[Deepak Raju is a Senior Managing Associate at Sidley Austin LLP, Geneva, focusing on international disputes; he is also a visiting faculty at National University of Juridical Sciences (India), and a doctoral candidate at the University of Geneva.] In a recent post on EJIL: Talk, I discussed Ukraine’s new dispute before the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) against Russia, and compared...
[Boyd van Dijk is a McKenzie Fellow at the University of Melbourne.] The paradox of writing a book about the laws of war is that you never wish it to become timely. Today, however, with the ongoing brutality in Ukraine and Yemen, we are going through a dark time again. The Geneva Conventions are hitting the headlines every day. The study of...
[Karin Loevy is a fellow at NYU School of Law, where she serves as the manager JSD Program. She is also a researcher at the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) where she leads the History & Theory of International Law workshop series. Her current work is in history of international law in the Middle East in the period leading to the mandate system.] One thing that...
[Katharine Fortin is an Associate Professor at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, Utrecht University. She is the founder and co-editor of the Armed Groups and International Law blog.] The author is grateful to comments from Brianne McGonigle Leyh and Vivek Bhatt on an earlier draft of this post. Reading Boyd van Dijk’s Preparing for War at a time when the prospect of...
[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...
[Dr. Loqman Radpey is a Research Associate of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law (ECIGL) at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He writes extensively on Kurdistan and statehood, self-determination and the Kurds, and the ‘Social Contract’ (i.e., the constitution) of Rojava.] Violations of international law are by no means rare in today’s world but the reactions to breaches from the...
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...
[Abhijeet Shrivastava and Rudraksh Lakra are fourth-year law students at Jindal Global Law School, India.] Introduction Every once in a while, one or another international tribunal is faced with the resurgence of a question that should long have been regarded as settled: is there a doctrine of ‘unclean hands’ that exists in the form of a ‘general principle of law’ - in...
[Ana Luquerna is a lawyer working at The International Court of Justice as a Judicial Fellow. The opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author.] The Current Situation In less than two months, the world has been turned upside down due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a mere fifty-seven days, more than 5.1 million refugees, around 11% of the population, have fled...