Citation

Horne J. Int. Soc. Sci. J. 2002; 54(174): 483-490.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, UNESCO, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/1468-2451.00402

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Since the eighteenth century, relations between civilian populations and wartime violence have passed through three stages. First, the politicisation of war. The leveé en masse, an invention of the French Revolution, involves a total mobilisation of the population for war - an idea that reached its zenith in the twentieth century's two World Wars. The same logic of total mobilisation turns the enemy population as a whole into a legitimate target of military violence. Second, the industrial revolution and technological progress have made it possible to unleash unprecedented destructive power against civilians. Last, in the half century following the Second World War, the politicisation and industrialisation of war have been altering (and redressing) the substantial military imbalance between Europe and the European colonies. Extreme violence against civilian populations results in part from these changes in the way war is waged. However, it is also a product of how ‘normality’ is defined in warfare and the perception by contemporaries that, under certain circumstances, such norms are completely inva-lid. Extreme violence constitutes, so to speak, an ‘extreme moment’ in war.