How International Law Learned to Love the Bomb: Civilians and the Regulation of Aerial Warfare in the 1920s

Abstract

The 1923 Draft Rules on Aerial Warfare proposed regulations on aerial bombing. These Rules were also the first text intended to become an international treaty that mentioned civilians as a specific category of non-combatants. The civilian emerges in international law at the precise moment when they are about to be bombed. The article analyses the relationship between technologies, legal techniques, and the racialised and gendered articulation of the civilian status in the 1920s. It shows that civilian status was racially and spatially circumscribed and that civilians were conscripted into aiding the targeting process by making themselves ‘sufficiently visible’ to the eyes in the sky.