Decolonising the Civilian in Third World National Liberation Wars

Abstract

Within international humanitarian law (IHL) the legal figure of the civilian is conceived as a passive victim of war in need of protection, while civilians who become actively involved in hostilities lose their protections. The distinction between civilians and combatants is accordingly a fundamental principle informing IHL and is considered a standard of civilisation and humane warfare. This paper interrogates what happens when this standard is applied to anticolonial wars, where entire civilian populations participated in self-emancipatory violence and actively blurred this distinction in order to advance their own liberation. Advancing a theory aimed at decolonising the legal figure of the civilian, I analyse the specific nature of anticolonial violence and the call of anticolonial thinkers to deliberately undermine the distinction between civilians and combatants. Building on the ethos of civilian participation articulated by different anticolonial thinkers and adopting a ‘revisionist’ approach, I argue that the passive conception of the civilian at the heart of the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols faces the risk of outlawing anticolonial violence and its political ethos of liberation.

Décoloniser la figure du civil dans les guerres de libération nationale du tiers monde

Guerrilla fighter,

Servant of the oppressed,

Exploited masses,

The masses around you –

They are your camouflage,

They are your quartermaster,

They are your recruiting officer,

Your communications network,

Your efficient, with-many-hands

Intelligence service.

Never let them down,

They are your master.

N. Mathema, in Zimbabwe’s People’s Voice, 1978

The poem addresses the guerrilla fighters in the Zimbabwean people’s war against Ian Smith’s settler-colonial regime. Its meaning epitomises a crucial characteristic of anticolonial wars: the inter-dependence between civilians and combatants in armed efforts for liberation from imperial and colonial forms of domination. ¹ This ethos of self-emancipatory violence through the intermingling between the international humanitarian law categories of civilians and combatants was not particular to any specific colonial context. Rather, we could say that it constituted a global anticolonial political culture and system of civilian-military institutions and values developed throughout decades of Third World national liberation wars. In fact, all anticolonial movements – from South America, through Africa, to Asia; in spite of their ideological and operational differences – deployed methods of warfare in which civilians and combatants operated in synergy. These methods were crucial to overcome the asymmetry of force Third World peoples faced in colonial wars, allowing colonised peoples to defeat Western colonial powers.

Scholars dealing with the politics of decolonisation from different disciplinary trajectories have not engaged with the legal-political fulcrum of anticolonial warfare: civilian participation in the armed struggle. In this article I want to fill this lacuna by developing a new theory of decolonisation of the legal figure of the civilian. I want to ask: what is so unsettling and disturbing in this mode of organisation of self-emancipatory violence? Is it that civilian participation in collective violence is part of a project of universal justice that emancipated the majority of the Third World by transgressing the foundations of international humanitarian law? Is it that this ethos of anticolonial emancipatory violence violates the principle of distinction between civilian and combatants, while relying on the distinction itself to ‘undo’ and re-articulate it into the political-military unity of masses and fighters? Or is it a combination of these conundrums?

Distinguishing between civilians and combatants is the bedrock of the international humanitarian law. ² All members of a population who are not part of organised armed forces are considered civilians. After being initially formulated in the late 19th century, the process of codification of the principle of distinction intensified in the first half of the 20th century, under the aegis of Western powers and the International Committee of the Red Cross, especially in response to the horrors of two World Wars. ³ Colonised nations were not involved in the process until they acquired self-determination and full recognition at the United Nations. The Western-led codification effort resulted into the institutionalisation of the figure of the civilian, protecting it from intentional targeting to reduce the brutality of armed conflicts. Simultaneously, combatants engaged in the use of lethal force are also protected from inhumane treatment, while being asked to actively separate themselves from civilians. ⁴ In other words, combatants are conceived in international law as active actors in the battlefield. In contrast, civilians are codified as passive actors, as bystanders. ⁵ Active combatants can be legally killed; while passive non-combatants must be spared from the use of lethal force unless they cease to be peaceful and commit acts which amount to ‘direct participation in hostilities’. ⁶ The polarisation of active combatants versus passive civilians has overshadowed the question of civilian agency. ⁷

Distinction was actively transgressed in many intra-European conflicts between Western countries in the late 19th and early 20th century. ⁸ Scholars examined how occupied Western populations in Europe have responded to Western occupations through forms of asymmetric warfare in which combatants and civilians deliberately intermingled. ⁹ Much less attention has been dedicated to how anticolonial warfare has blurred the separation between civilians and combatants, and its unique legal-political meaning. The few scholars who focused on the topic tended to analyse this challenge through the prism of the 1973–7 Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts, the first international legal-political forum which included former colonies and anticolonial resistance groups in discussions on distinction. These scholars concluded that, during those 4 years, Third World anticolonialists ultimately adapted to the principle of distinction. ¹⁰

However, this ‘reformist’ prism is both temporally and heuristically problematic. The anticolonial transgression of distinction has taken decades to coalesce into a specific political culture that is irreducibly antagonistic – rather than diplomatic and reconciliatory – towards international humanitarian law. In fact, whereas European nationalists who fought European occupiers did not juxtapose their partisan warfare to Western conceptions laws of war; in Third World anticolonial warfare, the blurring of the principle of distinction translated into a form of legal-political disobedience against Western domination. Transforming civilians into active masses involved in self-emancipatory armed struggle, was conceived by anticolonial movements and theorists as a way to resist the indiscriminate brutality of colonial war, and, even more crucially, as the sine qua non for abolishing the condition of political subjection and passivity into which colonised peoples had been forced by Western powers for centuries. ¹¹ In this way, they challenged the principle of distinction through a praxis of active anticolonial indistinction that put the principle of distinction in crisis from a very peculiar anticolonial position in which the legal and political agency of civilians overlapped. It is precisely this Third World challenge to the principle of distinction and the framing of the civilian as a passive subject – produced, as it were, by the Western world – which I seek to explore in my theory of decolonisation of the civilian.

Thus, what do I mean by ‘decolonising the civilian’ in this article? The notion of decolonisation is polysemic. It has multiple political meanings: the abolition of international racial hierarchies, the political recognition of national-sovereignty in the international arena, the liberation of lands from settlers, the protection and affirmation of indigenous cultures against colonial erasure, or many of these and other decolonial practices together. Third World emancipatory violence played a key role in cementing these multiple meanings of decolonisation, providing them with global legitimacy. Indeed, for the first time in history, and with unprecedented geographical extension, between the 1940s and the 1970s – the key historical period of decolonisation wars analysed in this article – Third World colonised peoples systematised their methods of anticolonial warfare and, excluding few exceptions, achieved self-determination. But whereas anticolonial self-determination has acquired an indisputable degree of global political and legal legitimacy, ¹² the key emancipatory means through which this legitimacy has been achieved – namely the Third World ethos of active indistinction – are still irreconcilable with international humanitarian law.

Decolonising the legal figure of the civilian thus means to decolonise the anticolonial means of decolonisation. It means to articulate the peculiar characteristics of anticolonial civilian participation in self-emancipatory violence – including in its transgression of the principle of distinction – as a global political project of justice. This requires an explanation of how this political conception of indistinction beyond the law, allowed the colonised to challenge colonial subjection and alienation. And, ultimately, it means to acknowledge that for colonised peoples the transgression of the legal distinction between civilians and combatants has a fundamental liberatory potential.

My theory of decolonisation of the civilian develops as follows. In the first section, I situate my contribution within the existing scholarly efforts to decolonise international law, stressing its originality. In the second section, I engage with civilian participation through the work of Mao Tse-Tung and explore the ‘primordial’ political-legal question raised by anti-imperial and anticolonial armed struggles: what I call the threat of anticolonial indistinction. In the third section I explain via Frantz Fanon how anticolonial indistinction through civilian mass violence in decolonisation wars – in spite of the similarities with European national liberation wars – presented a unique element of what I call anticolonial ‘de-passivisation’ of the civilian. In the fourth section, I offer a ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the process that led to the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. I examine why a reformist understanding of the historical tension between decolonisation wars and international humanitarian law misses the crucial point for a theory of the decolonisation of the civilian: that anticolonial civilian participation transcended the law and its liberal symmetric application to decolonisation wars. In the fourth and conclusive section, examining neglected sources on anticolonial indistinction, I explain how anticolonial civilian participation in self-emancipatory violence was not a marginal and radical conception of minoritarian anticolonial political actors and thinkers in a reformist anticolonial sea. I conclude by showing how the anticolonial deliberate transgression of international humanitarian law was an institutionalised ethos that pooled together different and distant experiences of liberation from colonial domination. Civilian participation in liberation struggles was central to the political culture of decolonisation developed in the new socio-political realities created by Third World national liberation wars.

Decolonising International Law Through Indistinction

My theorisation of the decolonisation of the legal figure of the civilian builds on a consolidated tradition of legal decolonial thought, while trying to challenge some of its limitations and silences in thinking anticolonial violence and its relation to the law. A vast literature has explored the deep intimacy between colonialism, imperialism and Western-centric international law. ¹³ In one of the foundational works of Third World Approaches to International Law, Anthony Anghie pointed out how the Western idea of ‘civilising mission’ has permeated the historical development of international law, from Francisco da Vitoria to the war on terror. The racialising principle of ‘cultural difference’ has ultimately facilitated the subjection of the non-White world to White control and authority, while silencing native forms of resistance. ¹⁴

Decolonising the master’s legal tools is a paradoxical process ¹⁵ which can obfuscate the co-opting force of international law. ¹⁶ The ‘integration’ of the colonised in the society of nations through the acquisition of national sovereignty during the last century, is often interpreted as a progressive corrective to the unequal legal structure of the global order. However, as scholars have persuasively argued, inclusive national self-determination processes did not shake the colonial and imperial roots of international law. ¹⁷ When the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations, the question of reproduction of the colonial hierarchy informing the international arena remained alive. ¹⁸ B. S. Chimni warned that the threat of ‘recolonisation’ persists through the erosion of Third World states’ authority. ¹⁹ These critiques have generated calls for the decolonisation of international law, ²⁰ because, to say it in Anne Orford’s words, ‘questioning the extent to which decolonization has ever fully taken place [. . .] remains a critical intervention in contemporary global politics’. ²¹

This line of decolonial interrogation can be applied to anticolonial armed struggles in which civilians were actively and strategically involved in the fighting. In the 19th century, colonised peoples were systematically portrayed by colonial powers as inhumane ‘savages’ that could not understand the laws of war. ²² At the beginning of the 20th century non-Western societies were still framed as peoples deliberately ignoring the principle of distinction between civilians and combatants at their own advantage. ²³ There were no civilians in non-Western societies subjected to colonial warfare, and the development of Western-centric laws of war took place through the exclusion of non-European peoples from their application. Indigenous non-abidance by the laws of war was framed as an innate characteristic of colonised peoples and used to justify indiscriminate forms of violence in genocidal colonial wars, where millions of civilians were killed. ²⁴ To put it differently, the colonial development of the laws of war translated an ontological aversion for anticolonial mass resistance in which civilians got involved. By ontological aversion, I mean the Western-centric radical refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the anticolonial use of collective armed struggle. The colonised was always framed as the radical other whose violence is irrational, unethical and ultimately illegal.

We might then ask: was the legal figure of the civilian ever decolonised? The short answer is no, since decolonisation never translated into a full decolonisation of the means through which the Third World resist Western powers. Indeed, even though most colonial projects ended over half a century ago, the Western-centric colonial rationale continues to inform contemporary conflicts, in particular the war on terror. ²⁵ Colonial warfare, its doctrines and its legal arguments are still alive in the post-9/11 world. ²⁶ In spite of the formal inclusion of the colonised into the ‘fold of the laws of war’ after World War II, the question of ‘savage violence’ persists until today. ²⁷ In fact, hi-tech state militaries maintain that ‘insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’ operating in the ex-colonies emulate their ancestors, hiding behind or involving civilians while ignoring the principle of distinction. ²⁸ The persistence of this discourse on civilian participation – which we might call civilian coloniality – in a formally post-colonial world makes the decolonisation of the civilian urgent.

Some important foundations have been laid to carry this decolonisation work. Critical legal studies have deconstructed the colonial and Western-centric origins of what constitutes legitimate or illegitimate use of lethal force in the laws of war. They showed how the racial and gender hierarchies sustaining global colonial governance have structured the laws of war and the category of civilian. ²⁹ They analysed the emergence of the category of civilian as a new way of seeing non-combatants that surfaced from the World Wars; and they persuasively argued that anticolonial resistance led to a reformulation of the laws of war. ³⁰ During decolonisation wars and the accompanying diplomatic conference on the application and review of the Geneva Conventions – in particular the debates leading to the promulgation of the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Conventions – the anticolonialists challenged ‘the privileging of the rights of the [colonial] occupiers over those of resistant civilians’, while fighting for the acceptance of their armed struggle as a just war. ³¹ They forced Western powers and legal scholars to acknowledge that non-European colonised peoples were also entitled to the application of distinction.

However, these approaches have limited themselves to the diplomatic conversations and have not engaged in depth with the foundational legal, ethical and political ‘heresy’ of the deliberate non-observance of the principle of distinction by colonised peoples when they liberated themselves from colonialism and imperialism. This deliberate non-observance was theorised by a range of neglected anticolonial thinkers who developed rules, norms and a political ethos of national liberation in which colonised civilians became indistinguishable from anticolonial freedom fighters. What is eclipsed is that due to the radical inequalities on the ground and in the law, decolonisation happened through indistinction – rather than distinction – between colonised civilians and combatants.

The Threat of Anticolonial Indistinction

Whereas scholars have explored how civilian involvement became a strategic tool in intra-European wars, much less attention has been paid to how indistinction was progressively articulated in anticolonial wars and thinking as a threat to the legal-political order. This is particularly interesting if we consider that anticolonial violence resorting to people’s wars, guerrilla and partisan warfare against colonial and imperial domination has a long history which dates back to at least the 16th century. Native resistance against the Spanish conquest of the Americas as well as French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, and British imperialism and colonialism in North America, Africa and Asia was quite systematic, often resorting to people’s wars, guerrilla and partisan warfare which involved civilians. However, it was only in the 20th century – during the wave of decolonisation wars that took place between the 1940s and the end of the 1970s – that anticolonial armed struggle became widespread and organised across different imperial and colonial territories. It was during these thirty years that colonised civilians coalesced into a global political project of liberation that challenged the international legal-political order through self-emancipatory violence.

The seeds were planted in the previous decades. The aftermath of World War I led to the re-adjustment of the colonial and imperial order, ³² but also to the diffusion of a global anticolonial consciousness. The proliferation of rebellions and revolts in the colonial peripheries and the difficulties of the empires in consolidating their sovereignty, marked the emergence of an ethos of transnational resistance to colonial and imperial rule. ³³ During the interwar period the circulation of ideas which treated imperialism and colonialism as co-substantial with slavery allowed for the development of an ‘expansive critique of colonial rule’ that challenged the international racial hierarchies left intact by the Mandate System and the League of Nations. ³⁴ This critique progressively developed into global armed confrontation with colonialism and imperialism.

The 1931 Japanese invasion of Chinese Manchuria (which led to the Second Sino Japanese War of 1937–45) and the 1935 Italian colonial aggression against Ethiopia – one of the few black sovereign states at the League of Nations – which triggered the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1935–6), eroded the legitimacy to the League and its imperial mandate system. ³⁵ These events also marked two formative moments in the transformation of anticolonial violence into a global legal-political challenge. In Ethiopia, the anticolonial resistance resorted to practices of guerrilla warfare which involved civilians in the armed struggle. ³⁶ The fascist aggression against a member state of the League of Nations triggered an international legal debate about the methods used by the two parties, in particular the question of distinction between combatants and non-combatants. ³⁷ On the one hand, the Ethiopians reiterated the legitimacy of a defensive way of war which involved the entire population and required civilian sacrifice. ³⁸ On the other hand, the Italians framed Ethiopian anticolonial violence as a ‘grotesque and ludicrous’ method of warfare that deliberately and perfidiously violated the ‘moral and legal’ principle of distinction. ³⁹

However, while in Ethiopia it was mainly state regular troops that fought the fascists, it was in Manchuria – thus in a war between China and Japanese imperialist forces – that self-emancipatory violence was consolidated into a theory of national liberation in which the figure of the civilian acquired a central role. Indeed, in Manchuria, Mao Tse-Tung developed the key tenets of his people’s war theory. He built on the Marxist-Leninist tradition of people’s revolution while providing it with an arsenal of new non-Western anticolonial concepts and meanings. Mao was an attentive observer of other anti-imperial and anticolonial wars. He admired the Ethiopian resistance against the fascists for its capacity to involve the entire population, but he considered it still too dependent on traditional military thinking. According to Mao, the Ethiopians lost because their anticolonial violence wasn’t mobile and irregular enough. ⁴⁰ Therefore, in his vision, the Chinese people had to develop a deeper combination of popular mobilisation and mobile guerrilla warfare.

The people were defined by Mao as a multitude equipped with spears. ⁴¹ They were a mass of civilians in arms that had to be organised politically and militarily in order to resist Japanese imperialism. ⁴² China had to develop its own ‘laws of revolutionary warfare, and, given their anti-imperial and anticolonial function’, these laws could not be ‘copied from abroad [from Western laws of war manuals]’. ⁴³ In fact, if the Chinese resistance had adopted the laws of war developed by Western powers it ‘shall be “cutting the feet to fit the shoes” and be defeated’. ⁴⁴ Through its constitution of civilian base areas, its rejection of fixed battle lines, its constant mobility and invitation to civilians ‘to cross the threshold [of distinction between combatants and non-combatants]’ and become soldiers, Mao’s method of warfare could not adapt to the canons of Western-centric international law and military doctrines.

From Mao’s dialectical-materialist perspective, the mobilisation of the entire people in the armed struggle was a practice of anti-imperial resistance through which new non-Western laws of war could be generated ‘actively to change the world’. ⁴⁵ Civilian mobilisation and participation in the war effort acquired the meaning of an act of destabilisation of Western international legal-political hierarchies. This is the key reason behind Mao’s global fortune among anticolonial armed groups and the widespread adoption of his works and teachings as tools of anticolonial liberatory violence. Authors like Carl Schmitt have reflected on Mao’s idea of civilian participation in the context of partisan warfare, downplaying Mao’s anticolonial influence. ⁴⁶ They have interpreted Mao’s people’s war within a Eurocentric genealogy. ⁴⁷ But crucially, for the peoples at risk of disappearance under the brutality of forms of colonial violence often justified through legal arguments, the Maoist concept of people’s war provided a decisive weapon able to unite different groups of colonised civilians into a project of resistance against Western domination. That of the entire people at war was an idea which allowed to translate self-emancipatory violence into the power to imagine and create new liberated communities and independent institutions. ⁴⁸ Through this idea, the colonised civilians who got involved in the people’s war could shape their own laws of war which allowed them to think of and affirm a future as decolonised citizens.

Anticolonial revolutionaries read the works of Guevara, Lenin and other thinkers on popular mobilisation and guerrilla warfare. But Mao’s ‘civilian-centric’ anticolonial thinking circulated among the colonised peoples in Africa and Asia with incomparable extension. ⁴⁹ It inspired the national liberation wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. ⁵⁰ It provided the ‘bible’ for guerrilla training camps in Tanzania, Zambia, Ghana, Congo, Egypt and Algeria, ⁵¹ which prepared anticolonial fighters and cadres from more than a dozen African countries. ⁵² In Asia, it guided the Vietnamese national liberation war against French colonialism and US imperialism. Its influence extended to Malaya, the Philippines, and Thailand. ⁵³ In the Arab world, the Maoist doctrine of people’s war was adopted across different factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and it received the support by states like Egypt as a tool of liberation from Israel’s military occupation. ⁵⁴ It also reached South America, becoming the ideological pivot of tricontinental national liberation struggles after the 1966 Havana conference. ⁵⁵

Crucially for our theory of the decolonisation of the figure of the civilian, indistinction progressively became a global project of justice. Mao’s ideas about anticolonial civilian participation circulated in the Global South after World War II, in a key historical moment in which the principle of national self-determination translated into an international right upheld by the United Nations. For the first time in history, in this period there was a majority of organised and interconnected Third World peoples who mobilised together and reclaimed their right to use violence in order to disintegrate the international racial hierarchies that had survived World War II, and join the international society of nations. ⁵⁶ Progressively, national liberation wars were discussed at the UN General Assembly and people’s wars acquired international political legitimacy. ⁵⁷ Civilian mobilisation and participation in the armed struggle became the key weapon used by the anticolonial international alliance in order to become free from colonial and imperial domination. It is in post-World War II decolonisation wars that for the first time the figure of the colonised civilian and active anticolonial indistinction posed a universal threat to the Western global rule sustained by existing international law.

This encounter between civilian-centric people’s wars and the international explosion of the colonial question is the point of departure of my theory of decolonisation of the civilian. It is the primordial manifestation of the threat of active anticolonial indistinction posed by a majority of Third World colonised peoples against a minority of Western colonial and imperial states. It is the threat of a ‘sea’ of colonised civilians directly supporting, hiding and camouflaging the guerrilla ‘fishes’ across different continents, colonies and imperial peripheries. It is thus the threat of the potential destruction of the political order dominated by colonial states through the violation of one of the key tenets – distinction – of those very laws of war that, as we have seen before, colonial and imperial powers often used to justify their domination over the Third World. Whereas for the coloniser indistinction was savagery and it reiterated the savage legal-political status of the colonised; for the colonised, indistinction through mass civilian participation in self-emancipatory violence was, to put it with Frantz Fanon, a crucial element of the ‘agenda for total disorder’ of decolonisation. ⁵⁸

De-passivising the Colonised Civilian

This ‘seismic’ global appearance of active anticolonial indistinction took place in a context in which people’s wars, guerrillas and partisan warfare were conceived by ‘formal-legalistic’ and realist interpretations of international law as ‘anarchy’. According to these state-centric theories, civilians must remain ‘mute’ and abstain from any participation in violence, which had to remain an affair of state militaries. ⁵⁹ The Geneva Conventions of 1949 tried to strike a balance between the rights of combatants and the right of civilians, codifying a series of norms of distinction between the two legal figures to prevent the repetition of the horrific violence of World War II. ⁶⁰ But this institutionalisation of protections consolidated the idea that civilians are passive victims. In other words, the humanitarian norms instituted by the 1949 Conventions continued configuring civilians as non-active actors that should remain passive in order not to lose their protections. ⁶¹ It is in this legal-political landscape that the figure of the ‘undisciplined’ colonised civilian involved in self-emancipatory violence made its appearance: in antagonistic antithesis to the passive civilian victim of international law.

Certainly, the practices of irregular warfare and civilian involvement deployed by the colonised were not a new military, political and legal phenomenon. Sibylle Scheipers demonstrated that irregular warfare was used ‘in most modern wars, both in Europe and beyond, and that hence the categorial distinction between “old”, “normal” or “big” wars and “new”, “other” or “small” (irregular) wars is neither accurate nor helpful’. ⁶² She adds that irregular warfare in the colonies was not qualitatively different from European wars. ⁶³ However, in spite of the similarities between people’s wars, partisan wars and irregular warfare deployed in anti-Nazi-fascist resistance in Europe and in anticolonial resistance against Europe, a crucial qualitative difference for the development of a theory of the decolonised civilian exists between the two phenomena. This difference has to do with the specific way in which colonised subjects are conceived in colonial contexts; and with what civilian participation does to this conception.

As theorised by Frantz Fanon, the colonial situation is one in which divisions, fragmentations and the violence that enforces them are based on ‘what species, what race one belongs to’. ⁶⁴ In this Manichean world the native is ‘declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values’. ⁶⁵ The colonised is a passive subject about which the colonist speaks in ‘zoological terms’. ⁶⁶ This situation is quite specific to colonial contexts and finds no correspondence in the people’s wars that took place in Europe. A systematic articulation of the ordinary civilian as marked by zoological inferiority and passivity was not a decisive element in the political contexts of Europe’s national liberation wars. Crucially, anticolonial self-emancipatory violence is a response to this specific condition. It constitutes, in Fanon’s vision, a rediscovery of humanity that makes the people – the civilians who are daily subjected to colonial dehumanisation – ‘sharpen their weapons to secure their victory’. ⁶⁷ Self-emancipatory violence becomes a rediscovery of the reality after alienation for the colonised. It ‘rids colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence’. ⁶⁸ Getting involved in violence against the colonised is an ‘absolute praxis’. Becoming an active civilian has a generative force. It constitutes a form of conscientisation through violence – a political education that brings together isolated and ‘passivised’ individuals into a self-liberating collectivity:

For the colonized violence is invested with positive, formative features because it constitutes their only work. This violent praxis is totalizing since each individual represent a violent link in the great chain, in the almighty body of violence rearing up in reaction to the primary violence of the colonized. Factions recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. The armed struggle mobilizes the people i.e. it pitches them in a single direction, from which there is no turning back. When it is achieved during a war of liberation the mobilization of the masses introduced the notion of common cause, national destiny, and collective history into every consciousness. ⁶⁹

Active indistinction allows the colonised to abandon the condition of victim and establish ‘a new type of relationship with the world’. ⁷⁰ The civilian becomes a militant and the involvement in self-emancipatory violence ‘represents the absolute praxis. The militant therefore is the one who works’. ⁷¹ Civilian praxis through collective violence becomes the basic grammar of liberation and ‘no part of the indigenous population can remain indifferent to this new rhythm which drives the nation’. ⁷²

Fanon knows that this new ethos is common across the African continent and elsewhere, and that it counters the basic distinctions of international law, including those of gender and age. Thus, writing about the Angolan armed struggle, Fanon adds: ‘Men, women, and children, armed and unarmed, courageously hurled themselves en masse in wave after wave against the regions dominated by the colonists’. ⁷³ In this development of anticolonial consciousness through mass violence, the passive/active polarisation at the basis of the figure of the civilian – as conceptualised in international law in juxtaposition to the figure of the combatant – is neutralised and overcome. Remaining passive civilians would mean to accept colonial passivisation, de-humanisation and alienation. To put it with Achille Mbembe, it would keep the colonised in the position of a ‘castrated subject’ and a ‘passive instrument for the enjoyment of the Other’ that would reproduce defencelessness and victimisation. ⁷⁴ It would mean to remain disposable to Western colonisers. It would ultimately translate into the impossibility of praxis, and thus the impossibility of decolonisation. It would mean damnation’ ⁷⁵ – the damnation of a racially passivising condition imposed also through the rule of Western-centric international law. Ultimately, for Fanon decolonisation is a form of active re-humanisation of the colonised in conflict with the existing ‘humanitarian rules of war’ Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 598.

Accordingly, we should understand decolonisation wars as moments of open confrontation between two forces: on the one hand, the passivising legal conception of the civilian produced by 1949 Geneva Conventions which overlapped with the passivising conception of the colonised subject that had been produced by the colonisers, and, on the other hand, active colonised civilian involvement in violence as a liberation praxis from colonial domination and damnation. From the point of view of the colonised, international law, if respected in this element of civilian passivity, would ensure that the colonised remains colonised. In other words, a theory of the decolonisation of the civilian should understand decolonisation wars as a process of de-passivisation of the civilian through active participation into violence. The de-passivised civilian is the key means of decolonisation that allows the colonised to challenge alienation and transform the liberatory potential of transgressing distinction into a Third World global political project.

De-passivisation was very clear to Fanon, Mao and many other anticolonial political, legal and military thinkers. It became so politically and legally powerful that it travelled beyond the colonised world. In fact, Third World oriented internationalist legal experts like Charles Chaumont – who during the era of decolonisation wars articulated a new legal framework for defending the rights of the colonised, from within the colonial metropole – grasped the nature of the legal-political confrontation at stake between legal-political passivity and action. According to Chaumont, anticolonial armed struggles precipitated new ‘norms of action’. Decolonisation wars transformed the colonised from passive witness of the world order to actors of global legal-political change. ⁷⁶ The most interesting contribution produced by Chaumont for the development of a theory of decolonisation of the civilian is his in-depth understanding of this question of the active civilian in legal terms. Chaumont realised how the transformation of the passive colonised witness into an active subject threatened some of the foundations of the existing humanitarian laws of war.

For Chaumont, the norms of action are norms of combat. They are norms which – in a Fanonian vein – ‘are elaborated in combat, between life and death’, and which are not ‘elaborated by the cadres of Third World states’. ⁷⁷ The resort to methods of anticolonial indistinction unifies the colonised and defines ‘the contours [of the people] through combat’. ⁷⁸ Anticolonial national liberation struggle are moments of ‘revelation of the people’ through the abolition of the division between civilians and combatants in response to the inequalities on the ground and in the law. ⁷⁹

Discussing the cases of Vietnam and Palestine, Chaumont explains how that distinction is a relative concept, not an absolute one. Anticolonial self-emancipatory violence might ultimately not abide by the principle of distinction if abidance resulted in the impossibility of anticolonial violence itself. In order to be effective, in anticolonial guerrilla there must be a constant confusion between civilian population and combatants. ⁸⁰ It is only through the ‘norm in action’ of active indistinction that anticolonial movements can overcome the technological and power asymmetry and transform the hierarchical order established by colonial and imperial powers. If – in its passivising configuration – the existing norm of distinction is incompatible with the liberation need of involving the entire people, and if this makes it impossible for the colonised to overcome the asymmetry of colonial war and imagine a decolonised future, then ‘better to renounce the norm [of distinction] itself’. ⁸¹

Here Chaumont is not making a generic call for the abolition of distinction. He is making a very colonially situated claim: ‘It is incontestable that the disappearance of distinction is related to the political objectives of combat: in certain conditions’, like Vietnam, Palestine and the other colonial cases he discusses in his work, ‘combat is everybody’s affair’. ⁸² Crucially for our theory of decolonisation, colonised civilian populations, in their inter-dependence with anticolonial combatants, are an active normativity in collision with the existing principles of international humanitarian law which contribute to their legal and political passivisation.

Decolonising Legal Symmetries

In the mid-1970s, a revision process of the laws of war took place under the aegis of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Anticolonial liberation wars – after having being ignored during the creation of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 ⁸³ – played a crucial role in triggering the negotiations. The revision process was carried out at the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts, which culminated in the promulgation of 1977 Additional Protocols. But while in 1949 ‘approximately 62 delegations from Western, primarily European, states met over a period of three months’, in 1973–7 ‘more than 150 delegations, 11 national liberation movements, and 50 Intergovernmental Organizations met over a period of four years’. ⁸⁴ Under the pressure of anticolonial armed liberation struggles, the balance of international political power had profoundly changed. A large section of the colonised world participated in ‘the twentieth century’s last major revision of international humanitarian law’. ⁸⁵ For the first time in history, colonisers and colonised sat at the same diplomatic table discussing the question of the application of international humanitarian law to anticolonial national liberation wars. The question of the status of civilians was one of the most controversial topics of legal-political confrontation at the conference.

Broadly speaking, decolonisation wars were ‘uncharted territory’ for international humanitarian law. ⁸⁶ On the one hand, the colonial method of warfare considered civilians as collaborators of anticolonial rebellions, an argument used to justify colonial indistinction. For colonial powers and their advocates, civilians could be targeted because they supported a form of illegal ‘insurgent terrorism’. In this prose of counterinsurgency, ⁸⁷ anticolonial violence was framed as a form of unorthodox fighting ‘inevitably’ disposed to ‘committing war crimes’ and violating humanitarian principles. ⁸⁸ In line with the predominant Eurocentric conception of the laws of war, self-emancipatory violence was cast as a question pertaining to ‘internal war’, ⁸⁹ while self-defence was characterised as a form of unlawful aggression.

On the other hand, the anticolonial method of warfare which deliberately blurred the distinction by merging civilians and combatants in the violent self-emancipatory effort aimed at constituting a new liberated polity. Therefore, when the negotiations for the development of the Geneva Conventions started in 1973, both the colonisers and the colonised practiced – different – forms of indistinction in their deployment of violence. ⁹⁰ They both posed a challenge to international humanitarian law.

Positivist Western and anticolonial legal experts who commented on the 1973–7 diplomatic process have argued in favour of the inclusion of anticolonial people’s wars, guerrillas and partisan warfare within the realm of international humanitarian law. While acknowledging the incapacity of the law to deal with anticolonial warfare, Western scholars have maintained that the integration of self-emancipatory anticolonial violence within the international legal system constituted a tool for its ‘regularisation’. ⁹¹ Given their unprecedented geographical extension, anticolonial guerrillas and people’s war could not be ignored anymore. Since anticolonial armed groups tended – according to these scholars – not to conform to international humanitarian law, especially through their systematic blending with civilian population, their inclusion in the realm of in the international legal-political community would have resulted in an incentive to conformity to humanitarian principles. ⁹² Thus, according to these authors anticolonial violence had to be integrated within the existing juridical apparatus through reform and without compromising on the foundations of the laws of war – in particular the principle of distinction. In other words, self-emancipatory violence could be co-opted.

From the point of view of anticolonial legal experts like Georges Abi-Saab and Mohamed Bedjaoui, the integration of national liberation wars within the realm of international humanitarian law was a form of strategic adaptation and inclusion. To use Bedjaoui’s effective phrase, this process would have translated anticolonialism into a new form of ‘universal legal expression’. ⁹³ Firstly, it would have contributed to acknowledge that the use of violence against colonial oppression was not an internal question and could not be regulated from within the colonial metropole. Abi-Saab concurred. Self-emancipatory violence, he said, created new facts by ‘undermining the territorial control of the colonial government’ and extending anticolonial control over the civilian population that participated in the liberation effort. It transformed the colonised into a ‘belligerent community on the international level’. ⁹⁴ Secondly, this inclusion within the international legal arena would have allowed anticolonial armed groups to be treated as regular quasi-state armies and their members as legitimate combatants and prisoners of war and thus provided them with legal protections. ⁹⁵ Inclusion would have also provided protected status to the civilian population which had in effect been denied until the 1977 Additional Protocols. ⁹⁶ And thirdly, the anticolonial integration within international humanitarian law and its discourse would have damaged the international image of colonial powers through what Fabian Klose has called humanitarian strategy’. ⁹⁷

Scholars who have analysed anticolonial legal struggles and the proceedings of the 1973–7 Diplomatic Conference from a critical perspective, have interpreted positively the recognition of wars of national liberation. For them, these produced a challenge to European international law and outlawed colonialism, in spite of the paradox that anticolonialists operated according to the rules of the colonisers. ⁹⁸ They have maintained that this paradoxical process has turned the colonised from object to subject, ⁹⁹ expanding the realm of legal-political humanity ¹⁰⁰ and creating a counter hegemony. ¹⁰¹ The integration of anticolonial violence in the realm of international humanitarian law has been understood as a sign of the colonised being in control of the international legal debate. ¹⁰² Some scholars have argued that the categories of civilian and combatant were reconfigured as a result of the political pressure exerted by the colonised, ¹⁰³ making anticolonial war legal.

While these historical and theoretical arguments are valid, they face the risk of avoiding a conundrum generated by the debates and struggles on the reform of the Geneva Conventions in light of anticolonial wars. The conundrum, to say it in the words of Amechi Uchegbu Amechi Uchegbu, an anticolonial legal scholar who wrote in the aftermath of the Diplomatic Conference, is the following: ‘If colonialism is illegal and armed struggle for national liberation legal, what are the legal consequences of illegal acts [carried out by anticolonial peoples] in international law?’. ¹⁰⁴ To project Uchegbu’s compelling formulation of the conundrum onto the realm of anticolonial civilian participation: if anticolonial violence is legal, are acts of anticolonial violence which involve the civilian population illegal according to international law? A decolonial understanding of the figure of the civilian in anticolonial violence cannot limit itself to interpreting decolonisation wars as a reformist force that has transformed positively international humanitarian law. It has to deal with this conundrum and undertake a ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the revision process of the laws of war that took place in the mid-1970s and its broader political context.

The traces of the cracks in the reformist theory can be found in the records of the Diplomatic Conference itself. While reclaiming and obtaining an important political role at the negotiation table, anticolonial representatives of states like Mali advocated for the anticolonial right to transgress existing international humanitarian law. They defended the participation of ‘all citizens, whether men or women, young or old’ as ‘combatants’ to the war of national liberation. Anticolonialism, the Malian representative argued, created new ‘social realities’ that exceeded the realm of the existing humanitarian laws. ¹⁰⁵ Echoing his Malian partner, the representative of Ghana defended ‘methods of combat [that were] very different from traditional ones’ and that had emerged from the anticolonial conscientisation and involvement of the people in self-emancipatory violence. ¹⁰⁶ He stressed how the prohibition of intermingling civilians and combatants, ‘the prohibition of perfidy, the use of recognized signs and the identification of prisoners of war’ could not be applied to anticolonial struggles. ¹⁰⁷ What were usually conceived as illegal acts of war which included illegal civilian participation and putting civilians at risk, could not be considered as illegal in anticolonial wars in which civilians were part of a mass liberation effort.

The representative of the Zimbabwe African National Union characterised the norm proposed by the International Committee of the Red Cross – according to which members of the anticolonial armed struggle had to distinguish themselves from the civilian population – as ‘totally unrealistic’. He said that:

[The norm] revealed a failure to understand the positive nature of national liberation wars. Oppressed peoples took to arms against colonialists and racists. Guerrilla fighters were the vanguard of the people: they could not be distinguished from the latter, on which they depended constantly [. . .]. Guerrilla warfare, therefore was very different from conventional combat. It was not easy to make a distinction between freedom fighters and people. Popular freedom fighters were poorly armed and equipped, they could not afford the luxury of uniforms and emblems. ¹⁰⁸

The Zimbabwean representative concluded that the duty of distinction should not apply to national liberation movements. Given the asymmetry of the conflict, several anticolonial actors at the Diplomatic Conference asked for the principle of distinction to be applied only to the colonial aggressor, while rejecting its application to practices of anticolonial self-defence in which combatants and civilian operated in synergy. In other words, according to these anticolonialists, civilianhood could not be interpreted separately from colonial asymmetries of power.

To put it with the ‘strategic ambivalence’ of the Vietnamese legal and political theorist Tahi Quang Trung, who commented on the debates of the Diplomatic Conference from the pages of the French newspaper Le Monde in 1976, the colonised civilian population has a right to become active, offensive and indistinct from the armed groups during an anticolonial war, without simultaneously forfeiting the right to remain protected as civilians in the name of an abstract principle of non-combatant passivity. If the principle of distinction were applied equally and according to liberal standards to both coloniser and colonised in a situation of colonial domination and asymmetric violence, continues Thai, ‘this would lead to absurd consequences’. It would transform the legitimate indistinction practiced by the colonised into an excuse for colonial indiscriminate attacks against the civilian population. In order ‘to guarantee equality between the grasshopper and the elephant’, continues Thai, ¹⁰⁹ those elements of existing international humanitarian law which reproduce the international colonial order should be disregarded – in particular the unequal application of a problematic notion of passive civilian, which constituted an obstacle for anticolonial liberatory violence.

Reformist theories and historical interpretations have the merit of acknowledging the contribution of decolonisation wars to the improvement of certain humanitarian protections for the colonised and other peoples living under foreign domination. However, not unlike other progressive theories mentioned in the introduction to this article, reform theories that focus their attention on the ‘inclusion’ of anticolonialists within the realm of international law face the risk of positing the law as inherently good. ¹¹⁰ By doing so, they downplay the clash between anticolonial resistance and international law. More precisely, reform theories face the heuristic risk of displacing the way in which the right to active indistinction and civilian mass participation was mobilised by the colonised against international humanitarian law, which many anticolonialists perceived as a colonial weapon. The right to indistinction was mobilised by the colonised with a full awareness that civilian protection based on the principle of distinction was one of the mechanisms that, if applied as ‘inherently good’ and according to liberal standards of equality to a situation of colonial asymmetry, would have neutralised self-emancipatory violence and collective military-political fighting against racial domination. The corollary for my theorisation process is that a decolonisation of the civilian is also a decolonisation of those legal symmetries which – in their application of the category of civilian according to liberal standards of equality in a situation of racial domination and radical power asymmetry – reproduce what we have called civilian coloniality.

Institutionalised Ethos

Scholars who provided critical insights about the impact of decolonisation wars on the figure of the civilian through the analysis of the 1973–7 Diplomatic Conference, tended to frame the rejection of distinction and the articulation of the anticolonial right to indistinction as the position of a bunch of ‘marginalised Third World countries’ ¹¹¹ ; or as the position of isolated radical delegations which did not align with the Third World overall acceptance of international law. ¹¹² However, these interpretations present a major problem: a theory of decolonisation of the civilian cannot limit itself to an analysis of the 4 years of Diplomatic Conference. Examining the legal and political challenge posed by anticolonial warfare to the existing laws of war through this very limited historical and political prism, ignores the contribution of important anticolonial warfare theorists which have remained neglected. Therefore, the magnitude of the anticolonial challenge to the idea of passive civilian requires an expansion of our horizon beyond the diplomatic exchanges which took place under the aegis of the ICRC between 1973 and 1977.

Therefore, in order to decolonise the civilian, we have to adopt a different temporal and heuristic frame. We have to understand anticolonial civilian participation in mass violence as an ethos – a broad political culture and system of values – that was constituted throughout many decades and that was common to a broad global anticolonial formation across continents. This ethos superseded the limits of existing international humanitarian constraints. In Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, for almost 20 years Amilcar Cabral led an anticolonial resistance grounded in the idea that civilians in arms were the foundation of the legitimacy of the anticolonial self-determination: ‘in the villages, the militiamen or civilian population take up what principally symbolises our struggle: weapons. [. . .] It would have been impossible for us to wage the struggle, in the era of clandestinity, were it not that our people kept us alive’. ¹¹³ The synergy between armed struggle and civilian participation translated into the liberation of new areas from colonial control, providing the people with schools, medical assistance and other basic services. This synergy had a poietic function for Cabral. It played a decisive role in ‘creating new life’ and constituting a liberated polity. ¹¹⁴ The people’s war was conceived by Cabral as a quasi-metaphysical force, since the foundation of the idea of national liberation ‘lies in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history, whatever the formulations adopted in international law’. ¹¹⁵

Ghanian political theorist and political leader Kwame Nkrumah wrote a neglected manual of civilian-centric guerrilla warfare published in 1969. The Ghanian president conceived the handbook as a tool for connecting to the Black Power movement in the United States, and the struggles of peoples of African descent in the Caribbean, South America and elsewhere. The epigraph of the manual is an un-attributed sentence that immediately sets the civilian-centric tone: ‘the guerrilla is the masses in arms’. ¹¹⁶ The pan-Africanist guerrilla handbook proceeds as a historical reflection on anticolonial armed struggles and what is required in order to build an All-African People’s Revolutionary Army. Under the unifying force of nationalism, pan-Africanism and socialism – writes Nkrumah – revolutionary guerrilla warfare would have become a continental common practice of civilian-centric liberation. ‘Trained workers should be organized into militias’, while peasant organisations ‘will constitute the nuclei of self-defence’. The majority of the popular strata, including miners, transport employees and others ‘will be organized into disciplined, self-defence units and will receive military training’. ¹¹⁷ The Ghanian thinker is quite clear that the revolutionary force is made of ‘civilians trained in arms’ which are at the same time workers and fighters. After all, an anticolonial war of revolutionary liberation cannot abide by Western canons, legality and morality. It constitutes an unprecedented effort whose normative regime is not that of the law neither that of morality: ‘Our armed struggle for freedom is neither moral nor immoral, it is a scientific historically-developed necessity’. ¹¹⁸

The ethos of civilian-centric anticolonial resistance exceeded existing Western laws of war and morality because those laws and morality posed a threat to anticolonial self-emancipatory violence. Jose Oscar Monteiro, the representative of the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO), expressed this idea very clearly in a conference organised by the Algerian Red Crescent in 1971. Monteiro discussed the problems caused by humanitarian legislation to anticolonial guerrilla warfare. He defined the question of the applicability of the principle of distinction as it is formulated in the ‘current code of humanitarian rights’ as the ‘most important’ problem at stake in the clash between decolonisation wars and the laws of war. Distinction cannot apply to anticolonial guerrillas since with their methods of warfare based on civilian participation and protection, they ‘eliminate any distinction between combatants and the population at large’. The civilian-centric ethos is an ethos of mobilisation. It is the foundation of a new antiracist political culture of liberation through mass violence. Thus, asks Monteiro, ‘should we, and consequently the civilian population of the liberated areas, be penalized for the fact that we have successfully mobilized our population and involved it in agreement with its interests [. . .]?’. In his speech at the Red Cross, Monteiro completely subverts the relationship between decolonisation wars and international law, and concludes: ‘the experts have often claimed that the guerrilla poses a formidable challenge to humanitarian rights. [. . .] We prefer to say that the present system of humanitarian rights poses a still more formidable challenge to the guerrilla’. ¹¹⁹ For Monteiro there is no possibility of humanitarian neutrality if specialised humanitarianism translates into silence and complicity with the ‘crimes committed [against civilians] in the Portuguese colonies and in Southern Africa in general, in Palestine, in Indochina, and on the American continent’. ¹²⁰

In contexts like the Vietnamese liberation wars from French colonialism and American imperialism, this ethos of indistinction that Cabral, Nkrumah and other African thinkers framed as a quasi-meta-physical scientific-historical necessity was institutionalised in new social identities at the threshold between civilians and combatants. While threatening the foundations of international humanitarian law, anticolonial violence in indistinction was able to generate ‘new categories of people’, ¹²¹ new social figures and new institutions of warfare which were unknown to the colonial and imperial ethos of warfare. These new institutions were used by the armed resistance to mobilise ‘their children and relatives to join the guerrilla ranks’ making sure ‘that all people engage in killing the enemy’. ¹²² The process of militarisation of the civilian population translated into a culture in which ‘labor, production, and combat activities’ became a ‘way of living’: the institution of the ‘combat village’. ¹²³ The combat villages – simultaneously civilian and military entities – were the ‘expression of the large masses participation’ in war. ¹²⁴

The institutionalisation of the ethos of civilian participation took different shapes. For instance, it translated into what in Vietnam General Giap called ‘civilian air defence’, a mechanism of defence from imperial aerial bombardment put in place with the assistance of ‘the population, of Party organization, government bodies and mass organizations of various localities, and of people of various nationalities’. ¹²⁵ The anti-raid institution was the incarnation of the entire civilian population at work in order to keep military targets ‘secret, protected by defence works, camouflaged, scattered and moved from place to place’. ¹²⁶ This system was part of a broader mechanism of mixed civilian-military entities like ‘workers-combatants’ ¹²⁷ or ‘civilian-soldiers’. ¹²⁸ While deliberately non-observing – when not deliberately violating – the existing laws of war, these mixed institutions were entrenched in the social reality of the colonised. They were so part of the colonised’s ethos of anticolonial liberation that they were able to produce new social relations at the border between armed struggle and civilianhood, like the institution of the ‘mother of combatants’, created during the war against French colonialism and described by Ngo Van Chieu in his Journal of a Combatant:

The mothers of combatants are an institution which exists from the beginning of the war and have constituted a decisive element in our victorious prolonged struggle [. . .]. These mothers are mainly elderly women who adopt a combatant of the popular army for the duration of the war. The whole mother’s family acts as adoptive family for the young combatant [. . .]. If there is a battle and the unit of the ‘adopted son’ has to disperse itself, the family will collect the combatant, it will host him, it will provide him with civilian clothes, and it will help him to join the popular forces. ¹²⁹

The institution is a manifestation of the ‘affective link’ between combatants and people, facilitating ‘infiltrations in the enemy lines’ and allowing ‘the whole nation to participate in war’, concludes Van Chieu. ¹³⁰ In Vietnam, but also in other colonial contexts, this socially institutionalised ethos of mass indistinction involved millions of people. In Algeria, the national liberation army (ALN), the military organ of the anticolonial revolution, counted ‘ten million people. These ten million do not all wear a uniform, because they play a clandestine role which makes the enemy powerless’, writes the revolutionary Laroussi Khelifa in his education manual for Algerian militants. ¹³¹

This ethos of civilian involvement ‘without uniform’ and ‘without insignia’ in self-emancipatory violence is incompatible with the legal and moral coordinates which design the civilian as a non-militant subject. It is a socio-political ethos that embodies a notion of civilian which undoes the existing protections provided by positive international humanitarian law and allows for collective resistance in colonial contexts of racialised asymmetry of power. It constitutes the sine qua non for the emancipation of the colonised from its position of subordination in a global system of racial domination. Outlawing the anticolonial civilian in arms, and framing it – according to the orthodox interpretation of international humanitarian law – as a civilian that loses its protection by participating in mass liberatory violence, would corroborate a colonial interpretation of the law that ultimately outlaws the crucial method adopted by colonised peoples to become free from colonial and imperial subjugation. This is the main political and legal conundrum of anticolonial self-emancipatory violence that continues to interpellate us. If the legacy of anticolonial resistance through civilian involvement is a legacy of humanity that has produced a challenge to the way in which norms and laws of humane warfare are conceived, then a theory of the decolonisation of the civilian should treat this legacy resisting to the temptation of reproducing aversion against it.