[Andrew Clapham is a Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He has been a Commissioner with the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan since 2017. He is an Honorary Member of the International Commission of Jurists. In 2021 he published a book entitled War.] Preparing for War is a fascinating read. Dr Boyd van Dijk takes us to the heart...
[Doreen Lustig is a Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. She studies the history and theory of international law, global governance and constitutional law. She is the author of Veiled Power: International Law and the Private Corporation 1886-1980 (Oxford University Press, 2020).] Preparing for War is an insightful account of the history of the drafting of the four...
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...
[Professor Eyal Benvenisti is the Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, CC Ng Fellow in Law at Jesus College, and the Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. In Fall 2022 he will be the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.] Boyd van Dijk’s “Preparing for War” offers a rich historical account of...
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...
[Andrea Bianchi is Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva; Moshe Hirsch is the Von Hofmannsthal Professor of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Co-director of the International Law Forum at the Hebrew University Law Faculty.] We are extremely grateful to the editors of Opinio Juris and Alexandra Hofer for hosting and...
[Sofia Stolk is a researcher at the Asser Institute (The Hague) and the University of Amsterdam.] Note: In the spirit of the edited volume, we decided to make the main comments of symposium coordinator, Alexandra Hofer, and the responses of the author partly visible in the text in order to uncover, at least partly, the invisible frame of the editing process....
[Dr. Adil Hasan Khan is a Senior Research Fellow with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne.] Staying with habitus, in this section I want to develop upon the perceived shortcomings in Bourdieu’s project of producing a sociology of knowledge on account of his restrictive conceptualisation and formulation of this concept. This is relevant...
[Dr. Adil Hasan Khan is a Senior Research Fellow with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne.] Introduction Professor Akbar Rasulov has contributed a remarkably erudite and challenging chapter to the edited collection International Law’s Invisible Frames. In this chapter Rasulov further develops upon a fecund line of enquiry initiated by him in several earlier...
A Comment on Shiri Krebs’ chapter “The Invisible Frames Affecting Wartime Investigation: Legal Epistemology, Metaphors, and Cognitive Biases” [Emiliano J. Buis is a Professor of Public International Law at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and at the Central University of the Province of Buenos Aires (UNICEN), and researcher at the National Research Council for Science and Technology (CONICET)] Introduction Shiri...
Introduction to the Symposium on Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch (eds), International Law’s Invisible Frames: Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes (OUP 2021) [Alexandra Hofer is an assistant professor in public international law at Utrecht University and affiliated researcher at the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI)] In their thought-triggering project, Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch bring together sixteen chapters that, each in...
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...