It is surprising that it took so long for someone to provide a general alternative to the Whiggish histories of the law of war that begin at some point in the (usually very distant) past in order to celebrate good people struggling for present conceptual frames and humanizing agendas. In conceiving her important new book, Helen Kinsella has understandably reacted with intellectual outrage to—and recognized theoretical opportunity in—the fact that many books on the history of the law of war narrate the past teleologically, so as to provide deep authority for improvised current attempts to make war more mild. To this presentist approach, Kinsella deploys a genealogical alternative, and often to good effect. Most boldly, she claims that the very notion of the “civilian” legally immunized from combat is hard to find in the annals of law.

The Image before the Weapon starts out in the medieval period and runs forward over some crucial turning points in the elaboration of the law of war, pausing with early modern natural law theorists like Hugo Grotius and Francisco de Vitoria, moving to the modern turn in the American Civil War to codify standards, and touching on later international treaties through the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to update the applicable rules. It culminates in two chapters respectively exploring the additional protocols inspired and crafted largely by postcolonial states in 1977 and the ways in which the legal regulations functioned in the Latin American civil wars of the decade that followed.

What Kinsella has achieved is more interesting, however, as an episodic look by an often-learned theorist achieving purchase on current affairs than as a full or responsible alternative history of the laws of war since medieval times. She relies exclusively on English-language materials to mount her case, and when she uses foreign languages in the text, even at the level of the short phrase, she often mangles them. In the author's defense, she presents her book as a “critical history” rather than a general history, and she focuses solely on how the category of the civilian came about. And in compensation for what historians will regard as a relatively weak interest in reconstructing the past in a full-bodied way, the book shines for destabilizing common theoretical assumptions about the trajectory of the law of war, after a generation in which political theorists like Michael Walzer reduced it to a series of precedents instrumentally marshaled in their own controversial attempt to moralize the conduct of war. Kinsella answers their presentist appeals to the past with her own “history of the present.”

The author's overall thesis is that the laws of war embedded what she repeatedly calls “discourses of gender, civilization, and innocence” in the immunization of categories of people from the status of combatant long before the formal designation of civilian was finally and explicitly hewn out in 1977. “Every norm possesses a history, the marks of which remain,” Kinsella observes. Her most important point in this book, in this spirit, is that the distinction between combatants and noncombatants is “at once reflective and productive of a desired social order” (p. 102).

One is hardly surprised, of course, to discover that societies committed to stark understandings of the hierarchy between males and females or the civilized and the savage developed what now seem very problematic notions of immunity in warfare. Kinsella's text occasionally takes on an air of theoretical “critique” that can seem misplaced when its main opponents are not present commentators but past actors. It is uninformative at this late date to complain about medieval knights and their successors who fell prey to gender and orientalist bias. The author's strenuous efforts are diffuse in some chapters. But cumulatively, she is enormously successful in showing that by screening these features out, contemporary theorists have created a usable past, rather than focusing on how different the historical regulation of warfare was and how improvisational we are in humanizing war in our highly particular ways. For example, she is devastating in her criticism of the strange nostalgia that affects some accounts of medieval chivalry.

Many readers nevertheless will suppose that precisely because immunization from combat occurred through the law of war in various ways in Western history, the category of “civilian” was implicit and incipient throughout. Kinsella herself—in spite of her insistence on the novelty of the category of civilian—refers to “the development of the distinction between combatant and civilian” before the twentieth century dawned (p. 115). These same readers will hope that a progressive story is available as the unfortunate accretions on immunity were dropped in order to afford civilian protection as thoroughly as possible. Kinsella forecloses this hope. Civilization as rational masculinity—and its implications for gender order and cultural difference—remains. Current events suggest that she has a point.

The chapter on the anticolonialist revolt in international law may nevertheless understate how effectively the laws of war could be made to serve subversive purposes. Frantz Fanon certainly did denounce Europe's “colonial humanism.” But in expanding the protections of the laws of war for irregular forces, as Kinsella observes, other subaltern internationalists creatively turned the tools of the civilizers in a new direction, rather than abandoning them as fatally compromised by their past (p. 135). Ultimately, however, Kinsella subordinates this coverage to her persistent focus on the indeterminacy (it would have been better to say underdetermination) of the distinction between combatant and civilian and its still-gendered foundations. As a result, her chapter on anticolonialist revisions of the law of war in 1977 offers a vivid primer in how a critical account of the law of war in Western history could lead in various directions, and this book exemplifies only one.

In fact, there is one respect in which Kinsella might remain too bound up with the presentist articulations of the law of war she wants to oppose. At one point, as if it were a surprising fact, she notes that for “the supposed founders of the just war traditions,” St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, “there is the barest attention paid to the specifics of conduct within wars” (p. 36). But as a matter of fact, until the nineteenth century the pride of place in the moralization and regulation of war always fell on its initiation rather than its fighting, as for these “founders,” and was to do so again from the close of World War I through the Nuremberg trials down to the Vietnam era (the author does not mention Nuremberg except to mistakenly call it “the US Military Tribunal at Nuremberg” [p. 111]). In a fascinating but brief interlude, Kinsella shows how anticolonialists attempted to preserve the concern with just war even as the rise of human rights in international politics drove the law of war more and more in the direction of neutral humanitarian protection. Her very finding that concern for civilian populations per se came about in its current formulations only recently shows why exclusive emphasis on the conduct of war in general, and immunization of noncombatant categories in particular, distorts the law of war more and more the further back in history one goes. If so, another critique to make of the contemporary law of war is not for the legacies of discourses of gender and civilization, as Kinsella intelligently demonstrates, but for its marginalization of the project of restraining war itself, its central objective until yesterday.