In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Alonso Gurmendi

25 Oct

[Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg is a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford, in association with Somerville College, as well as Visiting Professor at University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor.] *Spoiler Warning for Avatar (2009), Prey (2022) and The Woman King (2022) Hollywood is very (very) white. According to recent figures by the consulting firm McKinsey, “less than 6 percent of...

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01 Aug

Researching legal history can frequently lead to the reframing of old debates, the discovery of new ways of reading a past text, and even the foregrounding of erased or invisibilised histories. It is a very rewarding kind of research. Other times, however, it simply leads to curious stories. These stories are probably not well-suited for a journal article, but –...

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11 Jul

This past Wednesday 6th, America Televisión – one of the most important and most watched TV networks in Peru – interrupted its signal to broadcast breaking news: two of its journalists, investigating corruption allegations in the rural province of Chota, in the Peruvian Andes, were being held against their will in the indigenous community of La Palma and forced to...

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26 Apr

So far, the 2020s have been a great decade for books on the history of international humanitarian law. 2020 saw the publication of Giovani Mantilla’s exceptional Lawmaking Under Pressure, on the history of Common Article 3; 2021 gave us Samuel Moyn’s Humane, a powerful critique on the idea that war can be humanised; and now 2022 starts off with Boyd van Dijk’s Preparing for War. I...

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25 Apr

Over the coming five days, we are happy to host a book symposium on Boyd van Dijk’s new book, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions, published by Oxford University Press. In addition to comments from van Dijk himself, we have the honor to hear from this list of renowned scholars and practitioners: Eyal Benvenisti, Andrew Clapham, Doreen Lustig, Katharine Fortin, Karin Loevy...

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28 Jan

[UPDATE: I've updated the information regarding the number of Latin American journals in the Scimago Ranking. Thanks to Sergio Verdugo for pointing out the actual numbers!] Back in May last year, I was asked to co-coordinate the 63rd issue of Ius et Veritas, a leading open-access, peer-reviewed, student-led, law journal in Peru. The way things work in Peru, law journals are...

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21 Jan

Recently, US President Joe Biden gave a press conference where he was asked about the US’ approach to Latin America. In an I-can’t-believe-he-actually-said-this moment, Biden responded as follows: “We used to talk about, when I was a kid, in college, about ‘America’s Backyard’. It’s not America’s backyard. Everything south of the Mexican border is ‘America’s Front Yard’. And we’re equal...

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25 Oct

[Alonso Gurmendi is a contributor for Opinio Juris and Assistant Professor at Universidad del Pacífico Law School, in Lima, Peru.] I am a long-time fan of 4X games. For the uninitiated, that stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit & Exterminate Games – a (lame) 1990s pun turned game-genre, coined by Video-Game reviewer Alan Emrich who wanted to promote his Master of Orion review by saying...

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21 Oct

Part I set out the fundamentals of the debate, explaining that a key part of the contextualist critique of Orford’s view of legal history centres on the difference between doing history of international law and using history in international law. This is where the two sides get stuck, because Orford presents the TWAIL critique as “correctives to problems with earlier...

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21 Oct

I am a big fan of Başak Etkin and Kostia Gorobets’ Borderline Jurisprudence podcast. I am also very interested in the intersection between law and history. Since Borderline Jurisprudence’s latest episode featured a discussion with Anne Orford on her latest book, International Law & the Politics of History(hereinafter ILPH), I could not resist to offer some comments. Anne Orford is, without a doubt, one of...

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