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Killing Nasrallah and the Law of Armed Conflict
Last Friday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted air strikes against a Hezbollah command and control bunker in Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburbs, which was located under an apartment complex. The attack, which followed IDF warnings for civilians to evacuate the area,...
War as a Non-State-Centric Concept of Contemporary International Law
Editors’ note: This post is drawn from the authors’ article-length work, “International Law’s Premature Farewell to the Concept of War” appearing in the Brazilian Journal of International Law. There is general consensus amongst practitioners and scholars that the...
EU Support to Ukraine through Windfall Profits: Reparative Value, International Law, and Future Pathways
Over two years into the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the fate of Russian assets frozen by Western sanctions is followed almost as closely as battlefield developments. Considering the figures at play (assets worth an estimated $300 billion),...
Beyond Compliance Symposium – Compliance + Restraint Towards Full(er) Protection in War
Editors’ note: This post forms part of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, featured across Articles of War and Armed Groups and International Law. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the...
Reparations in Colombia: Redressing Civilian Harm in the Midst of Armed Conflict
Commentators often point to Colombia as a success story in terms of confronting the consequences of armed conflict through its extensive engagement with transitional justice efforts to secure peace and to prevent repetition. Yet despite the peace agreement in 2016...
The Woomera Manual and Military Space Activities and Operations
The ongoing armed conflict in Ukraine has clearly demonstrated the critical role satellites in outer space play in the conduct of contemporary armed conflict. The conflict itself has been termed the first commercial space war given the heavy reliance by both Ukraine...
ISIS Detentions in Syria and the Responsibility of Supporting States
While the world’s attention is focused on the hostilities in Gaza and Ukraine, the conflict against ISIS in Syria and Iraq continues. Although out of the headlines, coalition forces led by the United States continue to work with local partner forces to achieve the...
The “Total Defeat” of Hamas and the End of NIAC
Since the onset of the hostilities in Gaza that began on October 7, 2023, Israel has consistently identified the “complete destruction” of the “military and governmental capabilities” of Hamas as one of its principal war aims. If Israel were to achieve that objective,...
Food Security Assessments and International Law
Food security remains an urgent and widespread global issue, with an estimated 281.6 million people in 59 countries or territories facing acute food insecurity in 2023. For nearly half of those people, conflict was the primary driver of their food insecurity. To...
Targeting Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr
On Wednesday morning, Israel killed the Chief of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. To do so, it reportedly used a bomb that had been smuggled two months earlier into the...
Russia’s Alleged Nuclear Anti-Satellite Weapon: International Law and Political Rhetoric
The development and testing of anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), as well as debates concerning the legal and policy implications of ASAT testing and use, have existed since soon after the dawn of the Space Age. The centrality of these issues has waxed and waned over...
The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission and Gaza – How is it Involved?
On 20 June 2024, the government of the Republic of Poland signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) regarding the incident on April 1, 2024 in the Gaza Strip during which seven people working with the...