 Welcome to this lecture. I'm very pleased to welcome you all. My name's Rachel Kerr. I'm a professor of War and Society in the Department of War Studies, and also Deputy Header of Department. It's a really great honour and a privilege to welcome you to this event and to be presenting our speaker for this evening. The Sucky and Michael Dockwell Memorial Lecture is a lecture that we hold annually in the School of Security Studies and it celebrates the dedication, collegiality and achievements of Professors Sucky and Michael Dockwell who spent very many years in the Department of War Studies. They were both well-known and eminent international and diplomatic historians. In addition to being accomplished scholars and publishing very widely, they were very generous mentors in the department and very important for the development of war studies and for scholars within it and I myself was privileged to be a student in the department while Professor Michael Dockwell was still teaching and then went on to be able to be a colleague of Sucky Dockwell's during her late years in the department. They both served very many years, Michael from 1971 to 2001 when he retired and Sucky from 1992 to 2009. This memorial lecture is our opportunity to embody the values that they upheld and to do orbit to carry forward the work that they did in inspiring the next generations of scholars in presenting the latest developments in the field of international history, diplomatic history and war studies more broadly. So I'm really pleased to be able to introduce our speaker this evening. It's a very great personal privilege and pleasure to introduce Professor Beatrice Hoyser. It's extremely fitting that this is somebody giving this lecture this evening who also embodies the values that were espoused by the Dockwell's of collegiality, mentoring and inspiration and has personally been very inspiring to me as a mentor and as a role model. Many of us, there are more of us now working in this field of studies. So I for one have benefited from her expertise and her advice hugely and I know many others have. Professor Hoyser holds a BA and an MA from the University of London and a Diffil from Oxford and a Hebilitesion higher doctorate from the University of Marburg. She's taught widely at many places. She spent very many years teaching at the Department of War Studies again when I had the privilege to be taught by her as well when I was a student here many years ago. And then during that time spent a year in NATO headquarters during the Yugoslav Wars. She served as director of research at military history research office of the Bundeswehr and as a professor of international relations at Reading. She's currently professor of international relations at Glasgow and is seconded at the moment back to the Bundeswehr in the higher staff college as director for strategy. She has many significant publications on nuclear strategy, on clousfits and her most recent books The Evolution of Strategy and the one that has just come out. This year wore a genealogy of Western ideas and practices and I would recommend anybody starting out in war studies to reading clousfits as the best introductions to clousfits if you're feeling a bit lost and essential reading for all butting war studies scholars. Her most recent book as I mentioned is a survey of thinking about war and ideas and practices of war, so a genealogy of Western ideas and practices. And she also runs the podcast series with Lucy talking strategy. So this evening Professor Hoyes is going to talk to us about civilians in war, specifically the civilian conundrum in war, so I will stop there and hand over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Professor Kerr, but also I'd like to thank everybody who's come tonight. I'm really privileged to see people having come from, taken time out of busy schedules to be here. But I must say the greatest and happiest surprises to see Barry Pascans because I think he will have the answers to the questions that I will raise tonight. And you will also see the profound effect you've had on me because of the thinking that I was subjected to from you that I've tried to find out more about over the years. So Barry, I'm particularly looking forward to your replies to what I'm going to talk to you about. It is also a great honour to be able to help commemorate in this way Saki, Michael Dockrell, great friends, and we all have lost particularly Saki far too early and it is wonderful that there is this lecture series to commemorate them. I hope that I can be worthy of this particular memory. Here is the structure that I propose to give you. I'm going to bore you to tears to start with a long historical introduction. I'm going to point to change where I think I have identified some change but also to horrendous continuities in the treatment of civilians in war. To then look at total war nationalism and then to raise moral issues and that's where really the political philosophy comes in and the moral and the ethical side comes in. So here we go. If you want to fall asleep, do so during the first two through a few bits and dig up for section five because I will and I really am hoping for interaction with you afterwards and questions and answers because I really have the questions rather than the answers. So having looked in this book on the genealogy of thinking about war and then contrasting it with practice at a fairly long period of time I've covered also this question of how civilians were perceived and one of the things that I found was that in ancient Greece and ancient Rome there was really a very extensive lack of compassion. Just about everybody was killed. Prisoners of war were killed in besieged towns. The classic pattern that the population could be allowed to surrender but then they could still be expelled. They might still all die of starvation or of exposure if they were expelled from their towns. If they had not surrendered, if a besieged town had been captured then generally all the men were killed, other else they were enslaved. Women were systematically raped and then they were abducted with children into slavery and that was a fairly classical pattern there. If you were insurgent and you were defeated then you were most likely going to be killed. There were occasional acts of mercy. Yes we do find them in all sorts of different sources but they're almost described as a sort of weird luxury and then so and so did something. Imagine they didn't do the normal thing of killing but they spared this person or they spared these two people. Alexander with Darius as wise is a big fuss about a very numerically limited case of clemency when a few pages earlier they told us that they had tens of thousands of people killed. This comes against the background of course where the brutality in families is also quite different from what we would be expecting today and not only the Spartans but also the Romans. Roman fathers had the right to kill their children if they chose. Population control included simply killing infants if you couldn't feed them and of course Greeks and Romans could kill their own slaves if they felt like it. There was no protection against that. This comes against the background of an immense tolerance of cruelty and brutality as we would now see it in their societies. What I think this amounts to is that there is an amazing lack of compassion. The Greeks if they are sparing people they will say that this isn't done in order not to offend the gods. They seem to be more worried about the gods being offended than about these people suffering. In the Roman case it's sort of less the gods although they get to mention a lot of the time as well but it's really disorderly. You're breaking the laws and laws are really the most important thing. You have to go along with the laws. You do have some people spared in war and this is mentioned over in several sources. It tends to be people to do with religion in some way. So it would be priests, it would be people taking refuge in sanctuaries. We all know that the example from Thucydides and elsewhere where then the sanctuary is ignored by somebody and the massacre still takes place but in principle there are certain rules about sparing people which tend to be related to religion or to sanctuaries in some way and all religious feasts. So it's quite, again it sort of enforces this pattern of to do with deities and gods rather than with compassion. People don't say, don't do this because these people would suffer and you don't want people to suffer, it's all about we don't want to offend the gods. You do have this both in one. You do have people suddenly showing sides of, this is unpleasant, we shouldn't be doing this, at the same time as they are showing extreme cruelty just to give one example, Alexander, Alexander III of Maconad, I refuse to call him the Great, who was happy to massacre the Thebans and the Tyrians because they hadn't surrendered to him in very large numbers, tens of thousands. But when he came to the Bactrians and found out that the Bactrians had this habit of getting rid of their old people and sick people by throwing them to a breed of dogs who had been trained particularly to attack them and eat them, he thought that was not very civilised and forbade it. So we do find in one person things practice that we find totally repulsive and then things that we can sort of relate to and you can have a nice argument as historians have had and I'd love to join in on that on the question of whether Alexander had any business telling the Bactrians not to continue with that because that was cultural interference, wasn't it? You do have, at the end of the Rome Republic, some evidence of humanitarian views creeping in and I do, I'd be late to discover Cicero and I've come to really, really like him who even says that in dealing with enemies there should be a limit to retribution and punishment. There are certain duties that we owe even to those who have wronged us. It is sufficient that the aggressor should be brought to repent of his wrongdoing in order that he may not repeat the offence and that others may be deterred from doing wrong. And then elsewhere the rights of all must be strictly observed and when the victory is won however we should spare those who have not been excessively cruel and monstrous. So there is an idea, there's an idea of limitation that does creep in but I would still argue that somebody must be thinking at the moment that surely the word Caritas is Roman and yes there was this, the virtue of charity even in Rome. Have you noticed that charity is always depicted as a mother with children? So I would say that's a case of hormones rather than of a mental disposition to be kind towards people who are not yourself with whom you're not related. So it's interesting that that is the prime example that they had of charity. Somebody who by their hormones is driven to look after their young. Fascinatingly one little idea I've come across in archaeology which is that in fact compassion also crept in not just from single individuals but from Judaism in Rome in the first century AD where you've got the I shall love thy neighbour as thyself is translated apparently in a system whereby richer Jews in Rome paid for the burial sites of poorer Jews and that is something that could be found in archaeology that Leonard Rutgers and some other archaeologists found out when they looked more closely at the Villa Torlonia catacombs in Rome. And that's very fascinating because it means that there is an element of social looking after each other which was quite, quite alien to the Romans in this respect that creeps in around the time when Christianity also very, very slowly takes off. And I think the argument could be made that this love thy neighbour as thyself this key point which then is fully taken into Christianity then becomes a driving factor for the limitation of war and the creation of, or the translation of caritas into something that isn't simply mother's love, hormonal love for the child but also something that is about caring for people who are not at all related to you. So I think the big tool norm, the big change does really come when Christianity becomes a state religion and you have the abolition of crucifixion as a punishment the abolition of lethal circus games and pretty late still even actually after the end of the Western Empire the attempts at least driven by the church to abolish slavery even though John Gillingham has shown that in fact the practice of enslavement particularly of women and children continued in the Christian West among Christians against each other until the 12th century which is pretty awful. So the Christian Church was actually quite important I think in a long fight to drive back two other forces Western or European civilization being basically an amalgam of three important forces one of them being the pagan traditions that I was mentioning earlier but then that pretty horrid, Germanic warrior culture that comes in with all the invasions and then the collapse of the Western Empire against which the Christian Church falls very hard with the result being a set of rules that are gradually introduced we don't actually know when they started but initially they are very much in the tradition of what we've seen from the ancient Greeks namely all about religion all about the protection of what belongs to the church i.e. the clergy and church property but very very gradually you find that that builds up also to in some other ways where it says well coming near the property of Gregory of Ture sorry, it's in margin of Ture or Ilerre of Poitiers in this area we shouldn't probably pillage peasants belongings and things like that so gradually an area that is particularly seen as holy also encompasses the poor peasants who should be spared in that area we have slightly more restrictions already self-imposed on the East Roman Empire in the Mauritius strategicon but in the west it takes a long time for these restrictions to come off I've done a bit of research into this you don't have to read this all just to give you an idea very gradually in the 9th century you begin to have more and more protection extended to peasants to widows orphans the poor in the context of saying we want to protect people on the territory through which our armies are moving and the crucial thing and I'll come back to this in a moment the crucial thing is this originally concerns only your own territory all these ordinances are initially only formulated to say we should protect our own peasants against our soldiers ravaging the land moving through the land and not only living off the land but eventually also very often killing the peasants in the process of it because if you're a peasant and you have enough food for the winter and soldiers come and want to take that from you you've got the choice between fighting them or dying of starvation over the winter with your family and therefore you might fight and then you're probably going to be defeated because you're going to be killed because the soldiers fight better than you so it's about protecting the poor and the soldiers in your own territory the other thing that comes up is that you have sovereign princes already from Anglo-Saxon England onwards trying to enforce a piece of the land the protection of their own citizens against interference and why do I have a gate here of Regent's Park I hope that some of you at least occasionally wander across Regent's Park which is a royal park and at least in my time when you came into Regent's Park there was a large panel saying that we had to follow certain orders in that park certain rules in that park one of which was, and we remember that particularly was not to interfere with the swans and why was this because this was a royal park where in my time the Queen's Peace had to be kept this idea of the King's Peace and the Queen's Peace is actually a revival if you like of the Pax Augusta the idea of an internal peace where only the monarch monopolised justice and violence and tries to stop everybody else from killing each other in vendettas introduced in the Holy Run Empire by Emperor Frederick I and then later by the famous Land Freedom of the end of the 15th century but it's interesting how that then spreads alongside this idea saying if we're at war and we're moving our forces to the frontier to fight the enemy on the way we should spare the poor and the peasants and not ravage the land the 100 years war and the Anglo-Scottish wars then produce a very large list of ordinances which are very interesting because more and more these ideas of these rules that are acceptable to all sides becomes crystallisers and more and more you have the standard line in there that you must spare civilians and you shouldn't go against them having said that we also from these wars have plenty of evidence again that this always applied to your own side to the poor and peasants on your own side and that this protection was only extended very occasionally and selectively to an abbey on the enemy's territory if that abbey surrendered to you with its lands or to a town if that town surrendered to you so all the time, shockingly I think for us it really only applied to our lot as it were and this is I think where the first big change comes in and it curiously comes in Burgundy the late 15th century where it moves from the ordinances move from protecting people on your own land to the idea that it should happen to all civilians including those on enemy territory I think there is a recognition here this is in the context of Burgundy the Dukes of Burgundy were actually the same family as the French kings they kept going to war with each other that there is a sense that they were fighting they were the same population and actually wanted to win the allegiance of that population and therefore it might not be wise to pillage them and to kill them if you then afterwards wanted to have their loyalty but interestingly this is where you do potentially have a change coming in at the same time there is some literature again just there which claims that there was a decline of violence also domestic violence also violence in small-scale societies whatever it is in the west in the late 15th to 18th century I personally can only say a heart this is what they say but I do at the same time see that there are more and more of these ordinances coming out and incidentally some of the fun was to find them because they were very often attached as annexes to books on war where you wouldn't have suspected them so you would suddenly have this Burgundy of more and more of these ordinances some of them simply stand alone you go to war you have somebody at the beginning of their campaign and it seemed to be the case that whenever you went to war whenever you went on a campaign you had to have publish these ordinances what the interesting thing about it is that these are unilaterally adopted it isn't international codes of conduct it isn't the use in bellow that is somehow agreed internationally but because everybody starts adopting them and copying from each other it becomes traditional law it becomes conventional law and you had so again even until the mid 19th century we find that ordinances are in such a way are issued ad hoc for an individual campaign and just to give you a little flavour of one just randomly chosen the Danish one upon pain of death are prohibited less majesty, all deliberate homicide, murder, sexual conduct against nature, incest, bigger means incidentally rape is not rape is exempt from the kidnapping, forceful abduction, laying fire street robbery, highway robbery stealing church property so these would be classic cases and it's quite interesting that a lot of them don't actually exclude rape horrible continuity at the same time absolutely horrendous continuity when it comes to siege warfare and since antiquity absolutely systematically you get the pattern all the way to what we're seeing in Ukraine now that if a city surrenders on certain conditions the besieged forces on the whole like expected to respect the conditions and then also not to pillage, not to rape, not to kill but if the city does not surrender but is taken everything is allowed and that is simply a practice that we see all over and just to have an example of this you have of course the element there of starving civilian populations until they surrender scorched tactics around places so that they run out of food naval blockade as in the naval dimension of this bombardment from land or from the air once you have the technology to do that and then the sacking as I said continues clearly from antiquity to the present we have there those pictures from Mariopole quite recently but we could add all the horrible pictures that we have seen since Erasmus of Rotterdam already commented that it was the greatest part of the suffering that falls on those who least deserve to suffer namely on farmers, old people, wives, orphans and young girls if anyone cries that this is it is unjust not to punish a sinner my answer is that it is much more unjust to call down absolute disaster on so many thousands of innocent who have not deserved it so it was quite clear for contemporaries what was going on so war should not be seen primarily as the clashing of armies religious wars and national wars well those two types of wars where all sides had it in particularly for the anybody every single person, all the civilians because it meant that this was a battle of good and evil and if you were in your soul you were on that other side you were an enemy of your deity as an element in the Muslim wars of conquest in 1630 the atrocities committed by the crusaders when they captured Jerusalem just as one of the many atrocities of the crusades but also in the confessional wars then of the early 15th century and then the religious underpinned wars of the 16th century and the early 17th century the wars of conquest and the Spanish Dutch 80 years war particularly horrendous and merciless as every single civilian on the other side was very often treated as an adversary whether they were a babe in arms or whether they were an old person or whatever there is a big debate among scholars about the violence in the 30 years war there is one school which says there was the 30 years war was a particular height of deliberate cruelty whereas the other school of historians speaks particularly about the indirect effects that led to so many casualties in this war which were up to a third of the population of some of the areas concerned where this particular school claims it was mainly because of famine and plague that so many people died I have a tendency to side with those who say that there was the deliberate cruelty that was inflicted and that this was it was a myth that the cabinet wars that followed after that were so very limited where does this myth come from just a very brief run through that because it's quite interesting it comes up an awful lot in literature about strategy called in French lace warfare la guerre en dentelle we know that it definitely goes back to the French author Guybert who thought that the wars that he'd witnessed in his own time particularly the seven years war were very unsatisfactory because people were always stopping the war whenever they ran out of money and then they resumed when the money came back and this was decided by cabinets hence the word cabinet wars it was picked up by Klausawits who crypt an awful lot from Guybert where he had this whole passage saying armies were paid for from the treasury which princes treated almost like their privy purse apart from a few commercial issues relations with other states concerned the treasury or the governments not the people war thus became the business exclusively of the governments hence cabinet war thus essentially became a real game looting and devastation of enemy territory which had played such an important part in the warfare of the ancients and even in the middle ages where no longer regarded as acceptable to the spirit of the age war was thus limited more and more to the armed forces themselves this is what Klausawits wrote he had never experienced them he wrote that retrospectively there was an inspiration from Guybert practically paraphrasing Guybert and that particular interpretation of the wars before the French Revolution particularly of the 18th century was then picked up by an awful lot of other people Moltger picked it up Carl Schmidt if infamously picked it up and there was this whole argument therefore that this is there was the limited period of cabinet warfare until I think Hervé de Réviant started writing about this period and said no actually it was pretty horrendous some of the little things that he mentioned as examples of this first of all lots of cities burned lots of looting of the city's bombardment of cities on the right hand side you will see a picture of the city of Dresden it's not just 14th of February 1944 that it was bombed it was already bombed in 1760 from the ground and destroyed and this is why so much of the centre of Dresden was then late 18th century and the wars of Louis XIV were horrendous and had horrendous effects for the people who were in the areas where he had this scorched politics tactics and where masses of people died from starvation but also as Hervé de Réviant underscores drilled forces firing at each other in lines and advancing towards each other had very high casualty rates more higher casualty rates per soldiers than you had in previous and later wars so this is really it was particularly also for the soldiers a particularly bloody business and the idea that the cabinet wars were so limited not necessarily the case but in any case however it seems get worse once you got back to a model in which an ideology inspired people to think that all enemies the entire enemy population was the adversary and that's really when religion was now replaced by nationalism and nationalist wars I think by logic and reason drift into being total wars because in that context it starts with a French Revolution not only do you mobilise your entire own population i.e. the entire nation against an assault by the adversary against your nation it's no longer just your dynasty but you then logically have to start sooner or later to think that therefore every member of the other side is also an adversary every single human being in the other nation let's pass review what people have thought about that and go back a step just go back to how people at some stage thought this was not the case Plato would not admit that the whole people the whole people of a state men women and children are enemies but only the hostile minority who are responsible for the quarrel so for Plato it was decidedly not the entire policy should be treated like that in the late 18th century you have a vatel saying women children the old and the sick come under the description of enemies and we have certain rights over them but these are enemies who make no resistance and consequently we have no right to maltreat their persons or use any violence against them much less to take away their lives this is so plainly a maxim of justice and humanity that at present every nation in the least degree civilized acquiesces in it so at least the theory was that you couldn't do that before the French Revolution before the rise of nationalism but then the big turning point comes with the introduction of nationalism all of a sudden you could see quite different views taken by the jurists of the 19th century the US Supreme Court in 1814 said in the state of war nation is known to nation only by their armed exterior each threatening the other with conquests or annihilation or a leipzig jurist at the university Julius Weisker saying 1845 the war of nations sees in each member of the enemy people an enemy who has to be fought or at least disarmed or Hallek a bit later this again a jurist the state of war means that the whole state is placed in the legal attitude of a belligerant towards another state so that every member of the if the one nation is authorized to commit hostilities against every member of the other so clearly this idea of the mobilization the entire mobilization of one's own people and then the the designation of the entire population of the other side as enemies in every place and under every circumstance thus there are in two ideological contexts you get the entire population as enemy namely if they're enemies of God in Islam versus Christendom or the confessional wars among Christian nominations or if they're enemies of a nation where you have warfare of nation against nations just described or even then the genocidal war as practiced by Ludendorff who actually formulated this out and went to the last logic of this why am I telling you all this well I think it's really important to see that Europe had produced an ethical spectrum of attitudes towards civilians which goes all the way and these are all European traditions from Mother Teresa to Adolf Eichmann all these are contained in European traditions and they were competing with each other you do have in the 19th century in parallel and competing with each other the jurists trying to create more rules that are internationally accepted with the whole legislation movement incidentally strongly supported if not even champion by Russia with the Tsar's main jurists who tried to convene those first Saint Petersburg declaration etc. international treaty efforts whereas at the same time in parallel you have this increasing development of the nationalization of war with this drift towards identifying the entire enemy population as enemies this good this ethically good side of it the greater protection of civilians by international law international law for the first time now turning from traditional law and simply conventional law to two treaties that are signed by various sides by multiple sides this tradition of course only takes off in the second half of the 19th century and is illustrated by this very long list that all jurists will immediately recognize of legislation that is supposed to afford protection to civilians but also for prisoners of war to fighting soldiers etc. I've highlighted the very important take draft rules of aerial warfare the one exception herein which wasn't ratified by the various sides which is why bombing from the air was still legitimate legal in the second world war but all the other legislation progressively tried to humanize warfare tried to restrain below tried to increase the rights of civilians and the protection for civilians but also of wounded soldiers captured soldiers etc. Aerial bombardment becomes this large and very important exception developed nicely in the colonial context because it was a cheap form of counterinsurgency you didn't need to put boots on the ground in the second world war the alternative to early invasion of course and then only really properly outlawed with the new appendices to the Geneva protocols of 1977 so we are I think in agreement everybody that what Russians forces are doing by bombing civilian properties in Ukraine that is a war crime but even then we find that the odd return to this thinking that you had in the middle ages before the Burgundians afforded something of a change that people, militaries tend to be very concerned about saving forces on their own side force protection on their own side and this whole development in the context of using missiles or aerial bombardment of trying to achieve a war with zero dead tended always to be about zero dead on its own side so let's not mistake that for a particular humane form of war the extremes of course of the nationalization of warfare are then in Genoa and Demoside where the classic cases are still, the jury is still out or put it that way, I don't know enough about it to be able to decide whether it was neglect or deliberate and incompetence or deliberate policy the Holodomor, the great Chinese famine mentioned in that context there are two schools on each of these one of them says it's deliberate the other says it was just extreme incompetence but design was definitely there in the German genocide of the Nama and the Hereros the Turkish genocide of the Armenians the German genocide of Slav Jews Sinti Roma and the Polpots genocide in Campachia the Rwandan genocide was by design and of course Reprenitsa was by design although on a different scale but still there's clearly that's the pinnacle of that okay this is the bit where I hope you're going to wake up because this is the bit where I will now need you so far we have considered the killing of clearly innocent people but this is now the conondrum and the moral dilemma that I want to raise which is how responsible are citizens for their government's wars and I have then restricted it by saying let's assume they are in a democracy but even in more authoritarian systems one should raise that question so in this context can we differentiate between innocence in the sense of those who really cannot do any harm that's where the word comes from in knocker, knocker or do harm not knocker or not doing any harm citizens of a totalitarian system which who may just have the choice between being incarcerated possibly even shot if they go against the government anyway so one would say that not everybody is born to be a martyr from me in any case I would have always been very worried about against the government if I had children to look after or the family to feed or something like that the active and voluntary professional contribution to a war effort which is still on a different scale if you actually joined the Nazi party if you volunteered for the military and if you were actually combatants in that war yourself let's for the purpose of this part of the discussion leave aside the question it would actually be physically possible in a war to differentiate between these people we should come back to that at the end because I think there might be interesting technological developments in the future that might make this turn this somewhat around so let me repeat there are degrees of responsibility whether this comes from voting for a party that proclaims war to be its aim or not protesting as a government against a government when it embarks on something that you think is wrong morally supporting such a government's war and actively supporting it by civilian or then military work in support of that economy well let me now just run past you some different views that have been taken on the subject and it's not uninteresting that Christine de Pison early in the 15th century who herself was writing at the court of the French king at the time during a time of civil war just to take you back you all know about the wars of the roses in England where you had exactly the same thing a generation earlier in France the Armagnac against the Bourguignon was basically another family feud led by two different factions of the royal family two uncles of the king who just like Henry the 6th in the later English case Charles the 6th was insane had great periods in which he couldn't reign and the uncles fought each other and in this context of civil war Christine de Pison came to the following a very interesting verdict let us suppose that the people of the enemy country or is it the enemy faction because it's left open wished not to aid their king or in injuring our king the other side doesn't want to aid their side okay in accordance with lawful practice we should not in any way cause bodily harm to or injure the property of such people or those who did not come to the aid of the enemy king so if the other side abstains from supporting our enemy king we shouldn't harm them by contrast if the subject of that enemy king be they poor or rich farmers or anything else give aid and comfort to him to maintain the war according to military right we may overrun their country and seize what they find prisoners of whatever class and all manner of things without being obliged by any law to return the same so interestingly here in a monarchy which is pretty close at this day we have no electoral system here people hadn't chosen by the election of their king she still assumes that there is a choice to be made by people whether they support this other ruler or not and that they deserve to be treated accordingly grotsious several centuries later says to start with the civil community is one body with a sovereign head thus no separation of interest between those of the prince and his subjects should be allowed not only those who actually bear arms who are immediately subjects of the belligerent power are our enemy but even all who are within the hostile territories so interestingly there again the assumption is made that the property of the enemy monarch and the subject of the enemy monarch are all collectively also the enemy's property as such extension of the adversary Cynulleson Baker's hook says the war is an attempt to subjugate the enemy and all that he has by seizing all the power that the sovereign has over the state that is to say by exercising complete dominion over all persons and all things contained in that state but that's a sort of still a benign thing because it doesn't at all suggest that you're going to kill them but it does still have this perception that the population is the sovereign's property so to speak we don't see here this fascinating argument that is made by Christine de Pison that suggests that they have a choice about this much of the contrary both Grotsius and Baker's hook give this impression that basically the subjects are just extensions almost property of the monarch but let's get back to this idea of Christine de Pison which strikes as being much more modern and in some way much more worrying of course in the same way so here this question of are they responsible do they have a choice let me introduce you to the thinking of somebody who was so out of tune with the rest of her environment and the rest of her thinking around her that people spotted her as being very exceptional and appointed her to chair a philosophy in Oxford in the second world war the Catholic philosopher Hanscom who was totally against the bombing strategy that was adopted by the British and of course the Americans in the second world war where she pleaded for a clear distinction by occupation between people who in some way supported the war offered and some people who didn't she said that innocent civilians could be in her opinion identified even in what others called total war they are those who are not fighting and not engage in supplying those who are with the means of fighting a farmer growing wheat which may be eaten by the troops is not supplying them with the means of fighting so she was very clear that there were these different categories I think for many other people and for many of her critics of course this distinction was not as clear cut but there is this position on the very extreme side that you can differentiate and that there are jobs in which you are wholly innocent again on the other end of the spectrum saying that you haven't got anybody innocent but anybody who supports the government who does something that is wrong we will find on the arguments that Islamist terrorists have put forward you find the Osama bin Laden saying that basically if you bomb my population we bomb yours we issue a fatwa to all Muslims the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies civilians and military is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country that is able to do so as an active retribution because he saw that as something he argued that was equivalent it is a fundamental principle of any democracy that the people choose their leaders and as such approve and are parties to the actions of their elected leaders by electing their leaders the American people have given their consent to the incarceration of the Palestinian people and the slaughter of the children of Iraq this is why the American people are not innocent the American people are active members so this assumption here that by having just voted for a particular government in advance you are already making yourself culpable of any later deeds committed so an extreme position there on this long spectrum that I am showing you but also very interestingly in the context of the Yugoslav wars and here in particular the Kosovo campaign air campaign that NATO conducted against Serbia in particular we had Barry Buzan arguing that people get the government they deserve and most a lot of people in this room are too young many of you are not but let me just for the younger ones remind you what happened there the Serbs got so or the rest Yugoslavia population got so angry about this if you were Serb you'd probably feel the same at that stage that they started painting targets on themselves or on their prams or on their hats and things and they deliberately said well NATO is going to bomb us so we are the targets come on bomb us to which Barry Buzan argued that if Serb civilians turned themselves into human civilian shields by occupying key bridges in order to prevent NATO from blowing them up from the air then these Serbs were in his view legitimate targets so here a much greater engagement on the part of the population in support of a particular policy but on the spectrum you can see that this is a debate definitely worth having Lord Guthrie of Craigbank and Sir Michael Quinlan took a slightly different angle on this and they said well let's not talk so much about whether they were responsible for getting a government into power and let's look simply at what they are doing at the time of the confrontation so in their book about just war they said that the concept of innocence as people who should not be deliberate attack does not turn upon whether these individuals in question had any personal responsibility for the evils which are engaging in war is intended to terminate or rectify i.e. let's disregard whether they were involved in voting for that government or anything like that the word innocent they suggested should be used to refer to whether or not they are involved their own willingness or reluctance is not relevant in contributing to do us harm whether in different terminology they are or are not essentially non-combatants a different take on it which makes it easier to distinguish between whether you will try to punish somebody for a decision that they made in the past or even are sustaining in the present or whether you are trying to target them or you will think it is legitimate to go for them because they are actively involved in the war effort so back to the question of the active involvement in the war effort rather than the punitive responsibility for something that happened earlier finally perhaps the philosopher David Lubin who dwelt on this question of whether this is a war can be seen or should be seen as a punishment where he said democratic states may be even more collectively guilty of international crimes and undemocratic ones precisely because their regimes rely more heavily on popular support but we should reject the conception of collective guilt that can lead to the death or maining or loss of possession of anyone in a guilty population anyone here meaning they could indiscriminately take up people irrespective of whether they have supported these war crimes or not so the anyone is the indiscriminate bit nevertheless injustice arises from the fact that the disasters of war are distributed among the enemy population without regard to their individual guilt this gets back to the big question of would there even be a possibility for differentiating in targeting between people who supported that government or people who have not so imagine a situation whereby you had in say Germany in late 1932 I think when the last free elections were when you had whole areas cities even where the popular vote had gone very strongly against the Nazis would you feel that these people were not supporters of the Nazis and therefore deserved punishment less than people in populations and cities who had the great majority voted for the Nazi in those elections but even then of course you'd still have those minorities you'd still have minorities in each side that had sided with the other side could you differentiate how could you make that difference in a way we let more and more to think about the question of whether there might be the means in any way in warfare to distinguish to recap civilians in European history were seen as great treasures to be protected those parts of the population that were the most vulnerable and therefore the most worthy of protection Christianity with its roots in Judaism in this very interesting combination of first of all looking after your own poor started to change that but it took a heck of a long time for this to penetrate it took an even longer time for this to be applied to the populations of enemy countries and to see some sort of distinction and yet there is a standing and very very long debate about whether in fact the population of an enemy country should be seen as innocent or whether they are actually particularly in a democratic system or if they are the subjects of an enemy monarch on any way part of an extension of that enemy should be particularly targeted if they are actually very much part of the enemy to be targeted so you have two parallel traditions from that point onwards on the one hand the tradition of trying to limit the destruction in war the collateral damage the killing of civilian populations to try to limit the effects on civilian populations first just on your own side but increasingly also through international law on the other side we have stand for and in parallel to that a tradition which particularly demonizes the entire enemy population and in any case we are very much left with the question of whether it would even be possible to differentiate between those in the population of an adversarial state who are supporting that state and its war imagine an illegitimate war and those who are silent objectors who are trying to keep out of it and who are not supporting this to end on the context of the Russian war against Ukraine we are beginning to see we have already seen in practice for a long time since 2014 the latest an attempt made to distinguish to punish selectively on supporters of that regime where they can be identified with the sanctions on oligarchs and sanctions on a media who have been particularly prevalent in their campaigning against Ukraine in the context of that war but we also see the application of economic sanctions which more indiscriminately affect the Russians more generally and we have the whole debate about whether Russian citizens should no longer be allowed to come to the European Union countries Finland was leading in that and has imposed its own restrictions on that so that's an indiscriminate if you like targeting and then my question for you and this is where I'm hoping very much that our debate will be of interest what other measures would be appropriate and just as a little tickler for your imagination can you think of ways in which in the future these things can be spread to a larger number of people now before you immediately dismiss that I'm not for a second saying bomb Russian cities from the air or anything like that but we should also start with saying what have the Russians been doing to western countries for quite a while hands up anybody in this audience who has already been subject to Russian hacking internet hacking so I mean there's already stuff going on in that respect people, individuals are identified as saying things which are hostile to the Russian government and at some stage you'll get interesting emails or your friends will get interesting emails and write you nasty letters saying why have you just etc so this is one way of doing this but I think there is much more that can be imagined it is pretty you know all the sort of new technology coming up where we can identify the actual soldiers, where we can identify the actual soldiers who shot off that missile that brought down the Malaysian airline in 2014 well the other side can do that too more and more it is possible to identify people to target people in that particular way and I think there are a lot of things that are already going on think of how Russians have or somebody has nation attempts and some very successful to Russian former spies in the west but all sorts of other things that can be done and that might be done in the future I think it's something that probably is going to come but I still want to leave the question with you what you think would be appropriate to what extent you would formulate that in terms of punishment because they have an opinion that you don't share and they're supporting a regime that you think is wrong and to what extent this would be a more practical way of putting pressure on them in order to stop them from supporting their government and where you can go with this and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion but if you wanted to have more examples of what I've said is all in my book War, a Genealogy and for the purpose of the discussion I'm going to sit down. Thank you very much.