Des-Encanto: Latin America and International Humanitarian Law

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Latin America has traditionally been absent from larger narratives about the history of international humanitarian law and its role in the formation of key instruments such as the Geneva Conventions has been limited. This contrasts with the region’s more successful attempts at influencing the regulation of war from the point of view of the jus ad bellum. In order to explain this dichotomy, this chapter foregrounds Latin America’s experience with the laws of war in the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing on the work of scholars, jurists and diplomats who contested the dominant von Clausewitz-inspired Western-centred paradigms of the time. It explains Latin America’s absence through a process of progressive disenchantment with the laws of war, coupled to its well-known strong defence of absolute non-intervention in international law. The chapter concludes that Latin America’s relative absence from the history of modern international humanitarian law should be properly contextualised, not as a story of disinterest, but as an effort to protect itself from war altogether rather than humanising it.