Ordering Legality

Gentili, Grotius, and other jurists absorb war and peace into the frame of law. They license the expansion of law into the basic measure for both conceptualizing and regulating war and peace. In the process, they produce a polemical opposition between enemies by law and enemies of law, or the lawful and the lawless. Against lawless, faithless enemies of law, peace is uncertain if not impossible. Such enemies include those with a different form, like pirates, expansionary empires, and peoples with “criminal” or “unnatural” customs. At the same time, Gentili and Grotius imagine that the laws of war and peace are perpetual and universal: they apply to all peoples everywhere. Colonialism enables them to gather and treat distant peoples’ practices as an assurance of their law’s universality.