This chapter explores the international legal protection offered to animals in occupied territory. Some rules of international humanitarian law protecting private and public property apply to animals as well. The legal framework is complemented by the domestic law in force prior to the occupation, and by international conventions on animal conservation that remain applicable during armed conflict. Nonetheless, animals in occupied territory are insufficiently protected. In order to strengthen legal protection, occupying powers should properly fulfil their duty to observe and apply local legislation such as animal welfare statutes. A non-anthropocentric approach based on animals’ needs, rather than on animals as property or as parts of the environment, would help to enhance the protection of animals in occupied territory.

Chapter 4 recounts the most intense phase of the violence of the 1937 Genocide and it focuses on the lived experiences of the victims and the survivors. The chapter is largely based on refugee testimonies collected in 1937 as well as a range of oral histories collected since. By closely examining the survivors’ testimonies, the chapter prioritizes their own understanding of the event. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the magnitude, brutality, and premeditated nature of the state-directed violence that took place in 1937. The chapter focuses on several key features of the 1937 Haitian Massacre in considering its relationship to other genocides in the twentieth century. Elements of secrecy, local complicity, extermination, and land appropriation were key features of this genocide. The chapter argues that victims of the 1937 Genocide interpreted the massacre as a major land grab. They also explained local civilian participation in the massacre in terms of pillage. In addition to focusing on their interpretation of the genocide as a form of land grab, the chapter argues that local complicity was more important than previously acknowledged. It also carefully considers patterns of killings that survivors described that occurred months and years after October 1937.

Chapter 4 delves into the practice of the international judiciary and, specifically, international war crimes tribunals and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). By analysing the approaches of post–World War II tribunals, the committee established to review the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in the Former Yugoslavia, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International Criminal Court, the first part of the chapter reflects on the conceptual, normative, and practical limitations of international criminal law. The second part provides a critical reading of two important ICJ cases, the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion and the Armed Activities case (Congo v. Uganda), dealing respectively with the ecological devastation of nuclear weapons and pillage of natural resources in the Congo. The chapter ultimately contends that international justice, both in its criminal and inter-state dimensions, is concerned about individual/state agency, quantifiable harm, and its proximate causes. Thinking in these narrow terms about the ecological impacts of militarism and resource extraction associated with conflict fails to grasp the structural dimensions of the problem, the plurality of actors involved, and the obligations owed to other human and non-human beings.

Chapter 7 examines the law governing the coercive or violent appropriation of property in armed conflict. The chapter focuses on the crime of pillage and related regulation of property during armed conflict under International Humanitarian Law and through an analysis of the conventions and jurisprudence at international tribunals, addresses the extent to which these respond to the problems of militarization, predation, and irregular warfare.

This chapter provides a brief historical overview of the concept of pillage and shows how the prohibition of pillaging developed into an absolute prohibition in international humanitarian law, both in international and non-international armed conflict. The chapter discusses a possible definition of pillage and its material elements, which have developed through decisions of international tribunals since the Second World War.

This chapter discusses the growth of military systems in Western Europe during the period from 1460 to 1560, the preliminary stage of what has often, controversially, been called the ‘military revolution’. The main characteristics of military violence generated by dynastic wars were the inexorable growth of armies and the problems of pay and supply which accompanied this. Military technology affected both the nature and duration of wars: artillery came to dominate both in siege warfare, naval warfare and on the open battlefield. The lives of professional soldiers were drastically affected by new forms of trauma and medical treatment remained rudimentary. At the same time, the relations between soldiery and civilians continued to be conflictual, especially in war zones. Endemic violence accompanied any war. The features specific to this period combine a more intensive kind of violence brought about by changes in military technology and the scale of war with a broadly dysfunctional control system. This meant that the larger armies and more destructive campaign had an impact of casualties and losses among the soldiery as well as a chaotic impact on the ‘civilian’ population, though the patterns of ‘collateral’ violence remained much the same as they had been for centuries.

Piracy, or violent despoliation at sea, is ancient, yet it took on global dimensions after 1500. This chapter examines piratical violence as an early modern, global, cross-cultural phenomenon motivated by politics and religion as well as profit. Varieties of piracy ranged from random pillage of merchant vessels to state-sanctioned corsairing companies. Forms of violence included murder, kidnapping, enslavement, rape, battery, mutilation, impressment and forced conversion. In some regions, extortion rackets formed wherein the threat of piratical violence was offset by regular payments. Rising seaborne violence prompted consequential reactions, from naval arms races to coastal depopulation. By the eighteenth century powerful states such as Great Britain and Qing dynasty China passed harsh anti-piracy laws and outfitted navies for pirate extermination, which led to the jailing and execution of many suspects, some of them innocent. Sea sovereignty came to be defined as monopolising violence at sea and treating anyone defined as a pirate as subject to harsher laws than those applied to land thieves. By this logic, pirates were ‘enemies of humankind’.