Recent Posts

[Mr Mark Douglas is a Maritime Domain Analyst at Starboard Maritime Intelligence. He qualified as a Marine Engineer Officer while in the Royal New Zealand Navy. He later concurrently served as New Zealand Assistant Defence Advisor to Singapore and the New Zealand International Liaison Officer to the Singapore Information Fusion Centre. Dr Trung Nguyen is a Research Fellow at the Centre...

[Jens Iverson is an assistant professor of international law at Leiden University]  The war in Ukraine was always about Russian aggression and the collective response to that illegal, ongoing crime. A just and sustainable peace needs to focus on reducing the risk of Russian aggression in the future. Unfortunately, the “peace plan” proposed by the US to Ukraine does not do enough...

[Maria Immacolata Fico is a research collaborator at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. Juliette Graf is a scientific associate (research and outreach) at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.] This is the second of two posts from a November 2024 roundtable in Geneva on accountability for children in armed conflict. Part 1 examined progress...

[Maria Immacolata Fico is a research collaborator at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. Juliette Graf is a scientific associate (research and outreach) at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.] This is the first of two posts from a November 2024 roundtable in Geneva on accountability for children in armed conflict. Part 1 examines progress...

[Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University School of Law, an Executive Board Member of Airwars, and the Managing Editor of Opinio Juris.] In a New York Times essay published last week, Jeh Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense in President Barack Obama’s first term and Director of Homeland Security in his second, seeks...

To have your event or announcement featured in next week’s post, please send a link and a brief description (1-2 paragraphs) to ojeventsandannouncements@gmail.com. Calls for Papers AILA Conference on International Law: The Armenian International Law Association (AILA) invites scholars, practitioners, and students to submit abstracts for the Inaugural AILA Conference on International Law. The theme of the conference is “Rethinking International Law: Knowledge,...

[Dr Sabina Garahan is a lecturer in criminal law and human rights at the University of Essex Law School and Director of the Essex Human Rights Centre Clinic. Dr Sarah Zarmsky is a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law with a research focus on international criminal law, human rights, and new and emerging technologies.] Introduction Detention is often associated with the perpetration...

[Madeeha Majid is a legal consultant with OpenNyAI – Agami and an international lawyer based in Srinagar, Kashmir] On 19 July 2024, Judge Dire Tladi, in his powerful declaration to the Advisory Opinion on Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, emphasized that Israel’s policies and practices reveal ‘a clear intent to dominate the Palestinian...

[Julia Emtseva is assistant professor of law at HEC Paris] I had never considered myself a law and technology person. Likewise, I never imagined that open-source investigations (OSINT) would touch me directly, beyond distant and abstract conflicts where technology was used to trace evidence of international crimes. That changed in September 2022, when my country, Kyrgyzstan, stood on the brink of full-scale armed conflict with its...

[Pedro R. Borges de Carvalho is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven, Institute for International Law and a research fellow at ATHENE – German National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity] Mass atrocities often leave scars on the Earth’s surface that forensic methodologies can decrypt given the right technological capabilities. High-resolution satellite imagery analysis is one such method, and it is fundamental for both forensics...

[Christine Carpenter is an international lawyer, and a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD Candidate in international relations and politics at the University of Cambridge] To live in a crisis zone today is to be watched, recorded, and broadcasted—often without one’s knowledge or consent. Digital evidence plays a central role in investigating international crimes and human rights abuses—as has been demonstrated vis-à-vis Israel’s atrocities...

[Christiane Wilke is a Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa and collaborates with Airwars on a project examining legal and factual claims in US military civilian casualty assessments] How do we look at genocide, and how does the vantage point shape what we see? Armed conflicts and genocides are frequently represented using the aerial perspective: satellite images, drone video footage,...