Who has the right to wage war? The answer to this question constitutes one of the most fundamental organizing principles of any international order. Under contemporary international humanitarian law, this right is essentially restricted to sovereign states. It has been conventionally assumed that this arrangement derives from the ideas of the late-sixteenth century jurist Alberico Gentili. Claire Vergerio argues that this story is a myth, invented in the late 1800s by a group of prominent international lawyers who crafted what would become the contemporary laws of war. These lawyers reinterpreted Gentili's writings on war after centuries of marginal interest, and this revival was deeply intertwined with a project of making the modern sovereign state the sole subject of international law. By uncovering the genesis and diffusion of this narrative, Vergerio calls for a profound reassessment of when and with what consequences war became the exclusive prerogative of sovereign states.

Claire Vergerio is Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

1. Context, reception, and the study of great thinkers in International Relations; Part I. Gentili's De iure Belli in its Original Context: 2. Alberico Gentili's De iure Belli: Between Bodin and the reason of state tradition; 3. Grounding an absolutist approach to the laws of war; Part II. Gentili's De iure Belli and the Myth of 'Modern War': 4. Unearthing the 'true founder' of international law; 5. Constructing the history of the 'modern' laws of war; 6. Carl Schmitt and the entrenchment of the myth.