Military, War, and Peace Commons^™

Corporate Foreign Policy In War, Kishanthi Parella

Scholarly Articles

On February 24, 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Over a year later, the war has claimed tens of thousands of lives and led to the displacement of millions. In Spring 2023, both Ukrainian and Russian forces prepared new offensives, while the United States committed to providing Ukraine with military tanks—a move that Russian officials had previously warned would constitute direct involvement in the war. While countries debated how to respond, we also witnessed the privatization of foreign policy as hundreds of companies around the world similarly sought to assist Ukraine or punish Russia using the tools of national foreign policy—humanitarian …

Submission Of Amicus Curiae Observations In The Case Of The Prosecutor V. Dominic Ongwen, Erin Baines, Kamari M. Clarke, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The important questions laid out by the Appeals Chamber in this case highlight the need for the proper delineation and interplay between mental illness and criminal responsibility under international law. Specifically, this case represents a watershed moment for the Appeals Chamber to set a framework for adjudicating mental illness in the context of collectivized child abuse and trauma. This is especially true for former child soldiers who occupy both a victim and alleged perpetrator status.

"A Hussy Who Rode On Horseback In Sexy Underwear In Front Of The Prisoners": The Trials Of Buchenwald’S Ilse Koch, Mark A. Drumbl, Solange Mouthaan

Scholarly Articles

Ilse Koch’s trials for her role in atrocities at the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp served as visual spectacles and primed her portrayal in media and public spaces. Koch’s conduct was credibly rumored to be one of frequent affairs, simultaneous lovers, and the sexual humiliation of prisoners. The gendered construction of her sexual identity played a distortive role in her intersections with law and with post-conflict Germany. Koch’s trials revealed two different dynamics. Koch’s actions were refracted through a patriarchal lens which spectacularized female violence and served as an optical space to (re)establish appropriate feminine mores. Feminist critiques of Koch’s trials …

Memorializing Dissent: Justice Pal In Tokyo, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Memorials and monuments are envisioned as positive ways to honor victims of atrocity. Such displays are taken as intrinsically benign, respectful, and in accord with the arc of justice. Is this correlation axiomatic, however? Art, after all, may be a vehicle for multiple normativities, contested experiences, and variable veracities. Hence, in order to really speak about the relationships between the aesthetic and international criminal law, one must consider the full range of initiatives—whether pop-up ventures, alleyway graffiti, impromptu ceremonies, street art, and grassroots public histories—prompted by international criminal trials. Courts may be able to stage their own outreach, to be …

Post-Genocide Justice In Rwanda, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The Rwandan genocide triggered a vast number of criminal and quasi-criminal prosecutions. Rwanda therefore constitutes an example of a robust and rapid implementation of criminal accountability for atrocity. Rwanda, moreover, departed from other countries – such as South Africa – by eschewing a truth and reconciliation process as part of a transitional justice process. This chapter unpacks three levels of judicialization that promoted criminal responsibility for atrocity in Rwanda: the ICTR, specialized chambers of national courts, and gacaca proceedings. The ICTR indicted roughly 90 individuals, the national courts convicted in the area of 10,000 defendants (with some proceedings remaining ongoing), …

The Many Harms Of Forced Marriage: Insights For Law From Ethnography In Northern Uganda, Myriam S. Denov, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Harnessing an interdisciplinary framework that merges elements of law and social science, this article aims to recast the crime of forced marriage, and thereby enhance accountability, in light of knowledge acquired through ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda. More specifically, we draw upon the perspectives and experiences of 20 men who were "bush husbands" in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). These men were abducted by the LRA between the ages of 10 and 38 and spent between 6 and 24 years in captivity. During their time in the LRA, these men became ‘bush husbands’ with each man fathering between 1 and …

Book Review, Marcos Zunino, Justice Framed: A Genealogy Of Transitional Justice (2019), Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Transitional justice initiatives, broadly speaking, respond to systematic human rights abuses. These initiatives take multiple shapes and forms. This means that the actual practice of transitional justice is diverse and organic. Transitional justice discourse, however, is aspirational, normative and selective. It is less heterogeneous and far more directive. Marcos Zunino’s eye-opening book, Justice Framed, is about gaps between narrative discourse and tangible practice. It is about the effects of discourse on practice. More pointedly, Justice Framed is about how discourse ‘surfaces’ certain kinds of practices of the past while sidelining and ignoring others. Hence, to come full circle, this book …

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bots, And How I Learned To Start Worrying About Democracy Instead, Antonio F. Perez

Scholarly Articles

This essay reviewing Striking Power, John Yoo and Jeremy Rabkin's new book on the legal and policy implications of autonomous weapons, takes issue with the book’s assumptions and; therefore its conclusions. The essay argues that, because of technological and ethical limitations, discriminate and effective use of autonomous weapons may not serve as an adequate substitute for traditional manpower-based military forces. It further argues that traditional conceptions of international law could prove more durable than Yoo and Rabkin suggest, and finally it concludes by suggesting that a grand strategy relying primarily on technological elites managing autonomous weapons actually threatens to …

The Kapo On Film: Tragic Perpetrators And Imperfect Victims, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The Nazis coerced and enlisted detainees into the administration of the labour and death camps. These detainees were called Kapos. The Kapos constitute a particularly contested, and at times tabooified, element of Holocaust remembrance. Some Kapos deployed their situational authority to ease the conditions of other prisoners, while others acted cruelly and committed abuse. This project explores treatment of the Kapo on film. This paper considers two films: Kapò (1959, directed by Pontecorvo, Italy) and Kapo (2000, directed by Setton, Israel). These two films vary in genre: Kapò (1959) is a feature fiction movie, whereas Kapo (2000) is a documentary. …

Epilogue: Homecoming Kings, Queens, Jesters, And Nobodies, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This epilogue unpacks the return of convicted war criminals as homecomings, with all the attendant rites, rituals, and expectations. Knotting together the various papers in this edited collection, this paper examines how the international community constructs an ideal homecoming and, in turn, how such a construction may simply be fanciful.

Book Review, Anton Weiss-Wendt, The Soviet Union And The Gutting Of The Un Genocide Convention (2017), Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Weiss-Wendt’s book unpacks what happened to “genocide” as it journeyed along this path of codification. To be clear, codification was conditioned by compromise among states; and states were often motivated by Cold War selfishness, spite, manipulation, and machination. The Convention narrowed—and even mangled—the set of protected groups to national, ethnic, racial, and religious. The Convention, moreover, limited the recognized forms that genocide could take. The title of Weiss-Wendt’s book reflects its argument that the expansiveness of genocide as an idea was “gutted” in the process of codifying it in an international treaty.

Book Review, Jamie Rowen, Searching For Truth In The Transitional Justice Movement (2017) & Leonie Steinl, Child Soldiers As Agents Of War And Peace: A Restorative Transitional Justice Approach To Accountability For Crimes Under International Law (2017), Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Why do truth commissions emerge following some conflicts but not others? Jamie Rowen tackles this question in Searching for Truth in the Transitional Justice Movement. Rowen approaches this topic through a detailed study of three jurisdictions: the former Yugoslavia, Colombia, and the United States. Although truth commissions did progress in Colombia, they stalled in both the former Yugoslavia in the wake of the Balkan Wars as well as in the United States in regard to the conduct of US officials after the events on 11 September 2001. Rowen unpacks what happened and what failed to happen — and why …

Biometric Cyberintelligence And The Posse Comitatus Act, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

This Article addresses the rapid growth of what the military and the intelligence community refer to as “biometric-enabled intelligence.” This newly emerging intelligence tool is reliant upon biometric databases—for example, digitalized storage of scanned fingerprints and irises, digital photographs for facial recognition technology, and DNA. This Article introduces the term “biometric cyberintelligence” to more accurately describe the manner in which this new tool is dependent upon cybersurveillance and big data’s massintegrative systems.

This Article argues that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, designed to limit the deployment of federal military resources in the service of domestic policies, will be difficult …

The Push To Criminalize Aggression: Something Lost Amid The Gains?, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over the crime of aggression, but the Rome Statute fails to define the crime. A Special Work- ing Group on the Crime of Aggression, however, has made considerable progress in developing a definition. The consensus that has emerged favors a narrow definition. Three characteristics animate this consensus: (1) that state action is central to the crime; (2) that acts of aggression involve inter- state armed conflict; and (3) that criminal responsibility attaches only to very top political or military leaders. This Article normatively challenges this consensus. I argue that expanding the scope of the …

The Kosovo Crisis: A Dostoievskian Dialogue On International Law, Statecraft, And Soulcraft, Antonio F. Perez, Robert J. Delahunty

Scholarly Articles

The secession of Kosovo from Serbia in February 2008 represents a stage in the unfolding of a revolution of "constitutional" dimensions in International Law that began with NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo against Serbia. NATO's intervention called into question the authority and viability of U.N. Charter system for maintaining international peace. Likewise, the West's decision in 2008 to support Kosovo's secession from Serbia dealt a further blow to the central post-War legal rules and institutions for controlling and mitigating Great power rivalry. Russia's later support for South Ossetia's secession from Georgia demonstrated the potential that the Kosovo precedent has for …

Karen E. Woody, Putting Pandora On Trial, 98 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 699 (2008) (Reviewing Mark A. Drumbl, Atrocity, Punishment, And International Law (2007)), Karen E. Woody

Scholarly Articles

In the wake of increasing globalization over the past fifty years, international criminal law has transformed from a toothless shadow into a concrete reality; the International Criminal Court is the most recent and impressive institutional accomplishment. Unfortunately, international criminal law has enjoyed this progress on the heels of increasingly horrific international crimes. International adjudicatory institutions have taken many forms and the sentences they deliver have varied widely. In Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law, Mark Drumbl reviews the strides made in international criminal law from the Nuremberg trials through present-day trials, particularly those related to the crimes committed in Rwanda and …

Guantanamo, Rasul, And The Twilight Of Law, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

In Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court held that U.S. district courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay. In this paper, I explore what has happened since the Rasul decision: most notably, the introduction of combatant status review tribunals as a response to Rasul and the challenges that have been filed thereto and adjudicated in the federal courts (Khalid, In re Guantanamo Detainee Cases); the charges brought against certain detainees by military commissions and challenges to these commissions filed in the …

Traditional Paradisms For The Causes Of War Applied To The International Trading System: Nation-State Institutions In A World Of Market-States, Antonio F. Perez

Scholarly Articles

The first object of this paper, therefore, is to consider in very general terms the intellectual history of the study of the relation between trade and peace, using two key texts from the beginning and the end of the Cold War - first, Kenneth Waltz's "Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis" 3; and, second, Philip Bobbitt's "The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History.

The second part of this paper will argue that Waltz's normative commitments are revealed in the order of his presentation and Bobbitt's normative commitments are revealed in the ostensibly descriptive thesis …

Legal Frameworks For Economic Transition In Iraq – Occupation Under The Law Of War Vs. Global Governance Under The Law Of Peace, Antonio F. Perez

Scholarly Articles

After over a decade as the ruling conventional wisdom under the rubric of the so-called Washington Consensus, the prospect of reconstruction and development through fiscal austerity, privatization and liberalization of markets is under considerable attack today from many quarters. One common theme of these challenges-to what has been received wisdom-focuses not on the technical characteristics of development, but rather its connection to political development.

'Lesser Evils' In The War On Terrorism, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

The Changing Jurisprudence Of The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia, Geoffrey R. Watson

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Legal Lessons Learned From Operation Enduring Freedom, Michael F. Noone Jr.

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Delegalization Of Arms Control – A Democracy Deficit In De Facto Treaties Of Peace, Antonio F. Perez

Scholarly Articles

Delegalization of arms control is now an accomplished fact. In this period of potential dramatic revision of the international order, it is not surprising that the US is seeking increased flexibility in pursuing several strategies, including the full use of military and technological advantages. The motivations behind this include US interests, as well as long run global interests. What may be surprising, however, is the potential risk to our democratic processes from delegalization of arms control-that is to say, the danger posed by reduced use of arms control treaties with built-in processes of transparency and democratic accountability.

The potential risk …

Posse Comitatus: Preparing For The Hearings, Michael F. Noone Jr.

Scholarly Articles

This Essay is intended for Congressional committee staff-whether employed by the committee or by members assigned to the committee-if they are called to review an administration legislative proposal to amend or repeal The Posse Comitatus Act ("The Act").2 It will be in two parts: background (to ensure that you and your members understand the statute's origins and implications); and separate Sections on expected issues and positions that will be asserted, or should be explored, as you prepare for testimony by supporters and opponents of the Bill.

Military Commissions And Courts-Martial: A Brief Discussion Of The Constitutional And Jurisdictional Distinctions Between The Two Courts, Timothy C. Macdonnell

Scholarly Articles

On 13 November 2001, President George W. Bush signed Military Order 222, authorizing the trial of non-U.S. citizens for war crimes by military commission.' Since the signing of that order, a contentious debate has raged over the possible use of military commissions to try suspected terrorists. As part of that debate, the media has used various terms to describe the proposed military commissions. They have called them "Secret Military Trials,"' "Military Tribunals,"' and "U.S. Military Court[s]." A Cable News Network internet story described military commissions as "essentially a courts-martial, or a military trial, during a time of war." This quotation …

The Adequacy Of International Law For Arms Control – Post Sept. 11: Arms Control And Nonproliferation, Antonio F. Perez

Scholarly Articles

Arms control was never an end in itself. Arms control and nonproliferation policy always had as their goals increasing international security. It may be worth recalling that, in response to having it called to his attention that he had changed his views on a matter, Lord Keynes is widely reported to have quipped, "When the facts change, what do you do?" Indeed, as Lord Keynes also once said, "There is no harm in sometimes being wrong-especially if one is promptly found out."

The question for this panel is whether the sea change in strategic thinking reflected in the arms control …

Whacking Unarmed Women: Gaps In The Law Of Armed Conflict, Michael F. Noone Jr.

Scholarly Articles

In recent years, legal commentators have begun to write on women in war: usually as the civilian victims of belligerent forces, sometimes as military victims of discrimination within their own armed forces. Very little has been written about women as belligerents. What has been written does not focus on the legal problems conventional forces face when women are "unprivileged belligerents"' who fail to comply with law of war requirements for combatant status. These problems can become acute when conventional forces are engaged in "Small Wars" where unarmed women often serve as auxiliaries to their unconventional opponents. Although legal sources have …

Applying Just War Jus Bello Doctrine To Reprisals: An Afghan Hypothetical, Michael F. Noone Jr.

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

As Justice And Prudence Dictate: The Morality Of America’S War Against Terrorism—A Response To James V. Schall, S.J.,, William J. Wagner

Scholarly Articles

This response to Father Schall's article explores just how three principles, which he proposes in general terms as central to integrity in moral reasoning and decision over the use of military force, serve, in fact, to organize an assessment of the rights and wrongs of actions by states and individuals within a conflict like the one coming to a crisis on September 11th. In the course of its analysis, the article means to show that prudence has a role, not only once the requirements of justice are satisfied, as a too casual reading of Father Schall's article might perhaps imply, …

The Modern Relevance Of Legitimate Authority And Right Intention, Antonio F. Perez

Scholarly Articles

In this brief comment, I want to argue, without making any definite judgments about the current situation, that our understanding of the just war should pay attention to the questions of legitimate authority and right intention for use of force. To do this, we should take into account the procedural values of modern constitutional democracy and transnational governance. We should also consider the intentions established through the political processes legitimating those war aims as the relevant intentions for assessing whether the use of force comports with the moral criteria of the just war. Indeed, if the just war's aims are …