International Law of War, War Crimes in Ethiopia, and Italy's Imperial Misrecollection at the End of Empire, 1946–1950

Abstract

Abstract The article explores the post-1945 discourse around Italian war crimes committed in Ethiopia from 1935 to 1942. Although Italians largely escaped prosecutions after the Second World War, the article demonstrates how an international controversy – the appointment and dismissal of a former general of the Italian army as governor of Somalia in 1949 – forced a reappraisal of Italy's imperial, fascist, and wartime past. Exploring this discourse is important for three reasons. First, it shows that, contrary to long-held assumptions, questions related to war crimes and empire were part of Italy's public debate after 1945. Second, it challenges the notion of national forgetting of the imperial past in post-war Italy. Third, it helps us better understand the multiple and subtle connections between empire and international legal order in the interwar and the early post-war period. It shows that arguments based on race, which drew heavily on fascist rhetoric and were made within rather than outside the law, served to justify violations of international legal conventions before similar issues were raised during the wars of decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s.