The Nobel Peace Prize for 2016 has been awarded to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. According to the Press Release, the award was given for his “resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long war to an end…. The award should also be seen as a tribute to the Colombian people who, despite great hardships and abuses, have...
I know pointing out stupid things Donald Trump says is a fool's errand -- pretty much everything Donald Trump says is stupid. (Note to non-hack conservative friends: I genuinely feel sorry for you.) But I'm struck by how little attention pundits have paid to this gem: I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over. At the same time, we have...
Defense One points to a news story in the Baghdad Post that the Iraqi Security Forces may be preparing to deploy a ground-combat robot: Loosely dubbed Alrobot — Arabic for robot — it has four cameras, an automatic machine gun, and a launcher for Russian-made Katyusha rockets, and can be operated by laptop and radio link from a kilometer away, the...
There are lots of important issues implicated by this morning's above-the-fold story in the New York Times that U.S. officials and certain cybersecurity experts (e.g., Crowdstrike) have concluded Russian government agencies bear responsibility for hacking the Democratic National Committee's servers and leaking internal e-mails stored on them to Wikileaks (Russian responsibility for the hack itself was alleged more than a month ago)....
Earlier this week, Julian and I each posted about the international legal issues of the Moon and asteroid mining plans of U.S. companies. Those projects may have sounded like something out of Space 1999 but now we hear of one of China’s near-term priorities that sounds like SeaLab 2020. Bloomberg reports: China is speeding up efforts to design and build a manned...
Just when I thought I was beyond being genuinely horrified, Roving Bandit called my attention to a story in Der Spiegel that almost defies words: The ambassadors of the 28 European Union member states had agreed to secrecy. "Under no circumstances" should the public learn what was said at the talks that took place on March 23rd, the European Commission warned...
I read with great interest Jens's excellent post about whether the US attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz was a war crime. I agree with much of what he says, particularly about the complexity of that seemingly innocuous word "intent." But I am not completely convinced by his argument that reading intent in the Rome Statute to include mental states other than...
Next month's issue of Foreign Affairs, a leading journal of highbrow foreign policy in the U.S., features an important article on the United States as "The Once and Future Superpower" (subscription). Based on their forthcoming book, professors Steven Brooks and William Wohlforth of Dartmouth College argue that China is not going to displace the United States as the world's leading superpower...
As readers no doubt know, on Tuesday the ICC's Trial Chamber declared a "mistrial" in the case against William Ruto and Joshua Arap Sang. The decision likely puts an end to the fiasco of the Ocampo Six -- now the "Ocampo Zero," to borrow Mark Kersten's nicely-turned expression -- although the Trial Chamber dismissed the charges "without prejudice," leaving the door open for the...
AJIL Unbound has just published a fantastic symposium entitled "TWAIL Perspectives on ICL, IHL, and Intervention." The symposium includes an introduction by James Gathii (Loyola-Chicago) and essays by Asad Kiyani (Western), Parvathi Menon (Max Planck), Ntina Tzouvala (Durham), and Corri Zoli (Syracuse). All of the essays are excellent and worth a read, but I want to call special attention to Ntina's essay, which is...
In 1958, Air Force Chief of Staff Thomas D. White wrote: “For all practical purposes air and space merge, form a continuous and indivisible field of operations.” White later coined the term “aerospace” and used it in a Congressional hearing. Later it was used in policy papers to explain why the U.S. Air Force would also have the responsibility for...
In a recent post, I noted my puzzlement at Russia's recent announcement that it will not cooperate with the ICC's investigation in Georgia. Noting that "Russia has very little to fear" from the investigation, I asked why it would not "milk a little goodwill by at least pretending to cooperate with the ICC" -- especially as Russia could simply stop...
