Thread by @Alonso_GD

I’m pretty sure I’m one of the people who knows most in the world about a relatively obscure Brazilian diplomat and nobleman called Felippe Lopes Netto. I came across him researching for my PhD and I’ve been obsessed with his life ever since. 🇧🇷 😍

https://twitter.com/romanhelmetguy/status/1948812848852779303

I was looking for non-Euro-American actors implementing the laws of war in the 19th Century. One of the key arguments I make in my dissertation is that 19th Century laws of war were really, literally, *laws* in plural, with different parts of the world adopting different readings

I argued that the Euro-American Clausewitz-inspired interpretation that puts military necessity at the heart of the discipline was just that: one interpretation among a larger global ecosystem. In fact, I argued, it was one that was not as popular as people tell us today

So I looked at how the Nama people of Namibia complained about German “barbarism” in the 1890s, how Western observers decried the Japanese atrocities in Port Arthur in 1895, and how Latin American scholars objected to the “brutal” principle of military necessity

Eventually, while going through consular documents at the @UkNatArchives, I read the minutes of the Italo-Chilean Mixed Commission, which resolved claims by Italian nationals claiming Chile had caused them harm during its war with Peru in violation of the laws of war

These mixed commissions were common at the time and usually they just rubber-stamped military operations by saying they were necessary and thus legal. But not this one. No these ones were presided over by Brazilian Councillor Felippe Lopes Netto. And, well, he was special 💕

Lopes Netto had been a revolutionary in his youth, rising up in arms against absolute monarchism in his native Pernambuco, during the Praiero Revolt. He wrote articles about how insurrection was a “natural right”. He was def very different from your usual 19th C military lawyer

So when he was confronted with Chile’s very Clausewitz-inspired style of war, he was horrified. He believed in reading military necessity through a proportionality and absolute necessity lens - a way of reading IHL that would not be codified until almost 100 years later.

Where his peers believed bombarding civilian areas was legal if it meant the defenders would surrender, he pondered the unusual question: was it really necessary to do this? Or could the same objective be achieved through less harmful means? Truly a man ahead of his time

His Chilean co-arbitrator *hated him*. And Lopes Netto was a grumpy old man. In one hearing, the Italian arbitrator had to separate them bc Lopes Netto had driven the Chilean so mad that he tried to punch him. He thought he was perverting the law by making it more humane

Eventually, Lopes Netto’s decisions made him a foreign policy liability for the Brazilian Empire, that really didn’t need this kind of drama, so they claimed Lopes Netto got sick and had to be replaced. His replacement, Lafayette Rodrigues Pereyra, was a classic Clausewitz guy

(Fun fact: he was called Lafayette because his father was obsessed with the US Revolution and called his kids Lafayette and Washington)

So Lopes Netto’s days as an arbitrator were over quickly and unceremoniously. He never became a famous jurist (Lafayette did). He never influenced anyone with his weird ideas about *not killing civilians*. He was a small blip in the otherwise inhumane history of the laws of war

But he was ahead of his time. A stubborn grouch of a man willing to put his career in the line and punch people in the face in defence of a simple idea: that humanity mattered more than necessity.

And for that, despite his absolute failure as a jurist, I absolutely love him

I hope one day to travel to @prefrecife and visit the places he frequented. Honestly at this point he’s like family to me

@prefrecife If you want to learn more about my adoptive grandpa Lopes Netto, here’s the article I wrote about him:

springerprofessional.de/en/des-encanto…

@prefrecife (Yes the title is a pun about the Encanto movie, I’m a nerd sue me)