Theoretical Boundaries of Armed Conflict and Human Rights

In the last two decades, human rights law has played an expanding role in the legal regulation of wartime conduct. In the process, human rights law and international humanitarian law have developed a complicated sibling relationship. For some, this relationship is viewed as a mutually reinforcing effort between like-minded regimes designed to civilize human behavior. For others, the relationship is a more complicated sibling rivalry. In this book, an unparalleled collection of legal theorists examine the relationship between these two bodies of law. Each chapter skilfully maps the possibilities of harmonization while, at the same time, raising cautionary flags about the limits of that project. The authors not only chart the existing state of the law, but also debate the normative implications of the continuing influence of human rights norms on current practices including torture, targeted killings, the conduct of non-international armed conflicts, and post-war state building.

Introduction: the inescapable collision Jens David Ohlin; Part I. Convergence and Divergence of Human Rights and Laws of War: 1. Laws for war Adil Haque; 2. Human rights thinking and the laws of war David Luban; 3. Rethinking the relationship between IHL and IHRL Marko Milanovic; 4. Acting as a sovereign versus acting as a belligerent Jens David Ohlin; Part II. Conceptual Limits of the Law of War Framework: 5. Ending the global war: the power of human rights in a time of unrestrained armed conflict Jonathan Horowitz; 6. Folk international law Naz K. Modirzadeh; 7. The use and abuse of analogy in IHL Kevin Jon Heller; Part III. New Frameworks for Regulating Armed Violence: 8. Forcible alternatives to war: legitimate violence in twenty-first-century international relations Janina Dill; 9. Whither international martial law? John Dehn; 10. The next Geneva Convention: filling a post-war legal gap with human rights values Brian Orend.

Jens David Ohlin is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Cornell Law School. He specializes in international law and all aspects of criminal law, including domestic, comparative, and international criminal law.