| International Law and Armed Conflict: Historical to Contemporary Debates

This is a standalone course intended to give students a well-rounded view of the International  law’s treatment of war and armed conflicts.

The course will be divided into three parts. The first part will deal with Jus ad bellum and  prohibition against use of force generally, in the UN Charter and customary international law.  Students will be introduced into debates around the concepts of force, armed attack, non-state  actors, humanitarian intervention and so on.

The second part of the course will deal with international humanitarian law. It will focus on  the relationships between international humanitarian law, Jus ad bellum regime and  international human rights law. It will also briefly examine few of the substantive provisions  of IHL treaties such as the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions. Through this, we  will briefly examine the law governing means and methods of warfare, conduct of hostilities,  detention, treatment of civilians etc. We will also examine the classification of armed conflicts  and their implications.

The third part of the course will be about accountability for violation of IHL, through  mechanisms such as international criminal law. Although we will not be going into the  substantive provisions of the Rome Statute and international crimes in detail, we will briefly  highlight the different international crimes and institutions dealing with them. We will also  briefly discuss issues of jus post bellum and transitional justice.

For the first and the third parts of the course, the course will rely more on scholarly writing,  to illustrate the debates in these topics and how they have developed. It will also rely on  judgments and texts of treaties like the UN Charter. For the second part of the course, we will  mainly rely on the primary texts like the Geneva Conventions, and secondarily rely on  scholarly articles to discuss gaps in primary documents and new debates.

I plan to do a mix of lecture (for half of a session) and a seminar style discussion (for the other  half of a session) for this course.

Course Objectives

The objective of the course is to familiarise students about the historical context in which the  laws concerning wars and armed conflict developed and inform them about current debates in  this area. The expectation is to create lawyers who have the capacity to think like international  decision-makers, lawyers and judges involved in issues of armed conflicts.