ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the evolution of identities, legal categorization, and experience of non-combatants in domestic and international conflicts from the Age of Revolution (1770s) to the present. It examines various national and international cases over the modern period, to consider continuities and ruptures in the ways non-combatants experience warfare. In the eighteenth century, non-combatants lent support to struggles for statehood and national independence as in the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. This section introduces the theme of citizens seizing arms against governments defined as foreign or imperial. Another section on citizens engaged in violent armed struggle bears witness to how non-combatants have contributed to domestic change. The chapter evaluates case studies in which gender becomes a mobilizing factor for non-combatants supporting or witnessing struggles for domestic political reform and international restructuring. Over the twentieth century, international conflict, technology and total warfare have deepened the complex relationship of non-combatants to war’s multi-front systems of violence, national defense, and invasion. The chapter describes how changes in industrial production, modern agricultural supply and health support during World War I and World War II integrate non-combatants into modern systems of national defense. Complementing non-combatant integration into war’s waging, a growing phenomenon of civilian, non-combatant displacement and dislocation have emerged as a common experience during wartime conflict and postwar (1945) reconstruction, presented here as a contrast to non-combatant integration. It concludes with a brief survey of the state of international law designed to protect non-combatants, refugees, and, especially, displaced women from statelessness, genocide, and war-related violence.
