Första världskriget kom i många avseenden att bli en vattendelare för hur man tänkt och pratat om människors utsatthet och lidande i samband med väpnade konflikter. Aldrig förr hade så många drabbats av krigets och krigsvåldets katastrofala återverkningar – av svält, epidemier och massdöd. Det totala, industrialiserade kriget ställde krav på en genom­gripande omorganisering och styrning av de humanitära insatserna för krigets offer. Den filantropiska verksamheten med rötter i 1800-­talets kristet­-religiösa idévärldar och värden skiftades ut mot en modern rättighetsbaserad humanitarism som utgick från transnationella samarbeten mellan både statliga och icke­-statliga aktörer. Röda Korsets humanitära insatser för de miljontals sårade och sjuka krigsfångar som internerats i fångläger på olika håll i Europa, Ryssland och Asien under loppet av första världskriget var ett betydelsefullt inslag i denna utveckling.

I Urkatastrofen förkroppsligad tillför historikern Christopher Collstedt viktiga perspektiv på denna process sådan den tog sig uttryck i det neutrala Sverige åren 1914 till 1921. I fokus för analyserna står samtalet om krigsfångars utsatthet och deras kroppsliga och psykiska lidande. Detta förmedlat genom ögonvittnesskildringar, medicinska fallbeskrivningar och humanitärrättsliga rapporter vilka författats av svenska hjälparbetare och läkare som deltagit i Svenska Röda Korsets insatser för tyska och österrikisk­-ungerska krigsfångar i de ryska fånglägren i Sibirien.

This article discusses the creation of assault as a crime against health and life as this discursive process is expressed through Swedish laws, legislative discussions, and legal practice from 1945 to 1965. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on biopolitics and sociologist Thomas Lemke’s outline to a analytics of biopolitics, the article argues that a most central component in the genealogy of assault as a crime against health and life was a shift in the first post-war decades, from a predominant legal idealistic paradigm within Swedish jurisprudence, by which assault was defined as a crime against bodily integrity, to a legal realistic epistemology, imbued with the scientific knowledge and empirical ‘truth’-producing practices of modern medicine. As an effect, new discourses around the victimized body emerged, through which prevailing knowledges and ‘truths’ around violent crime and its effects were challenged and marginalized. In this discursive process, the 19th-century legal-moral category of violent crimes finally collapsed into the overarching legal category prescribed by Brottsbalken (1965) as ‘crimes against health and life’. Consequently, the victimized body was deprived of all meaning but ‘life’ and thus created as a biopolitical space, available to series of life-governing interventions and regulatory practices.

This dissertation examines duelling crimes in Sweden during the first half of the 18th century. During this period such crimes could involve verbal insults concerning honour as well as duelling, resulting in death. lnspired by the methods and perspectives of New Cultural History and by theories of masculinity, the study argues that masculine violence is a cultural category that is historically developed. The focus is on the discourses that defined the legitimacy of masculine violence and honour in its cultural and historical context as well as elucidating perceptions of masculinity related to these.

Based on texts such as legal Acts, judicial records, verdicts, defence and prosecution Acts, letters of remission, Royal Council protocols and forensic reports this thesis highlights how the judicial discourse involving crimes of duelling included discourses and values of the time and how these expressed an understanding of violence and masculinity. In their argumentation in court the various actors employed discourses of their time such as religion, an advanced jurisprudence, perceptions of virtue and honour, policies involving penalty, and to a cerlain extent their knowledge of medicine, health, and the human body. This study has shown that the judicial argumentation on justified and unjustified violence in crimes of duelling above all had its origin in a Christian, hegemonic cultural perception, where binary oppositions of good and bad are combined with jurisprudence.

Contemporary research has maintained that much discourse conceming violence has defined the borders of masculinity in contrast to what is regarded as feminine and thereby emasculated. This study argues how in the early 18th centuries the discourse af peace and non-violence, based on the jurisprudence of the time as well as on the narratives of the New Testament that preached a Christian lifestyle and love, constituted the argumentation in court and also the image of the masculine ideal. However, duels and breaches of honour need to be understood as expressions of a masculine culture of honour rather than a religious practice, which elucidates how early modem conceptions of masculinity spanned over a wide range from the most peaceful, meek and forgiving to the most militant and violent. This specific honour consisted of components derived from the prevailing cultural perceptions of morality, nations of gender, combined with an aristocratic ideology. Possible reasons for a duellist to make use of insults, challenges to duel and violence were disrespectful treatment in the public arena, calling in question a military person's role, and accusations of lying and spreading of rumours.