New Battlefields Old Laws

Download or read book New Battlefields/Old Laws written by William C. Banks and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An internationally-recognized authority on constitutional law, national security law, and counterterrorism, William C. Banks believes changing patterns of global conflict are forcing a reexamination of the traditional laws of war. The Hague Rules, the customary laws of war, and the post-1949 law of armed conflict no longer account for nonstate groups waging prolonged campaigns of terrorism—or even more conventional insurgent attacks. Recognizing that many of today's conflicts are low-intensity, asymmetrical wars fought between disparate military forces, Banks's collection analyzes nonstate armed groups and irregular forces (such as terrorist and insurgent groups, paramilitaries, child soldiers, civilians participating in hostilities, and private military firms) and their challenge to international humanitarian law. Both he and his contributors believe gaps in the laws of war leave modern battlefields largely unregulated, and they fear state parties suffer without guidelines for responding to terrorists and their asymmetrical tactics, such as the targeting of civilians. These gaps also embolden weaker, nonstate combatants to exploit forbidden strategies and violate the laws of war. Attuned to the contested nature of post-9/11 security and policy, this collection juxtaposes diverse perspectives on existing laws and their application in contemporary conflict. It sets forth a legal definition of new wars, describes the status of new actors, charts the evolution of the twenty-first-century battlefield, and balances humanitarian priorities with military necessity. While the contributors contest each other, they ultimately reestablish the legitimacy of a long-standing legal corpus, and they rehumanize an environment in which the most vulnerable targets, civilian populations, are themselves becoming weapons against conventional power.

Download or read book War Beyond the Battlefield written by David Grondin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an effort to make sense of war beyond the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the "War on Terror", this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war beyond the battlefield, it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance, it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed, re-designed, re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new spaces of war – new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to – are television screens, cellular phones and bandwidth, George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, videogames, popular culture sites, news media, blogs, and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) – to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

Download or read book The New Warfare written by J. Martin Rochester and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the evolving relationship between war and international law, examining the complex practical and legal dilemmas posed by the changing nature of war in the contemporary world, whether the traditional rules governing the onset and conduct of hostilities apply anymore, and how they might be adapted to new realities. War, always messy, has become even messier today, with the blurring of interstate, intrastate, and extrastate violence. How can the United States and other countries be expected to fight honourably and observe the existing norms when they often are up against an adversary who recognizes no such obligations? Indeed, how do we even know whether an "armed conflict" is underway when modern wars tend to lack neat beginnings and endings and seem geographically indeterminate, as well? What is the legality of anticipatory self-defense, humanitarian intervention, targeted killings, drones, detention of captured prisoners without POW status, and other controversial practices? These questions are explored through a review of the United Nations Charter, Geneva Conventions, and other regimes and how they have operated in recent conflicts. Through a series of case studies, including the U.S. war on terror and the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Kosovo, and Congo, the author illustrates the challenges we face today in the ongoing effort to reduce war and, when it occurs, to make it more humane.

Download or read book Lawfare written by Orde F. Kittrie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lawfare, author Orde Kittrie's draws on his experiences as a lawfare practitioner, US State Department attorney, and international law scholar in analyzing the theory and practice of the strategic leveraging of law as an increasingly powerful and effective weapon in the current global security landscape. Lawfare incorporates case studies of recent offensive and defensive lawfare by the United States, Iran, China, and by both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and includes dozens of examples of how lawfare has thus been waged and defended against. Kittrie notes that since private attorneys can play important and decisive roles in their nations' national security plans through their expertise in areas like financial law, maritime insurance law, cyber law, and telecommunications law, the full scope of lawfare's impact and possibilities are just starting to be understood.

Download or read book Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law written by Kubo Macak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of factors that transform a prima facie non-international armed conflict (NIAC) into an international armed conflict (IAC) and the consequences that follow from this process of internationalization. It examines in detail the historical development as well as the current state of the relevant rules of international humanitarian law. The discussion is grounded in general international law, complemented with abundant references to case law, and illustrated by examples from twentieth and twenty-first century armed conflicts. In Part I, the book puts forward a thorough catalogue of modalities of conflict internationalization that includes outside intervention, State dissolution, and recognition of belligerency. It then specifically considers the legal qualification of complex situations that feature more than two conflict parties and contrasts the mechanism of internationalization of armed conflicts with the reverse process of de-internationalization. Part II of the book challenges the conventional wisdom that members of non-State armed groups do not normally benefit from combatant status. It argues that the majority of fighters belonging to non-State armed groups in most types of internationalized armed conflicts are in fact eligible for combatant status. Finally, Part III turns to belligerent occupation, traditionally understood as a leading example of a notion that cannot be transposed to armed conflicts occurring in the territory of a single State. By contrast, the book argues in favour of the applicability of the law of belligerent occupation to internationalized armed conflicts.

Download or read book Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law 2013 written by Terry D. Gill and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-15 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains several articles on the topic ‘Detention in non-international armed conflict’, including the Copenhagen Process, and moreover features contributions on autonomous weapons systems, Apartheid and the second Turkel Report. It also contains an elaborate Year in Review and a special section on the high-level Boundaries of the Battlefield symposium, including a conference report and several in-depth reflections on various other aspects of the symposium. The Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law is the world's only annual publication devoted to the study of the laws governing armed conflict. It provides a truly international forum for high-quality, peer-reviewed academic articles focusing on this crucial branch of international law. Distinguished by contemporary relevance, the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law bridges the gap between theory and practice and serves as a useful reference tool for scholars, practitioners, military personnel, civil servants, diplomats, human rights workers and students.

Download or read book Counterinsurgency Law written by William Banks and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Counterinsurgency Law, William Banks and several distinguished contributors explore from an interdisciplinary legal and policy perspective the multiple challenges that counterinsurgency operations pose today to the rule of law - international, humanitarian, human rights, criminal, and domestic. Addressing the considerable challenges for the future of armed conflict, each contributor in the book explores the premise that in COIN operations, international humanitarian law, human rights law, international law more generally, and domestic national security laws do not provide adequate legal and policy coverage and guidance for multiple reasons, many of which are explored in this book. A second shared premise is that these problems are not only challenges for the law in post-9/11 security environments-but matters of policy with implications for the international community and for global security more generally.