There are currently over 100 stateless nations pressing for greater self-determination around the globe. The vast majority of these groups will never achieve independence. Many groups will receive some accommodation over self-determination, many will engage in civil war over self-determination, and in many cases, internecine violence will plague these groups. This book examines the dynamic internal politics of states and self-determination groups. The internal structure and political dynamics of states and self-determination groups significantly affect information and credibility problems faced by these actors, as well as the incentives and opportunities for states to pursue partial accommodation of these groups.
Using new data on the internal structure of all self-determination groups and their states and on all accommodation in self-determination disputes, this book shows that states with some, but not too many, internal divisions are best able to accommodate self-determination groups and avoid civil war. When groups are more internally divided, they are both much more likely to be accommodated and to get into civil war with the state, and also more likely to have fighting within the group. Detailed comparison of three self-determination disputes in the conflict-torn region of northeast India reveals that internal divisions in states and groups affect when these groups get the accommodation they seek, which groups violently rebel, and whether actors target violence against their own co-ethnics.
The argument and evidence in this book reveal the dynamic effect that internal divisions within SD groups and states have on their ability to bargain over self-determination. Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham demonstrates that understanding the relations between states and SD groups requires looking at the politics inside these actors.

This volume brings together the most important writing on torture and the 'war on terror by one of the leading US voices in the torture debate. Philosopher and legal ethicist David Luban reflects on this contentious topic in a powerful sequence of essays including two new and previously unpublished pieces. He analyzes the trade-offs between security and human rights, as well as the connection between torture, humiliation, and human dignity, the fallacy of using ticking bomb scenarios in debates about torture, and the ethics of government lawyers. The book develops an illuminating and novel conception of torture as the use of pain and suffering to communicate absolute dominance over the victim. Factually stimulating and legally informed, this volume provides the clearest analysis to date of the torture debate. It brings the story up to date by discussing the Obama administration's failure to hold torturers accountable.

War is about individuals maiming and killing each other, and yet, it seems that it is also irreducibly collective, as it is fought by groups of people and more often than not for the sake of communal values such as territorial integrity and national self-determination. Cecile Fabre articulates and defends an ethical account of war in which the individual, as a moral and rational agent, is the fundamental focus for concern and respect-both as a combatant whose acts of killing need justifying and as a non-combatant whose suffering also needs justifying. She takes as her starting point a political morality to which the individual, rather than the nation-state, is central, namely cosmopolitanism. According to cosmopolitanism, individuals all matter equally, irrespective of their membership in this or that political community. Traditional war ethics already accepts this principle, since it holds that unarmed civilians are illegitimate targets even though they belong to the enemy community. However, although the traditional account of whom we may kill in wars is broadly faithful to that principle, the traditional account of why we may kill and of who may kill is not. Cosmopolitan theorists, for their part, do not address the ethical issues raised by war in any depth. Fabre's Cosmopolitan War seeks to fill this gap, and defends its account of just and unjust wars by addressing the ethics of different kinds of war: wars of national defence, wars over scarce resources, civil wars, humanitarian intervention, wars involving private military forces, and asymmetrical wars.

The Small Arms Survey 2014 considers the multiple roles of women in the context of armed violence, security, and the small arms agenda. The volume's thematic section comprises one chapter on violence against women and girls - with a focus on post-conflict Liberia and Nepal - and another on the recent convergence of the small arms agenda with that of women, peace and security. Complementing these chapters are illustrated testimonies of women with experience as soldiers, rebels and security personnel. The 'weapons and markets' section assesses the potential impact of the Arms Trade Treaty, presents the 2014 Transparency Barometer and an update on the authorized small arms trade, and analyses recent ammunition explosions in the Republic of the Congo. Additionally, it examines ammunition circulating in Africa and the Middle East, maps the sources of insurgent weapons in Sudan and South Sudan, and evaluates crime gun records in the United States.

International human rights law offers an overarching international legal framework to help determine the legality of the use of any weapon, as well as its lawful supply. It governs acts of States and non-State actors alike. In doing so, human rights law embraces international humanitarian law regulation of the use of weapons in armed conflict and disarmament law, as well as international criminal justice standards. In situations of law enforcement (such as counterpiracy, prisons, ordinary policing, riot control, and many peace operations), human rights law is the primary legal frame of reference above domestic criminal law. This important and timely book draws on all aspects of international weapons law and proposes a new view on international law governing weapons. Also included is a specific discussion on armed drones and cyberattacks, two highly topical issues in international law and international relations.

In 2005, the international community made a landmark commitment to prevent mass atrocities by unanimously adopting the UN's "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) principle. As often as not, however, R2P has failed to translate into decisive action. Why does this gap persist between the world's normative pledges to R2P and its ability to make it a daily lived reality? In this new book, leading global authorities on humanitarian protection Alex Bellamy and Edward Luck offer a probing and in-depth response to this fundamental question, calling for a more comprehensive approach to the practice of R2P - one that moves beyond states and the UN to include the full range of actors that play a role in protecting vulnerable populations. Drawing on cases from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, they examine the forces and conditions that produce atrocity crimes and the challenge of responding to them quickly and effectively. Ultimately, they advocate both for emergency policies to temporarily stop carnage and for policies leading to sustainable change within societies and governments. Only by introducing these additional elements to the R2P toolkit will the failures associated with humanitarian crises like Syria and Libya become a thing of the past.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is the third modern international criminal tribunal supported by the United Nations and the first to be situated where the crimes were committed. This timely, important, and comprehensive book is the first to critically assess the impact and legacy of the SCSL for Africa and international criminal law. The collection, containing 37 original chapters from leading scholars and respected practitioners with inside knowledge of the tribunal, analyzes cutting-edge and controversial issues with significant implications for international criminal law and transitional justice. These include joint criminal enterprise; the novel crime against humanity of forced marriage; the war crime prohibiting enlisting and using child soldiers in the first court to prosecute that offense; the prosecution of the war crime of attacks against United Nations peacekeepers in the first tribunal where this offense was prosecuted; the tension between truth commissions and criminal trials in the first country to simultaneously have the two; and the questions of whether it is permissible under international law for states to unilaterally confer blanket amnesties to local perpetrators of universally condemned international crimes, whether the immunities enjoyed by an incumbent head of a third state bars his prosecution before an ad hoc treaty-based international criminal court, and whether such courts may be funded by donations from states without compromising judicial independence.

Each year, many thousands of child civilians are killed, injured, or otherwise physically and psychologically harmed as a result of armed conflicts. There is a considerable body of international law which aims to minimize the harm inflicted on these children, and yet it is little known, or observed. This text focuses exclusively on child civilians. It addresses three main questions: what are the precise rules incorporated in the pertinent body of law, and what are its implementation mechanisms?; how effective is it (with reference to recent conflicts involving Iraq) in helping to achieve some protection for child civilians?; and can it be rendered more effective? The book concludes by proposing a number of strategies to strengthen the impact of the applicable law.

This collection of essays brings together jus post bellum and transitional justice theorists to explore the legal and moral questions that arise at the end of war and in the transition to less oppressive regimes. Transitional justice and jus post bellum share in common many concepts that will be explored in this volume. In both transitional justice and jus post bellum, retribution is crucial. In some contexts criminal trials will need to be held, and in others truth commissions and other hybrid trials will be considered more appropriate means for securing some form of retribution. But there is a difference between how jus post bellum is conceptualized, where the key is securing peace, and transitional justice, where the key is often greater democratization. This collection of essays highlights both the overlap and the differences between these emerging bodies of scholarship and incipient law.

This book examines to what extent the right of self-defence, as laid down in Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, permits States to launch military operations against other States. In particular, it focuses on the occurrence of an 'armed attack' - the crucial trigger for the activation of this right. In light of the developments since 9/11, the author analyses relevant physical and verbal customary practice, ranging from the 1974 Definition of Aggression to recent incidents such as the 2001 US intervention in Afghanistan and the 2006 Israeli intervention in Lebanon. The notion of 'armed attack' is examined from a threefold perspective. What acts can be regarded as an 'armed attack'? When can an 'armed attack' be considered to take place? And from whom must an 'armed attack' emanate? By way of conclusion, the different findings are brought together in a draft 'Definition of Armed Attack'.

The Military Commissions scheme established by President George W. Bush in November 2001 has garnered considerable national and international controversy. In parallel with the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the creation of military courts has focused significant global attention on the use of such courts as a mechanism to process and try persons suspected of committing terrorist acts or offenses during armed conflict. This book brings together the viewpoints of leading scholars and policy makers on the topic of exceptional courts and military commissions with a series of unique contributions setting out the current state of the field. The book assesses the relationship between such courts and other intersecting and overlapping legal arenas including constitutional law, international law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law. By examining the comparative patterns, similarities, and disjunctions arising from the use of such courts, this book also analyzes the political and legal challenges that the creation and operation of exceptional courts produces both within democratic states and for the international community.

In der Voelkerrechtswissenschaft ist streitig, ob Kampfeinsatze fremder Truppen in internen Konflikten, die nicht auf einem Mandat des Sicherheitsrates der Vereinten Nationen beruhen, voelkerrechtlich zulassig sind. Nolte geht in seinem Buch der Frage nach, ob die Einladung der jeweiligen Regierung eine Rechtsgrundlage fur solche Einsatze sein kann. Er untersucht die Bedeutung der einschlagigen Grundprinzipien des Voelkerrechts (Zustimmung, Interventionsverbot, Gewaltverbot, Selbstbestimmungsrecht, Menschenrechtsschutz, Anerkennung von Regierungen) und analysiert dann die umfangreiche Staatenpraxis. Ergebnis seiner Analyse ist, dass die Einladung der Regierung in bestimmten Grenzen rechtfertigend wirken kann und mit den Grundprinzipien der kollektiven Sicherheit, so wie sie sich seit Ende des Kalten Krieges entwickelt haben, vereinbar ist.

The international law on the use of force is one of the oldest branches of international law. It is an area twinned with the emergence of international law as a concept in itself, and which sees law and politics collide. The number of armed conflicts is equal only to the number of methodological approaches used to describe them. Many violent encounters are well known. The Kosovo Crisis in 1999 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 spring easily to the minds of most scholars and academics, and gain extensive coverage in this text. Other conflicts, including the Belgian operation in Stanleyville, and the Ethiopian Intervention in Somalia, are often overlooked to our peril. Ruys and Corten's expert-written text compares over sixty different instances of the use of cross border force since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, from all out warfare to hostile encounters between individual units, targeted killings, and hostage rescue operations, to ask a complex question. How much authority does the power of precedent really have in the law of the use of force?

Few events have influenced our global order as intensely as the events of September 11, 2001. At various levels in the past ten years, persistent attempts have been made to address the threat of terrorism, yet there is still urgent need for a joint and coherent application of a variety of regulations relating to international criminal justice co-operation, the use of force and international human rights law. In an important contribution to international discourse, Larissa van den Herik and Nico Schrijver examine the relationship between different branches of international law and their applicability to the problem of terrorism and counter-terrorism. Using a unique combination of academic perspectives, practitioners' insights and a comprehensive three-part approach, Counter-terrorism Strategies in a Fragmented International Legal Order offers sound policy recommendations alongside thorough analysis of the state of international law regarding terrorism and provides fresh insights against the backdrop of recent practice.

The Balkan Wars, the Rwanda genocide, and the crimes against humanity in Cambodia and Sierra Leone spurred the creation of international criminal tribunals to bring the perpetrators of unimaginable atrocities to justice. When Richard Goldstone, David Crane, Robert Petit, and Luis Moreno-Ocampo received the call - each set out on a unique quest to build an international criminal tribunal and launch its first prosecutions. Never before have the founding International Prosecutors told the behind-the-scenes stories of their historic journey. With no blueprint and little precedent, each was a path-breaker. This book contains the first-hand accounts of the challenges they faced, the obstacles they overcame, and the successes they achieved in obtaining justice for millions of victims.

In 1946, the judges at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared 'crimes against peace' - the planning, initiation or waging of aggressive wars - to be 'the supreme international crime'. At the time, the prosecuting powers heralded the charge as being a legal milestone, but it later proved to be an anomaly arising from the unique circumstances of the post-war period. This study traces the idea of criminalising aggression, from its origins after the First World War, through its high-water mark at the post-war tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, to its abandonment during the Cold War. Today, a similar charge - the 'crime of aggression' - is being mooted at the International Criminal Court, so the ideas and debates that shaped the original charge of 'crimes against peace' assume new significance and offer valuable insights to lawyers, policy-makers and scholars engaged in international law and international relations.

The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has proven the most complicated and controversial of all arms control treaties, both in principle and in practice. Statements of nuclear-weapon States from the Cold War to the present, led by the United States, show a disproportionate prioritization of the non-proliferation pillar of the Treaty, and an unwarranted underprioritization of the civilian energy development and disarmament pillars of the treaty. This book argues that the way in which nuclear-weapon States have interpreted the Treaty has laid the legal foundation for a number of policies related to trade in civilian nuclear energy technologies and nuclear weapons disarmament. These policies circumscribe the rights of non-nuclear-weapon States under Article IV of the Treaty by imposing conditions on the supply of civilian nuclear technologies. They also provide for the renewal and maintaintenance, and in some cases further development of the nuclear weapons arsenals of nuclear-weapon States. The book provides a legal analysis of this trend in treaty interpretation by nuclear-weapon States and the policies for which it has provided legal justification. It argues, through a close and systematic examination of the Treaty by reference to the rules of treaty interpretation found in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, that this disproportionate prioritization of the non-proliferation pillar of the Treaty leads to erroneous legal interpretations of the Treaty, prejudicing the legitimate legal interests of non-nuclear-weapon States.

1994 is the International Year of the Family, and debates about the rights of the child are once again at the top of the national and international legal and political agenda. Yet in places of armed conflict all over the world tens of thousands of children are recruited to fight in bloody conflicts, and their rights are systematically ignored and abused. In this path-breaking study, Professor Goodwin-Gill and Dr Cohn assess the status of the Child Soldier in international law and highlight the ways in which international humanitarian law fails to provide effective protection, particularly in the internal conflicts which are the most common battlefields today. Based upon empirical data gathered from places of conflict all over the world, the authors examine the consequences for child soldiers, their families and community of their participation in armed conflict. They conclude their study with practical suggestions for preventing recruitment, and call for a more coherent policy of treatment for those children who have participated in acts of violence.

War, Aggression and Self-Defence is an indispensable guide to international legal issues of war and peace, the crime of aggression, self-defence and its trigger, armed attack, and the different modalities of self-defence, as well as enforcement measures taken under the aegis of a binding decision of the Security Council. This new and fully updated 6th edition focuses on the key issues at the forefront of the contemporary international legal debate, as well as analysing the new armed conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and Georgia, re-examining the Kampala amendments on the crime of aggression and considering the phenomenon of 'robust' mandates of a peacekeeping force. Suitable for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, this market-leading book offers a wide-ranging and highly readable introduction to the legal issues surrounding war and self-defence.

Until recently, and with a few notable exceptions in the wake of World War II, violations of the laws of war and international humanitarian law were addressed primarily as claims between states. However, this approach has changed radically in the last twenty years, as the international community has increasingly accepted the idea of individual criminal responsibility for violations of international humanitarian law. The International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have played a key role in this transformation and, as the trailblazers for a growing number of new international or hybrid criminal courts, in establishing the field of international criminal justice and encouraging the national prosecution of war crimes. Understanding the Tribunals' origins, their ground-breaking jurisprudence, and how they have addressed critical legal and practical challenges is essential to understanding both the revolution that has occurred over the past twenty years and how international criminal law will change and grow in the years ahead. As a leading scholar on humanitarian law, and President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Theodor Meron has observed and influenced the development of international criminal law as it has evolved from a mostly academic exercise to a cornerstone of the new international legal order. In this collection of speeches delivered during his first decade on the bench, he offers an insightful overview of the foundations of international criminal law as well as a unique insider's perspective on the challenges faced by international criminal tribunals, their creation of a corpus of substantive and procedural law, and the responsibilities of international jurists. Judge Meron's experience in international criminal justice makes this volume as rewarding for experts as it is for the general public.

In this evaluation of the international legal standing of the right to reparation and its practical implementation at the national level, Christine Evans outlines State responsibility and examines the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice, the Articles on State Responsibility of the International Law Commission and the convergence of norms in different branches of international law, notably human rights law, humanitarian law and international criminal law. Case studies of countries in which the United Nations has played a significant role in peace negotiations and post-conflict processes allow her to analyse to what extent transitional justice measures have promoted State responsibility for reparations, interacted with human rights mechanisms and prompted subsequent elaboration of domestic legislation and reparations policies. In conclusion, she argues for an emerging customary right for individuals to receive reparations for serious violations of human rights and a corresponding responsibility of States.

Charting in detail the evolution of the international rules on the protection of historic and artistic sites and objects from destruction and plunder in war, this 2006 book analyses in depth their many often-overlapping provisions. It serves as a comprehensive and balanced guide to a subject of increasing public profile, which will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners of international law and to all those concerned with preserving the cultural heritage.

Through an analysis of UN operations including international territorial administration, refugee camps, peacekeeping, the implementation of sanctions and the provision of humanitarian aid, Guglielmo Verdirame shows that the powers exercised by the UN carry a serious risk of human rights abuse. The International Law Commission has codified and developed the law of institutional responsibility, but, while indispensable, these principles and rules cannot on their own ensure compliance and accountability. The 'liberty deficit' of the UN and of other international organisations, thus remains an urgent legal and political problem. Some solutions may be available; indeed, recent state and institutional practice offers interesting examples in this respect. But at a fundamental level we need to ask ourselves whether, judged on the basis of the principle of liberty, the power shift from states to international organisations is always beneficial.

This book is about amnesties for grave international crimes that are adopted by states in moments of transition or social unrest. The subject is naturally controversial, especially in the age of the International Criminal Court. The goal of this book is to reframe and revitalize the global debate on the subject, and to offer an original framework for resolving amnesty dilemmas when they arise. Most existing literature and jurisprudence on amnesties deal with only a small subset of state practice and sidestep the ambiguity of amnesty s position under international law. This book addresses the ambiguity head on and argues that amnesties of the broadest scope are sometimes defensible when adopted as a last recourse in contexts of mass violence. Drawing on an extensive amnesty database, the book offers detailed guidance on how to ensure that amnesties extend the minimum leniency possible, while imposing the maximum accountability on the beneficiaries.

This fully revised fourth edition of Constraints on the Waging of War considers the development of the principal rules of international humanitarian law from their origins to the present day. Of particular focus are the rules governing weapons and the legal instruments through which respect for the law can be enforced. Combining theory and actual practice, this book appeals to specialists as well as to students turning to the subject for the first time.