CWS TCD: workshop soldiers & civilians
1
Soldiers and Civilians in Combat:
Norms and Excesses
Workshop organized by the Centre for War Studies, TCD.
11:00-17:30, Friday, 24th April 2009: Arts Building, 6th Floor, Room C6002
The relationship between soldiers and civilians in combat is one of the
most fraught in warfare. Even the terms beg a clarity of distinction that is often
missing in reality. And where a sharp separation of status and function is
accepted between those who bear arms and those who do not, the latter may still
become the target of violence for a variety or reasons – their perceived potential
to engage in combat, the supply of goods, materials and intangible support to the
enemy armies, or the fact that in wars of extermination they represent the
ultimate target of violence. Yet norms of warfare and codes of military conduct
have also tended to designate civilians (and especially non-combatants) as the
objects of particular consideration, a tendency that was exemplified in the long
19th century by the development of humanitarian codes of international law
designed to regulate and limit the violence of armed forces towards civilians in
combat and under military occupation. The ways in which the two world wars
comprehensively breached such distinctions by the extension of mass,
indiscriminate violence towards civilians profoundly shocked contemporaries and
impelled them to redraft the norms of war in order to outlaw the excesses of the
recent conflicts – a process which resumed with particular intensity after the end
of the Cold War in the 1990s. But perhaps the relationship between moral, legal
and religious norms that seek to restrain military behaviour towards noncombatants and the violence of combat that tends to transgress those same
norms is a perennial dialectic in the history of warfare. That, at any rate, is the
proposition that we hope to test by a day’s discussion ranging from classical
antiquity to the 20th century and across wars in Ireland, Europe and the colonial
world.
CWS TCD: workshop soldiers & civilians
2
11:00-11:30: Registration and introduction by John Horne (Professor of
Modern European History and Director of the Centre for War Studies, TCD)
11:30-13:00: Colonial and European civil wars in the early twentieth
century.
Dr Claudia Siebrecht (Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for War Studies, TCD):
Mass Killing, Genocide and Concentration Camps: Colonial Warfare and
Violence in South Africa and South-West Africa, 1902-1910. siebrec@tcd.ie
Dr Julia Eichenberg (Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for War Studies, TCD):
The Dark Side of Independence. Violence against Civilians in Ireland and
Poland, 1918-1923. eichenbj@tcd.ie
14:00-15:30: The seventeenth century.
Dr Micheal O Siochru (Department of History, TCD): Cromwell in Ireland.
Civilians and Soldiers in the Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1649-1653.
m.osiochru@tcd.ie
Dr Jane Finucane (History Division, University of Glamorgan): The Thirty
Years’ War: Tradition and Reform in the Conduct of Siege Warfare.
jfinucan@glam.ac.uk
16:00-17:30: Ancient and medieval warfare.
Dr Alexander Thein (School of Classics, UCD): The Civilian Experience of
War in Late Republican Rome. alexander.thein@ucd.ie
Dr Conor Kostick (Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Medieval Studies, TCD):
The Muslim Inhabitants of Jerusalem on the Fall of the City to the First
Crusade, 1099. kosticc@tcd.ie
17:30-17:45: Conclusions by Alan Kramer (Professor of European History at
TCD).
Format
This is a workshop, not a mini-colloquium. Preparation should be light, and
the aim is to provide maximum time for discussion with no intention to publish
proceedings. Presentations should be 15-20 minutes at most, allowing up to
50 minutes discussion in each session. A brief typed summary would be
helpful on the day, but there will be no pre-circulation of papers. Lunch and
coffee will be provided, with a small fee to cover these except for paper-givers.
Wine reception and launches
The workshop will be followed by a wine reception (18:00-19:00) in the space
outside the seminar room at which the book which emanated from a
conference organized by History postgraduates at TCD will be launched:
Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian, eds.,
Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
This will be followed (with yet more wine) by a launch of the Centre for War
Studies.
The day will conclude with dinner on a self-financing basis at a reasonablypriced city centre restaurant.
CWS TCD: workshop soldiers & civilians
Workshop convenors: Professor John Horne (Director of the CWS). Tel.
(00.353.1) 896.1011: email: jhorne@tcd.ie, and Dr Edward Madigan,
administrator and Postdoctoral Fellow of the CWS: edward.madigan@tcd,ie
3