Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...doctrine and military doctrine and practice. Recent scholarship, including from participants to this symposium, has greatly contributed to bridging this gap by offering conceptual clarity (see the work of Hans Boddens Hosang,  Jan Arno Hessbruegge, Gloria Gaggioli, Camilla Cooper or Chris O’Meara) and by denouncing the over-reliance on the notion of self-defense in military operations (Gary Corn, Randall Bagwell & Molly Kovite, Erica Gaston). This symposium aims to continue the discussion by taking stock of doctrine and practice and by encouraging States to share their understanding of how their soldiers’...

...victims of human rights violations, a wide range of justice actors, policymakers, and scholars alike. Yet this veneration merits scrutiny. What exactly do we mean when we demand ‘accountability’ for human rights violations? The term ‘accountability’ itself carries an illusion of clarity. We speak of ‘holding violators accountable’ as if the meaning, mechanisms, and normative objectives of such a process were self-evident.  This blog introduces a collaborative effort to reimagine human rights accountability. It serves as the opening piece in a seven-part blog symposium for Opinio Juris stemming from the...

their respective Red Cross National Societies adopted a joint pledge towards Organizing and hosting a Rotating Nordic IHL/LOAC Symposium on an annual basis. The Symposium series is aimed at strengthening collaboration, facilitating expertise and knowledge transfer, and enhancing the dissemination of IHL/LOAC principles among different stakeholders within the participating states and across the Nordic and potentially neighbouring regions by harnessing the collective convening power and resources of Nordic states in a sustainable manner. The 1st Symposium was held in Stockholm, Sweden in 2025. ELIGIBILITY The early career professional panel is...

that ought to engage the minds of lawyers and asking, inter alia, that those lawyers develop a better understanding of technology. As she correctly observes, the book may help to phrase the questions we should be asking about technological development. It is for all of us to engage across disciplines when considering possible answers. Markus Wagner looks at Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems and rightly comments that more could have been said in the book about the inherent difficulty in assigning responsibility in complex decision-making systems. He must be right that...

[Kobi Leins is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne. This post is part of our New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace Symposium.] The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises. In order to reconquer the machine and subdue it to human purposes, one must first understand it and assimilate it. —Mumford, Technics & Civilization (1934) The idea for collaboration on this book sprang out of a conversation on a sunny...

[Joseph Rikhof is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Common Law of the University of Ottawa. Until his retirement in 2017 he was also a senior counsel at the Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Section of the Canadian Department of Justice. This essay was initially prepared at the request of FIU Law Review for its micro-symposium on The Legal Legacy of the Special Court for Sierra Leone by Charles C. Jalloh (Cambridge, 2020). An edited and footnoted version is forthcoming in Volume 15.1 of the law review in spring 2021 .] The book “The Legal Legacy...

[Dr Gleider I. Hernandez is a Lecturer at Durham Law School] I am grateful to the organisers of this symposium on the collection, edited by Dr Baetens, on the interaction of international investment law (‘IIL’) with other areas of public international law (‘PIL’). Broadly speaking, I identify as a ‘generalist’ international lawyer, one who is interested in the system as a whole and how its organs and agents grapple with emerging problems of global governance. As such, when I was approached in 2011 to consider and address the interaction between...

[Ezequiel Heffes is a Thematic Legal Adviser for Geneva Call and a Lawyer at the University of Buenos Aires School of Law. The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Geneva Call. This is the latest post in the co-hosted symposium with Armed Groups and International Law on  Organizing Rebellion.] Although the nature, organization and structure of non-State armed groups (NSAGs) are issues of increasing concern, in particular due to the participation of these entities in the majority of armed conflicts (here, at 19), their...

[Jonathan Hafetz is a Senior Staff Attorney in the Center for Democracy at the American Civil Liberties Union and Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School . This post is part of our Punishing Atrocities Symposium.] The central purpose of Punishing Atrocities through a Fair Trial is to unpack and examine the enduring tension in international criminal law between principles of fairness, on one hand, and accountability for atrocities on the other. Any system of criminal justice that seeks to hold perpetrators responsible for their violent and destructive actions...

The book that Michael Bazyler and I have been working on for over two years, Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy (Bazyler & Alford, eds., 2006) is now available for purchase at Amazon here or NYU Press here. The book has received good reviews (available here) such as IAGS President Israel Charney’s blurb that the book is “an invaluable text for students and scholars as well as a fascinating read for all those concerned with Holocaust and genocide issues in all disciplines and on behalf of all...

to one of a very small number of books dealing wholly or in part with several individual trials as well as Telford Taylor’s parochial memoirs. The major achievement of Kevin’s book is to provide what none of the other sources can — an overall discussion and scholarly analysis of the entire NMT process in a single reasonably well indexed volume. Among the book’s many valuable contributions are: (1) Identifying the unique legal standing of the NMT, which were neither truly international courts, like the IMT, nor national tribunals. Instead, Kevin...

parents. Intellectually, though, the book is profoundly indebted to Telford Taylor, without whom the trials would not have achieved the success that I believe they did. Taylor always intended to write a book about the NMTs, a sequel to his seminal work The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. Unfortunately, at the time of his death, Taylor had completed only three chapters. I regret that he was never able to finish his book; I’m sure it would have been superb. It is my profound hope that he would have been happy...