-State Groups
17: Adam Roberts: Detainees: Misfits in Peace And War
18: David Cole: Outsourcing Terror: Extraordinary Rendition and The Necessity For Extraterritorial Protection of Human Rights
19: Alia Brahimi: Terrorist Beheadings: Politics and Reciprocity
20: Sibylle Scheipers: Conclusion: Prisoners and Detainees in Current and Future Military Operations
Index

Sibylle SCHEIPERS (ed.), Prisoners in War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010 (352 pp.).

Sibylle Scheipers, Director of Studies at the University of Oxford, this book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.