[Dr. Kubo Mačák is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.] I would like to start by thanking Opinio Juris for providing a platform for the discussion of internationalized armed conflicts in international law. In the title of my opening post, I paraphrased Carl von Clausewitz to suggest that these types of confrontations have become...
I want to congratulate Professor Macak for a fantastic book. Not only does it make for a very enjoyable read, I was also very pleased with its thoroughness, including in terms of incorporating the practice of the Global South. Take, for example, the case of recognition of belligerence. It is, as the book points out, very common to hear how...
[Elvina Pothelet is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva. Her research interests focus on the international law governing the use of force, the law of armed conflict and war crime law.] Kubo Mačák’s book is a rich and thought-provoking contribution to the scholarship on IHL applicability. The writing style and structure of the book make it a smooth and enjoyable read – to...
[Katharine Fortin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utrecht's Netherlands Institute of Human Rights.] Kubo Mačák’s book starts with the observation that many conflicts today start as internal affairs in which a State confronts a domestic armed group, but often end up getting internationalized. Mačák sets out to unpack and analyse this phenomenon, by identifying at what point a...
[Tamás Hoffmann is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department for the Study of Domestic Implementation of International and European Law at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.] Kubo’s new monograph on internationalized armed conflicts is a truly remarkable book. It attempts to give a comprehensive yet concise analysis of the nagging legal issues inevitably arising during such conflicts when the line...
[Laurie R. Blank is a Clinical Professor of Law, Director of the Center for International and Comparative Law, and Director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law.] The classification of international armed conflict (IAC) and non-international armed conflict (NIAC) is the essential building block of any law of armed conflict analysis. Kubo Maçak’s new book, Internationalized...
[Anne Quintin is the Head of the Advisory Service for the International Committee of the Red Cross. Her contribution is written in her personal capacity and the views contained hierin do not necessarily reflect those of the ICRC.] Let me first thank Opinio Juris for the invitation and congratulate Kubo for his excellent, rigorous and well-researched book. The latter brings a...
[Bill Boothby is an Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.] After establishing key trends in the evolution over centuries of the law relating to conflict, and having put forward a convincing methodology, the attempt to give meaning to the notion of the internationalisation of a conflict is the task of the first substantive chapter. Numerous ways in which...
[Dr. Kubo Mačák is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.] Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw all US troops from Syria, announced characteristically through a Twitter post, has once again brought the ongoing hostilities in the Middle Eastern country into international spotlight. More than seven years into the conflict, its origins in a series...
Over the coming ten days, we are proudly kicking off the new year with our first book symposium of 2019 on Kubo Mačák's new book, Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law, published by Oxford University Press. In addition to comments from Kubo himself, we have the honor to hear from this list of renowned scholars and practitioners: Laurie Blank, Bill Boothby, Susan...
[Dr. John Heieck is a criminal defense lawyer in the US and an independent researcher of genocide and human rights studies.] I want to reiterate my thanks to Opinio Juris and the International Commission of Jurists for holding this thought-provoking symposium on my new monograph A Duty to Prevent Genocide: Due Diligence Obligations among the P5. I especially want to thank...
[William A. Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University in London. He is also professor of international human law and human rights at Leiden University, emeritus professor of human rights law at the National University of Ireland Galway and honorary chairman of the Irish Centre for Human Rights.] John Heieck has produced a fine study on the duty to...