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The adoption of the 1949 Geneva Conventions: a humanitarian break and colonial continuity
More than seven decades after their adoption, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 remain foundational to contemporary international humanitarian law (IHL). Efforts to update their Commentaries testify to both the resilience of the Geneva Conventions and their enduring relevance in modern armed conflicts. Yet the story of their making is inseparable from the longer history of the law of armed conflict, which developed in the late nineteenth century within a deeply hierarchical international legal order. From the perspective of colonized states and territories, that history reveals a persistent…
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