Governing from Above: A History of Aerial Bombing and International Law

Abstract

The advent of aircraft in the early twentieth century brought significant changes to human society, from transportation and infrastructure to surveillance and warfare. This technology provided a new way of seeing the world from above – an aerial perspective – with its assumptions and frames of understanding space, peoples and objects. In armed conflict, airplanes facilitated interventions in foreign places and attacks directed at cities and civilians, leading to significant changes to military strategy and to legal and political discourses on how wars should be pursued. This thesis studies how the rise of aerial bombing transformed the central concepts of international law of armed conflict...