In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Symposia

16 Feb

[Ingo Venzke is a Professor at the University of Amsterdam.] ‘This workshop where ideals are fabricated—it seems to me just to stink of lies.’Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (2007 [1887]), §I.14 It is a common belief that international law had little to say on the legality of the use of force before the First World War. A ‘narrative of indifference’ holds that...

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16 Feb

[Miriam Bak McKenna is Associate Professor of Law and Global Governance at Roskilde University, School of Social Science and Business. Her book Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill) was released in December 2022.] By now it is perhaps axiomatic to assert that the historical narratives surrounding international law are rather murky at best. As the canon of texts revisiting and critiquing...

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15 Feb

[Siddharth Mallavarapu is Professor and Head of the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies at the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence in India.] Close to a year after the commencement of the Russia-Ukraine war, there is barely anything that can be more topical and worthwhile than a closer look at the histories of international law relating to the use of force. Agatha Verdebout...

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15 Feb

[Isa Blumi is Associate Professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University.] Dr. Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force (2021) charts how International Law’s founding generations of scholars sought relevance during times when the powerful adopted “the law” only when it suited their interests. By reading beyond the ‘emotional’, ‘cynical’, or ‘idealistic’ discourse that accompanied assertive claims about the...

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14 Feb

[Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg is a Departmental Lecturer of International Relations at Oxford University.] Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: The Narrative of Indifference, by Dr. Agatha Verdebout, is an impressive volume covering a vast time period with an ambitious goal: to, as the title suggests, “rewrite” the history of use of force in international law in the 19th century. Dr. Verdebout starts by noting...

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14 Feb

[Mohamed S. Helal is Associate Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University; and member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration as well as of the African Union Commission on International Law.] Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: The Narrative of Indifference is an exhaustively researched and lucidly written volume that makes important contributions to both the history...

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13 Feb

[Alexandra Hofer is Assistant Professor in Public International Law at Utrecht University.] I should probably start by admitting that I am not indifferent to Dr Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting the Histories of the Use of Force: The Narrative of ‘Indifference’ (apologies for the poor wordplay). I first heard Agatha present her research in December 2015, during one of the seminars of Ghent University’s International Order & Justice...

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10 Feb

[Sarah Zarmsky is an Assistant Lecturer and PhD Candidate at the University of Essex Human Rights Centre with a focus on the intersections between new and emerging technologies, human rights, and international criminal law. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley. (Twitter: @SZarmsky)  Judy Mionki is an International Criminal and Human...

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10 Feb

[Ruwadzano Patience Makumbe is a human rights lawyer. Edward Kahuthia Murimi is a Kenyan lawyer. They are both currently undertaking PhD research as part of the ‘DISSECT: Evidence in International Human Rights Adjudication’ Project (funded by ERC) at the Human Rights Centre, Ghent University (Belgium).] Introduction  In November 2020, a conflict broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia pitting the Ethiopian...

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09 Feb

[Isabella Regan is a PhD candidate in criminology at Erasmus School of Law (Rotterdam, NL), researching public-private power dynamics within online open-source investigations of international crimes.] This blog arises from her thesis on public-private power dynamics within online open-source investigations of international crimes. All comments and feedback are welcome at regan@law.eur.nl.   Over the past decade, online open-source information – such as...

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09 Feb

[Vidhya Ramalingam is the Founder and CEO of Moonshot.  Raquel Vazquez Llorente is the Head of Law and Policy, Technology Threats & Opportunities, at WITNESS. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.] This piece is a conversation between two professional communities that use open source information in overlapping contexts, yet are rarely in dialogue. The...

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08 Feb

[Kate Pundyk is the former Open Source Investigation Lead at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab and previously worked at the Berkeley Human Rights Center. She is currently studying at the Oxford Internet Institute on a Rhodes Scholarship.] Author’s note: I am grateful to Adriano Belisario and Jorge Ruiz Reyes for their conversations conceptualizing this article, as well as those who agreed...

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