Helen M. Kinsella

Settler Empire and the Laws of War

I argue the early laws of war (GO100) facilitated settler colonial violence by defining modern war as a public war, arrogating it to sovereign states; distinguishing revenge from retaliation, attributing revenge to the ‘savage’; and elevating a certain racialized/gendered governance, ascribing it to the Cis-Caucasian race. Producing Native peoples and Native wars as lacking in the proper characteristics of sovereign belligerency resulted in a subordination of status and a legitimation of exterminatory tactics which were subsequently universalized and (re)internationalized through GO100’s determinative influence on the laws of war.

Helen Kinsella is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She holds affiliate faculty positions in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. She was previously an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and an affiliate in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2005 to 2018. Helen held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the New York University School of Law, and postdoctoral and predoctoral appointments at Stanford University and Harvard University. In 2023, she will be the Fulbright U.S. Friends of Queen’s University Belfast Distinguished Scholar. I have a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a BA in Political Science and Gender Studies from Bryn Mawr College.