VUB rediscovers Belgian contribution to peace

In his doctoral research, VUB legal historian Wouter De Rycke investigated the unique but forgotten contribution of the Mons lawyer Louis Bara (1821-1857) to the 19th-century international peace campaign. According to De Rycke, his research offers a glimpse into a rather unknown episode of our history: " In the 19th century, the first internationally organised movement to declare war emerged, a kind of 'NGO' avant la lettre. Jurists such as Bara wanted to transform war from an ultima ratio regum and the associated right of conquest into a world order based on the rule of law. At the beginning of October, the renowned Journal of the History of International Law published for the first time the full story of Bara, who was one of the first within this movement to chart a path to a ius contra bellum : a law that prohibits war, as laid down today in the United Nations charter. In a project led by Frederik Dhondt and Raphaël Cahen within the research group Contextual Research in Law (CORE), De Rycke studied numerous 19th-century peace plans and placed them within the framework of their time, when international law still had to be transformed into its own branch of law. For this purpose, he went through the propaganda of the first pacifists, held in numerous libraries and archives throughout Europe and North America, as well as surviving manuscripts in Brussels and Mons. This revealed that Bara was an outsider in a number of important areas.