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Unlawful Combatants: A Genealogy of the Irregular Fighter By Sibylle Scheipers New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015 288 pages $79.86 (hardcover)
Dr. Sibylle Scheipers is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and was previously Director of Studies for the Changing Character of War Programme at Oxford University. She earned a PhD at Humboldt University in Berlin and was a post-doctoral fellow at Chatham House. This is her second solo-authored book in addition to editing three others including Prisoners in War (Oxford, 2010) and several articles published in scholarly journals.
Early in Unlawful Combatants the author reminds us, "Under the law of armed conflict, irregular fighters such as insurgents, guerrillas, and rebels are largely excluded from the privileges and protections of prisoner-of-war (POW) status." Her primary intent in this book is to explore "the ambiguity of the status of irregular fighters, the political opportunism entangled with categorizing someone as an irregular fighter, and...the stark consequences of such a categorization." (2)
To a great extent Scheipers admirably succeeds in illuminating those topics through a detailed study of several specific periods in military history and related developments including...