International law and new wars

Abstract

Christine Chinkin is Emerita Professor of International Law and Director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security, and Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, at the London School of Economics. International law and new wars brings together themes they have pursued over many years. Despite its ‘long gestation’ during which ‘the world has changed dramatically’, the authors ‘have endeavoured to include changes up to the end of 2016’. Old wars are ‘inter-state clashes involving battles between regular armed forces’. New wars ‘differ from old wars in terms of goals and identities, actors, tactics and forms of finance’ (for example the conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and Mali). Chinkin and Kaldor believe it follows that the way we think about war, including attempts to regulate it under international law, must take account of the novel character of such conflicts. To this end, they impose on a familiar structure (jus ad bellum, jus in bello and, more recently, jus post bellum) the framework in table 2.1, ‘Security models and world order’ (p. 84). The table sets out what each of the posited four security models implies about the authority to use force, the rules governing the use of force, the nature of world order and its underlying philosophical assumptions. For example, the ‘liberal peace’ model derives a state's authority to use force from a multilateralist source, treating ‘new wars’ as old wars, while ‘war on terror’ is unilateralist in spirit, although seeking support through ‘coalitions of the willing’. Readers may find it helpful to keep table 2.1 to hand as a sort of sat nav as they proceed through a richly documented and carefully argued text. There can be hardly a topic, old or new, to which Chinkin and Kaldor fail to attend. But sat navs should be used with care: chapter five, for instance, is headed ‘The humanitarian model for recourse to force’, which does not marry up tidily with the headings in table 2.1.