War in law: A corpus linguistic study of the lexical item war in the laws of war

Abstract

As a crucial register of modernity, the laws of war provide a discursive environment for the production and/or maintenance of key categories associated with organized violence. The register hosts the concepts which are used to refer to mass organized violence (war, armed conflict), and has both constructed and/or amplified categories of person that have been developed to legitimate war and give coherence to the international laws of war (e.g., prisoners of war, civilians). With the key texts of the international laws of war including such well-known instances as the 1949 Geneva Conventions now available in a searchable corpus format via the Sydney Corpus Lab, this paper explores the usage and meaning of war in this register where, in principle, the word war is a central part of a body of law which purports to put limits on organized violence. The method is essentially corpus driven: it takes the usages of this lexical item in this register and explores its frequency, its typical local lexical environments, and its collocates. The analysis shows that while the concept of war is essential to the laws of war, it remains ill-defined, indeed virtually undefined, at the same time that its collocational habits affirm its naturalness and legitimacy. As has been found elsewhere, in the laws of war, war and violence are treated as distinct phenomena, operating in distinct lexical environments. The paper is a contribution from corpus linguistics to the work of understanding the ideological effects of this highly significant legal register.