Latest in Non-International Armed Conflict
[I am happy to report that Lawfare once again is partnering with InterCross and EJILTalk! to present posts stemming from a summer roundtable at Oxford concerning international law and armed conflict.
If initial reports are confirmed, this month may go down as one of the gravest in recent memory for hospitals in war.
A better understanding of Russian doctrine about hybrid conflict could provide useful insights into how a nation using offensive cyber operations (many of which can be denied) might be able to achieve its goals.
On this week’s Lawfare Podcast, Ben sits down with Professor Gabriella Blum, professor at Harvard Law School, and Dustin Lewis, a senior researcher at Harvard Law Schools’ Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, to discuss their new report written with Naz Modirzadeh entitled Medical Care in Armed Conflict: IHL and State Responses to Terrorism. The conversation takes a look at whether we should consider medical care a form of illegitimate support to terrorists. Their argument?
I'm very happy to report that the 3rd annual Transatlantic Workshop on International Law and Armed Conflict will occur at Oxford next week.
The Guantanamo detainee, as readers likely know, argued in a February motion that the end of the United States' war in Afghanistan, as recognized by President Obama, requires his release from Guantanamo. On Wednesday, Al-Warafi filed his reply brief on that issue. It opens as follows:
Interested in the ongoing debate over the relationship between LOAC and Human Rights Law in general, or the intersection of those bodies of law in relation to non-criminal detention in particular? You won't want to miss this.
The use of lethal force (whether via armed drone, manned aircraft, cruise missile, helicopter assault, etc.) has been a cornerstone of U.S. counterterrorism policy for many years, both in places where we have ground combat deployments and places where we do not. Throughout this period, the legality, efficacy, wisdom, and morality of this practice has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate. Nonetheless, the kinetic option has proven remarkably durable over time (especially as compared to its sibling, the use of non-criminal detention).
Judicial imperialism is defeating the British armed forces. At least this is what the authors of a report recently published by the Policy Exchange---an influential British think tank---claim.
I spent the last two days at a terrific conference in at Columbia Law School on asymmetric warfare and the laws of armed conflict, organized by Matthew Waxman and the great Stanford international relations scholar, Steve Krasner. The conference was interesting in bringing together top-flight international relations theorists and international law experts to discuss an issue both think about---but for whom the vocabularies and methodologies of inquiry are totally different.