Debellatio

The term "debellatio" or "debellation" (Latin "defeating, or the act of conquering or subduing", literally, "warring (the enemy) down", from Latin bellum "war") designates the end of war caused by complete destruction of a hostile state. Israeli law-school professor Eyal Benvenisti defines it as "a situation in which a party to a conflict has been totally defeated in war, its national institutions have disintegrated, and none of its allies continue to challenge the enemy militarily on its behalf".[1]

Examples of debellation

Carthage

In some cases debellation ends with a complete dissolution and annexation of the defeated state into the victor's national territory, as happened at the end of the Third Punic War with the defeat of Carthage by Rome in the 2nd century BC.[2]

Nazi Germany

The unconditional surrender of the Third Reich—in the strict sense only the German Armed Forces—at the end of World War II was at the time accepted by most authorities as a case of debellatio as:

Other authorities have argued that a German state remained in existence from 1945 to 1949, albeit dormant and without any institutional or organisational component, on the basis that:

  • Most of the territory that made up Germany before the Anschluss was not annexed.
  • A German population still existed and was recognised as having German nationality.
  • German institutions such as courts never ceased to exist, even though the Allied Control Council governed the territory.
  • Eventually a German government regained full sovereignty over all the German territory that had not been annexed (see German reunification).
  • The Federal Republic of Germany sees itself as the legal continuation of the Third Reich;[3][9][10]

Others
gollark: ↑ umnikos pretending to be gollark
gollark: !esowiki Macron
gollark: Which "reifies" the type into a value.
gollark: Macron has dependent types, so obviously reification is the process of defining a variable.
gollark: I was going to suggest things, but then I realized that Macron does not really have a coherent design and therefore any concepts.

See also

References
  1. Benvenisti, Eyal (2012), The International Law of Occupation, OUP Oxford, p. 161, ISBN 978-0-19-958889-3
  2. "No European state had come to an end, as Germany had, with a 'debellatio', with the dissolution of the enemy state by the victor, a term familiar from Roman history: after three terrible wars, Rome completely annihilated Carthage by means of a 'debellatio'." (Press and Information Office of the Federal Government (1995), Deutschland, Societäts-Verlag, p. 84, OCLC 29827150)
  3. Eyal Benvenisti, The international law of occupation, Princeton University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-691-12130-3, pp. 92-95
  4. Breven C. Parsons, (2009), Moving the law of occupation into the twenty-first century, Naval Law Review, published by U.S. Naval Justice School, the pp. 21, 28-30 (PDF page numbers 26, 33-35)
  5. ICRC Commentaries on the Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War Article 5 "The German capitulation was both political, involving the dissolution of the Government, and military, whereas the Japanese capitulation was only military".
  6. United Nations War Crimes Commission, Law reports of trials of war criminals: United Nations War Crimes Commission, Wm. S. Hein, 1997, ISBN 1-57588-403-8. p.13
  7. The human rights dimensions of population (Page 2, paragraph 138) UNHCR web site
  8. Yearbook of the International Law Commission 1993 Volume II Part Two Archived October 21, 2013, at the Wayback Machine Page 48, paragraph 295 (last paragraph on the page)
  9. Detlef Junker et al. (2004). The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945-1990: A Handbook (Vol 2), Cambridge University Press and (Vol. 2) co-published with German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., ISBN 0-521-79112-X p. 104
  10. Lorenz-Meyer, Martin (2007), Safehaven: The Allied Pursuit of Nazi Assets Abroad, University of Missouri Press, p. 194, ISBN 978-0-8262-6586-9

Further reading
  • The dictionary definition of debellation at Wiktionary
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