In this podcast Dr Sonja Schillings explores how the use of the Latin term Hostis Humani Generis (the enemy of all mankind), which was originally applied to pirates, now creates an extralegal space which is being used to legitimise the assassination of international terrorists all over the world.

This is just part of her forthcoming book, Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence.

Podcast presented and produced by Tatiana Prorokova.

Tatiana Prorokova: Hello and welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Tatiana Prorokova and I am glad to have here Dr. Sonja Schillings to discuss her forthcoming book based on her dissertation titled Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence.

Before we proceed, however, I’d like to say a couple of words about Dr. Schillings’ academic career. She wrote her dissertation at the graduate school of North-American Studies at Freie-Universität Berlin in Germany, where she also held a position of a substitute junior professor for North-American Literature in summer semester 2014. And since October 2014, she is a post-doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at Giessen University in Germany.

So, Sonja, in your dissertation, your main concern is the relationship between two criminal groups - pirates and terrorists. You argue that both have one thing in common and that is they can be characterized as Hostis Humani Generis.

Could you elaborate on that and maybe explain your choice of these particular groups?

Sonja Schillings:  My basic concern is about Hostis Humani Generis.  It is a legal term of arts,  a Latin term, which means “enemy of all human kind”,. It is, quite generally, a legal fiction that is assigned to perpetrators who are considered not just enemies but enemies of the law, of the normative order.  They are enemies so hostile and so extreme that you can  commit legitimate violence against them, just because you commit it against them. And it’s a term that was traditionally,  in legal history, equivalent or synonymous with the crime of piracy. And “the enemy of all” means that everybody, without distinction, is being attacked by them. This is why violence against them is said to be representative of the entire human race.  Or rather it’s claimed to be. The claims I look at are only ever in text. So much for that.

So, pirates and terrorists. As I’ve been saying, Hostis Humani Generis was originally designated to describe pirates only, until the early nineteenth century when Hostis Humani Generis and the crime of piracy separated and Hostis Humani Generis was also used to describe slave traders – international slave traders. And then later, in the twentieth century, it was also used about perpetrators of crimes against humanity - the torturer is the most established example here.

And now, what we see since the 1980s, is the political initiative to describe international terrorists as pirates. It is this link that originally spurred my interest in the topic of Hostis Humani Generis because other than the fiction itself, other than , the legal description of Hostis Humani Generis, and other than the characterization of what they do to society (i.e. the orders they attack), pirates and terrorists have very little in common.  Even so, they were constantly combined or associated with each other, despite the grave reservations of the entire maritime securities community. This is what the “pirate-terrorist nexus” refers to.

T.P: So, you provide a brief historical overview of this “pirates-terrorists nexus”. But can you actually spot any difference between pirates and terrorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Was there any shift after 2000/2001?

S.S.: Well, yes and no. There was certainly a shift of it being more do-able – first of all that. And, second of all, you suddenly had Somali pirates, which is why maritime security became seen as piracy -  mariti...

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