Search: crossing lines
13 Jun Should There Be an International Treaty on Cyberwarfare?
...self-defense. The prospect that one State may assume a cyberattack falls below a use of force or armed attack threshold while the victim State perceives it as above those lines is not a happy one — it could lead to an unintended escalation of an incident into a larger armed conflict. Add to this the possibility that a victim State may respond by attacking an innocent third State (or non-State actor) because it holds the mistaken belief (on its own or via a successful false flag operation) that the innocent...06 Feb Response to Roger Alford
...between these two pieces of the story is reasonably clear. The “Goldilocks” part of the story explains why England had a good head start on the race to world power. The clever strategy, the five point plan, shows how the British and then the Americans managed to turn this initial head start into a long term lead. But there is another question. It is one thing to say that having an open society – here, a society eager and able to develop along liberal capitalist lines – is the first...12 Jul Charnovitz on NGOs
...legal scene. Continuity is the message. To the extent that there has been recent change, it is not in the way of a revolution but rather of a “reformation” – “a return to an earlier doctrine so as to clear away errors, such as the excessive state-centricity of positivist orthodoxy.” The piece makes the best case that can be made along those lines. It is rich in its documentation of the early and mid-twentieth century literature on NGOs (including in the first volume of the AJIL itself), for which purposes...30 Nov The Corrosive Risks of Lawless Leadership
...civilized. That was my duty as their leader . . . War gives the appearance of condoning almost everything, but men must live with their actions for a long time afterward. A leader has to help them understand that there are lines they must not cross. He is their link to normalcy, to order, to humanity. If the leader loses his own sense of propriety or shrinks from his duty, anything will be allowed . . . War is, at its very core, the absence of order; and the absence...15 Dec The Noble Lie and International Politics
...the answer is something along the lines of the limitations that law has to compel or induce states on issues of critical national importance. But, why would this issue, which is certainly not controversial to or disputed by most historians, constitute a sufficiently important issue that Turkey would be willing to jeopardize its EU accession talks? I’m reminded of the noble lie in Plato’s Republic, in which it is acknowledged that all states have their origins in brutality and blood, and therefore all states create national myths about their foundings...05 Apr Did the Soviet Union Commit Genocide in Ukraine (And Can Law Help Answer This Question)??
Russia’s lower house of Parliament has passed a resolution denying that the Soviet Union committed “genocide” in Ukraine during the 1930s. The resolution states: “There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were million of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country.” Interestingly, the resolution does not appear to deny (as it could not credibly do anyway) that the Soviet Union leadership was responsible for a great famine in the 1930s Ukraine...16 Apr Escalation of Violence in Bangui: Has MINUSCA Become Party to a Conflict in CAR, and What Would That Mean?
...fact that IHL may apply to situations in which a multinational operation is involved is nowadays accepted, states and international organisations are generally reluctant to admit that a peace operation has become party to an armed conflict. Such possibility has been often discussed but frequently let sink through the lines and rarely tackled head on. If, on the one hand, the capacity of a multinational operation to become party to the conflict is often taken for granted, the concretisation of such a possibility is on the other hand never explicitly...
15 Jul Intervention in Civil Wars Symposium: Intervention in Latin America
...the Confederation centres around the Argentinean, Bolivian and Chilean involvement in the Peruvian Civil War of 1834. This civil war started when Peruvian President Agustín Gamarra reached the end of his rule without elections having been called. Trying to avoid instability, Congress appointed Luis José de Orbegoso as “interim President”. Gamarra and his supporters revolted in response. When de Orbegoso marched south to confront Gamarra, one of his generals, Felipe Salaverry, joined Gamarra and cut off de Orbegoso’s supply lines. Desperate, de Orbegoso asked Andres de Santa Cruz, President of...
09 Dec Symposium on Forensic and Counter-Forensic Approaches to International Law: The Production of Visible Evidence in the Gaza Genocide
...and juxtaposing a mass of images and data. This entails gaps and a level of speculation which makes OSINT based evidence subject for reinterpretation and invites immanent suspicion. OSNIT’s promise of access should be considered in relation to larger historical shifts in media technologies that were celebrated as a democratization of media—no longer relaying on a centralized institutional framework, often sponsored by the state—and technological freedom—the lightness, affordability and user friendliness of digital technologies. As critics of media and humanitarianism have showed, this notion of access was tightly tied to...