Description
This paper investigates the rules which were used for justifying 'police bombing' practices in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s. Analysing British parliamentary debates and media coverage of police bombing at the time, I look into the ways in which justifications and critiques of the practice relied on ‘rules’ which were meant to separate the ‘guilty’ rebels from the innocent civilians. Looking more closely at these rules, for example the rule of giving prior warning of bombing campaigns to villages, shows the racialised and gendered assumptions about tribal areas and peoples under imperial control which these rules relied on. I build on postcolonial and critical IR and International Law literature to inquire into how – despite important differences – some of these racialised framings of 'rebels' still lingers in contemporary justifications of asymmetric war practices.
