Law Wars: Academia and the Manufacture of International Humanitarian Law

Abstract Despite the emergence of much critical discourse on the conventional history of international humanitarian law ( IHL ) over the last decades, the way in which this conventional history is told and re-told remains virtually unaltered in one key area of dissemination: teaching materials. By conducting an in-depth examination of these materials, this article uncovers the techniques used over time to generate and perpetuate the conventional IHL history. In so doing, it helps to explain how and why the conventional IHL history continues largely unchanged in textbooks to this day.