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ENEMIES OF ALL HUMANKIND: FICTIONS OF LEGITIMATE VIOLENCE Sonja Schillings Hanover, Dartmouth College Press, 2017 287 pages, paper, $40.00
Violence is a communicative act. As Jan Philipp Reemtsma noted in his 2012 book, Trust and Violence: An Essay on a Modern Relationship, the bullet fired in a battle carries not only death or injury for the one it hits but a message for all others-you could be next. Of course, the social contract has violence as its core, given the agreement that the state shall possess the monopoly of legitimate violence, but such violence is no less communicative than the battlefield bullet. As Sonja Schillings notes at the beginning of Enemies of All Humankind, the claim of legitimate violence "marks something as worthy of protection," such as a community; it "does not begin but ends conflict" by reacting to an attack that transgresses a boundary and, by so doing, "tends to refer to overarching values rather than to concrete interests" (2). The narrative construction of legitimate violence has been enabled most successfully by the concept called hostis humani generis ("the enemy of all humankind"), a legal fiction used to describe a perpetrator whose actions allegedly betray a fundamental hostility toward humanity. Such a concept makes not only the actions of such people illegitimate, but also the people themselves, and thus justifies counter-violence that would otherwise fall beyond established legal or moral norms.
Long used to describe pirates, and most recently terrorists, the hostis humani generis concept has, as Schillings explores in her engaging text, metamorphosed within a particularly American context to justify colonial expansion and violence against non-whites. Schillings describes the hostis humani generis as a constellation, a relationship...