About the event: In this talk, Elena Kempf shares material from her forthcoming book on the history of weapons prohibitions in international law from the 1860s to the 1970s.

She argues that weapons prohibitions during this period emerged as a central site of contestation about the limits of the legitimate application of new technologies to war. These debates involved diplomats and international lawyers, but also medical professionals, scientists, and journalists. From their efforts, two ways of justifying a prohibition on a weapon emerged. The first repurposed the old legal concept of unnecessary suffering to newly weigh wounding against the abilities of military surgeons. The second was based on the specter of injury to global systems like shipping lines or the obliteration of major cities.

To revisit the early history of weapons prohibitions under international law is to uncover an expansive vocabulary that might animate future efforts at prohibition or control. This history also reveals the limits of outlawing weapons under international law. Law and technology changed at different velocities, leading to persistent distortions between moral-legal expectations and technical realities. In addition, the project of weapons prohibitions remained fragile, contested by techno-optimist, militarist, and pacifist critics.

About the speaker: Elena Kempf is the Old Dominion Career Development Assistant Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the legal regulation of modern weapons of war. She is currently completing a manuscript on the history of weapons prohibitions in international law from the 1860s to the 1970s. She is also drafting a paper on the history of the concept of unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury. Prior to joining MIT, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at UC Berkeley Law School, and a lecturer with the Department of History at Stanford University. Professor Kempf earned her PhD in History from UC Berkeley in 2021.

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