Books

[Siobhán Wills is a Professor of Law at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. This post is a part of the Protection of Civilians Symposium.] In 2014 the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services published an ‘evaluation of the implementation and results of Protection of Civilians mandates in United Nations peacekeeping operations’ which: noted a persistent pattern of peacekeeping operations...

[Ralph Mamiya is team leader for the Protection of Civilians Team in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations but writes here in a purely personal capacity, and the views expressed do not represent official positions of his Department or the United Nations.] The protection of civilians is both a well-established topic in international law and also a relatively new and controversial...

This week, we are hosting a symposium on the Protection of Civilians, a volume recently published by Oxford University Press, edited by Haidi Willmot, United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations; Ralph Mamiya, team leader, Protections of Civilians at the United Nations' Department of Peacekeeping Operations; Scott Sheeran, Senior Lecturer, Director of the LLMs and MAs in International Human Rights, School of Law and Human Rights...

[Kevin Govern is Associate Professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law.] The science fiction author William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his short story, Burning Chrome (1982), before most of the public had a concept of, let alone experience with, using networked computer systems. Science fiction has given way to cyber reality, with 42.3% of the world’s population using the Internet on a regular basis, some 741% growth between 2000-2014 alone. At the same time, cyber weapons and cyber warfare are among the most dangerous innovations in recent years. Cyber weapons can imperil economic, political, and military systems by a single act, or by multifaceted orders of effect, with wide ranging potential consequences. A non-exclusive list of some notable past cyber incidents includes but is not limited to: The US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, recently told the House intelligence committee the next phase of escalating online data theft most likely will involve manipulation of digital information, with a lower likelihood of a “cyber Armageddon” of digitally triggered damage to catastrophically damage physical infrastructure. Contemporaneous with this writing, a Chinese delegation met with representatives from the FBI, the intelligence community and the state, treasury and justice departments for a “frank and open exchange about cyber issues” amounting to “urgent negotiations…on a cybersecurity deal and may announce an agreement when President Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington on a state visit on Thursday [24 September].” In this era of great cyber peril and opportunity, my colleagues and co-editors Jens Ohlin from Cornell Law School and Claire Finkelstein from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and I had the privilege of contributing to and editing a book that assembles the timely and insightful writings of renowned technical experts, industrial leaders, philosophers, legal scholars, and military officers as presented at a Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law roundtable conference entitled Cyberwar and the Rule of Law. The collected work, Cyber War – Law and Ethics for Virtual Conflicts, explores cyber warfare’s moral and legal issues in three categories. First, it addresses foundational questions regarding cyber attacks. What are they and what does it mean to talk about a cyber war? State sponsored cyber warriors as well as hackers employ ever more sophisticated and persistent means to penetrate government computer systems; in response, governments and industry develop more elaborate and innovative defensive systems. The book presents alternative views concerning whether the laws of war should apply, whether transnational criminal law or some other peacetime framework is more appropriate, or if there is a tipping point that enables the laws of war to be used. Secondly, this work examines the key principles of the law of war, or jus in bello, to determine how they might be applied to cyber-conflicts, in particular those of proportionality and necessity. It also investigates the distinction between civilian and combatant in this context, and studies the level of causation necessary to elicit a response, looking at the notion of a “proximate cause.” Finally, it analyzes the specific operational realities implicated by cyber warfare technology employed and deployed under existing and potential future regulatory regimes. Here is the full Table of Contents:

[Philip Allott is Emeritus Professor of International Public Law at the University of Cambridge.] Interpretation of any text – religious, political, historical, scientific, literary, artistic, legal – raises profound philosophical problems. Interpretation of a legal text is in a class of its own, because it can have direct and substantial social effects, determining people’s lives. The philosophy of legal interpretation is...

[Fuad Zarbiyev is an Associate in the International Arbitration Group of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP.] The interpretation discourse in modern international law is dominated by a textualist paradigm. This claim may seem empirically wrong if it is taken to mean that nothing other than eo nomine textual arguments features in the international legal discourse. After all, the interpretive regime...

[Julian Arato is an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School.] Interpretation in International Law is something of an iconoclastic volume, from its critical ethos to its provocative structure around the metaphor of the game. The object of its revisionism, above all, is an apparently stagnant formalism that seems too prevalent in the theory and practice of interpretation in international law today. Symbolic...

[Michael Waibel is a University Lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law.] The rise of distinct interpretive communities goes hand in hand with the much debated topic of fragmentation in international law. Even though the VCLT’s role in treaty interpretation has been studied extensively, how interpretive communities affect treaty interpretation...

[Daniel Peat and Matthew Windsor are PhD candidates at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, and members of Gonville and Caius College.] International lawyers have long realised the importance of interpretation to their academic discipline and professional practice. Interpretation in international law has traditionally been understood as a process of assigning meaning to texts with the objective of establishing rights...

[Carsten Stahn is Professor of International Criminal Law and Global Justice at Leiden University, and Programme Director of the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies.] Jus post bellum comes in many forms and variations. One of the main shortcomings in existing discourse is the lack of engagement with the interplay between law and morality. Like the laws of war, and the...

[James Pattison is a Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of Manchester.] It’s often been claimed that there exists a responsibility to rebuild after war on behalf of the international community in cases such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Somalia, and so on. For instance, this was one of the key tenets of the report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty...