In this article, I aim to reorient debates, in International Relations and Law, about the relationship between law and war. In the last decade, writers have challenged common understandings of law as a limit on, or moderator of, warfare. They have instead claimed that law is often used as a ‘weapon of warfare’, describing such uses as ‘lawfare’. Below, rather than arguing that law is either a constraint on or an enabler of warfare, I examine how law comes to be represented as such. Specifically, I examine representations, primarily by US military and other governmental lawyers, of ‘non-Western’ invocations of the laws of war, which seek to constrain the policies or practices of the US or Israeli governments. I show how these authors cast such invocations as not law at all, but as tools of war. I suggest that this move rests on, and reproduces, colonial discourses of ‘non-Western’ legal inadequacy or excess, which serve to render ‘non-Western’ law ‘violent’ or ‘war-like’. I show that the referents and boundaries of law and war are stabilised by notions of civilisational difference, which serve to give meaning to what law is, what war is, and whether particular claims or practices are understood as martial or legal.

中文翻译：

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“法律”、美国军事话语、法律与战争的殖民宪法

在本文中，我旨在重新定位国际关系和法律中关于法律与战争之间关系的辩论。在过去的十年里，作家们挑战了人们对法律作为战争的限制或缓和的普遍理解。相反，他们声称法律经常被用作“战争武器”，将此类用途描述为“法律”。下面，我并没有争论法律要么是对战争的限制，要么是战争的推动者，而是研究法律是如何被如此表述的。具体来说，我主要研究了美国军方和其他政府律师对“非西方”援引战争法的陈述，这些法律试图限制美国或以色列政府的政策或做法。我展示了这些作者如何将这些调用完全不是法律，而是作为战争工具。我建议这一举措基于并再现，关于“非西方”法律不足或过度的殖民话语，使“非西方”法律“暴力”或“类似战争”。我表明，法律和战争的参照物和界限被文明差异的概念所稳定，这有助于赋予法律是什么、战争是什么以及特定的主张或实践被理解为军事还是合法的意义。