Abstract
The body of international law that regulates the conduct of armed conflicts has been known, at various points in time, as the law of war, the law of armed conflict, and international humanitarian law. While ‘the law of war’ was a term widely used in State practice throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, both ‘the law of armed conflict’ and ‘international humanitarian law’ were terms introduced in the 20th century by one organisation: the International Committee of the Red Cross. In this paper, we use international law and corpus linguistic tools in a pilot study, examining how the terms were first introduced into international law and how quickly they were incorporated (if at all) into the practice of States. Using the ongoing conflict involving Israel and its neighbours, this pilot study charts the appearance and recurrence of these terms in the practice of States in the United Nations to examine how the terms were received and used. We conclude by offering some initial assessments, noting that, while the terms were largely considered unproblematic at their introduction, practice in relation to their deployment suggests deep tensions regarding the nature and purpose of the law and how and when it applies.
1 Introduction
It is almost standard practice in the literature of the law of armed conflict to include reference, sometimes even protracted reference, to the different terms used to describe the field of law. The literature on the topic will note that US texts prefer the terminology of ‘the law of war’ (low) or ‘the law of armed conflict’ (loac);1 that ‘international humanitarian law’ (ihl) is merely the latest term to define an increasingly expansive field of law;2 and/or that the terms loac and ihl are3 (or are not4) fundamentally interchangeable. Frequently, the texts in question will then go on to state that, for the most part, little turns on the different terminology.5
A closer linguistic analysis, however, raises interesting questions regarding the differences in terminology that we explore in this paper. In particular, we consider the background to these differences in terminology, asking why these changes of terminology occurred, how the changes were received in State practice, and what the why and how that might say about what the terms mean – namely, whether they are value-neutral descriptors of an extant body of law or have become imbued with politicised qualities that have impacted their acceptance in State practice.
Historical records show that the move from low to loac to ihl was first manifested in the language of the relevant treaties: the term ‘armed conflict’ replaced the term ‘war’ with the adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, and the term ‘international humanitarian law’ emerged in the 1960s and was used in negotiating and drafting documents that led to the adoption of the 1977 Additional Protocols.6 Critically, and most important to note for this analysis, the shifts in treaty terminology did not emanate from States (through State practice or from State sponsorship at treaty conferences), but instead from advocacy by the International Committee of the Red Cross (icrc). Given that the changes came from civil society, what was the reaction of States? Was there resistance to such changes in terminology or were they generally accepted without question? And, connected to this, how quickly – and how – did States accept the new terminology in their own practice, if at all? Did they do so in a uniform manner, or was adoption of the new terms patchy?
Exploration of the origins and development of the terms low, loac and ihl is not new; as noted above, there are notable examples in the literature that address the changes.7 However, what is new to the analysis is our approach. We draw on the tools of corpus linguistics, which allows for the linguistic analysis of large bodies of text. This enables us to map, in general terms, when and how particular terminology starts to be used within legal discourse. Of course, the analysis of all State practice since the adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 would be a mammoth task. For this initial case study, we have therefore chosen to focus on a much smaller corpus of texts, namely UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions relating to the ongoing conflict between Israel, Palestine and other States in the Middle East region. Security Council and General Assembly resolutions provide important evidence of State practice, while the Israel conflict provides a useful case study for our purposes because it has been ongoing since before the adoption of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
Part Two of this paper traces the historical development of the terminology of low, loac and ihl. We then turn in Part Three to explain the corpus linguistics techniques we have used to analyse Security Council and General Assembly resolutions relating to the conflict in the Middle East. Following this, we set out the results of the linguistic analysis. In the final part of the paper – Part Four – we explore what these linguistic results reveal about how States have used different terminology to refer to the law of warfare, and what this means – namely, that while the terms were largely considered unproblematic at their introduction, practice in relation to the deployment of the terms suggests deep tensions regarding the nature and purpose of the law and how and when it applies. We conclude by discussing what these results suggest for future research on this issue.
2 The History of the Terminology of the Law Relating to Wars and Armed Conflicts
From the earliest writings in the field of international law, authors called the rules that had emerged in practice relating to protracted armed engagements between States ‘the law of war’.8 Indeed, many of the earliest, and most significant, writings in international law were primarily about this field. Hugo Grotius’s seminal international law text was titled De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625); Italian jurist Alberico Gentili published De jure belli libri tres (Three Books on the Law of War, 1598); and Francisco de Vitoria wrote De Indis et de jure belli (The Indians and the Law of War, 1532). These works were followed in later years by Emer de Vattel’s Le droit des gens, ou Principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains (The Law of Nations: Or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, 1758) and Christian Wolff’s Jus naturae methodo scientifica pertractatum (The Law of Nations Treated According to the Scientific Method, 1729). Common to these books was the examination of the laws of war as they had developed in State practice over the centuries, and the rules that should rightly apply to such conflicts. Also common to the texts was that they all referred to a state of ‘war’ (belli – the Latin of which translates to ‘of war’; or guerre, which translates from the French to ‘war’) rather than ‘armed conflict’ (conflit armé in French or arma in Latin). For example, Book 3, Chapter 1 of On the Law of War and Peace began by noting that, having considered those who wage war and why such war may be waged, ‘we should determine what is permissible in war, also to what extent, and in what ways, it is permissible.’9
The law of war does not only disclaim all cruelty and bad faith concerning engagements concluded with the enemy during the war, but also the breaking of stipulations solemnly contracted by the belligerents in time of peace, and avowedly intended to remain in force in case of war between the contracting powers.11
Reference to ‘the law of war’ continued throughout the written rules of armed conflict in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The 1864 Geneva Convention12 provided, in Article 4, that ‘[t]he material of military hospitals being subject to the laws of war, the persons attached to such hospitals may take with them, on withdrawing, only the articles which are their own personal property’; the 1868 St Petersburg Declaration noted that ‘the only legitimate object which States should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy’;13 the 189914 and 190715 Hague Conventions contained numerous provisions that referenced the law of war, such as Article 1 of the 1899 Convention ii, which provided that ‘the High Contracting Parties shall issue instructions to their armed land forces, which shall be in conformity with the “Regulations respecting the laws and customs of war on land” annexed to the present Convention’; and Article 1 of the Regulations annexed to the 1907 Convention iv stated that ‘[t]he laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps’.16
Both the 1899 and 1907 Hague Regulations applied only in situations of ‘declared war’; there was, at the time, a customary and conventional requirement that, before a State initiated armed hostilities against another State, a formal declaration of war was necessary.17 For example, under Article 1 of the 1907 Hague Convention (iii) Relative to the Opening of Hostilities,18 it is stated that ‘[t]he Contracting Powers recognize that hostilities between themselves must not commence without previous and explicit warning, in the form either of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war’. Declarations of war were legally necessary to trigger the application of the law of war between belligerents, and to clearly delineate to other States that the law of neutrality would apply to any States not engaged in the conflict. Serious international legal ramifications would follow for a State that breached the laws of neutrality by aiding a State engaged in armed conflict.19
However, practice in the 19th and early 20th centuries had shown that some States avoided formally declaring war,20 even at times outright denying that they were engaged in a war, in order to, among other reasons, avoid the political and legal ramifications that would eventually follow.21 For example, Japan did not declare war against China in 1937, instead calling the conflict an ‘incident’ rather than a war. In doing so, historians have noted that Japan was hoping to achieve two aims: first, Japan could claim that the rules on the obligations of occupiers during armed conflict,22 and the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war,23 did not apply, as it was not at war; second, Japan could avoid the activation of the US Neutrality Act, which would have limited Japan’s ability to trade with the US.24
Prior to the commencement of the Second World War, the icrc advocated for the reaffirmation and expansion of the rules relating to armed conflict.25 In particular, the icrc believed that the Conventions should apply to all kinds of hostilities. The special commission that was enlisted to study the question of updating the Conventions posited, in particular, ‘whether it would not be proper to replace the word “war”, which occurs frequently in the Convention, particularly in the Preamble and in Articles 24, 25, 29 and 37, by the expressions “armed conflict between States”, “hostilities”, or “recourse to force”’.26 Further work on updating the Conventions was delayed by the outbreak of the Second World War. At the cessation of hostilities, the icrc recommenced its work on updating the 1929 Geneva Conventions, putting forward, in 1946, draft Conventions that would be applicable ‘from the moment hostilities have actually broken out, even if no declaration of war has been made and whatever the form that such armed intervention may take’.27 This was revised in 1947: ‘The present Convention is applicable between the Contracting Parties, from the outbreak of any armed conflict, whether the latter is or is not recognised as a state of war by the parties concerned.’28
The substitution of this much more general expression for the word ‘war’ was deliberate. One may argue almost endlessly about the legal definition of ‘war’. A State can always pretend, when it commits a hostile act against another State, that it is not making war, but merely engaging in a police action, or acting in legitimate self-defence. The expression ‘armed conflict’ makes such arguments less easy. Any difference arising between two States and leading to the intervention of armed forces is an armed conflict within the meaning of Article 2, even if one of the Parties denies the existence of a state of war. It makes no difference how long the conflict lasts, or how much slaughter takes place. The respect due to human personality is not measured by the number of victims.29
When States convened in Geneva to debate the draft Conventions, there was little debate about the use of the term ‘armed conflict’;30 from the travaux préparatoires, it seems that States considered ‘armed conflict’ an uncontroversial substitution for the term ‘war’, such that the conference eventually adopted the Conventions as applying to ‘all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them’.31
In the years following the adoption of the Geneva Conventions, the terminology of ‘armed conflict’ essentially replaced that of ‘war’ in the treaty discourse. Although ‘war’ was still used in some instances (for example, in reference to ‘prisoners of war’), ‘armed conflict’ remained the dominant terminology in the treaty discourse – for example, in 1954, States drafted and adopted the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.32
However, at the same time, a new term for the law of armed conflict began to emerge: ‘international humanitarian law’. That phrase was not used in the Geneva Conventions, but seemingly first appeared in the icrc Commentaries to the Conventions, published in four volumes over an eight-year period between 1952 and 1960.33 The word ‘humanitarian’ (rather than ‘international humanitarian law’) was first seen in the Commentary to Convention i, published in 1952, where reference was made, inter alia, to the ‘humanitarian principles’34 of the Geneva Conventions, which were described as ‘humanitarian Conventions’.35 Indeed, the term ‘humanitarian’ appears nearly 100 times in the Commentary to Convention i, but was not, at that stage, part of the larger term ‘international humanitarian law’. That would come with the publication in 1960 of the Commentary to Convention ii on the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked,36 where the authors noted that ‘humanitarian law affects nearly everyone’.37
As the 1960s progressed, the term ‘humanitarian law’ began to appear more frequently in the legal discourse – for example, one of the chief advocates for the law of armed conflict, Jean Pictet, wrote in 1966 on ‘The Principles of International Humanitarian Law’.38 However, it was the 1968 UN Conference on Human Rights in Tehran that arguably contributed the most to cementing the notion that the law of armed conflict and humanitarian law were synonymous.39 At that Conference, a resolution was adopted calling for the Secretary-General to study ‘[s]teps which could be taken to secure the better application of existing humanitarian international conventions and rules in all armed conflicts’ and ‘[t]he need for additional humanitarian international conventions or for possible revision of existing Conventions’.40 Partly in response to that resolution, the icrc began a program of work that would eventually result in the adoption of the 1977 Additional Protocols.
developing and reaffirming the laws and customs ‘of a humanitarian nature’. It may rightly have been said that the law of war, properly interpreted, generally presents that character. Nevertheless, the icrc considers that efforts should be directed essentially towards the rules of a distinctly humanitarian nature; those concerning the protection of the human being or the essential assets of humanity.41
The words ‘revision’ or ‘restoration’, of the law of war, which are convenient expressions for the sake of brevity, are often uttered and will sometimes be employed hereafter. But the icrc deliberately refrained from using them in the title of this Report – they can create confusion, controversy, and are associated with the idea of war in the formal sense. In this way the icrc desires to show that it is deeply aware of the changes which have occurred in the international community since the time when the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conferences codified the ‘law of war’ and resort to war was considered as a legitimate means of State policy … By avoiding the words ‘law of war’, the icrc is also desirous to take account of the deep aspiration of the peoples to see peace installed and the disputes between human communities settled by pacific means. For some years past the icrc, together with the whole Red Cross, has therefore decided to strengthen its contribution to a peaceful spirit in the world.42
those rules of the law of armed conflict which are clearly humanitarian in nature, namely those which protect human beings and the property essential to them. Consequently, the term covers not only the Geneva Conventions but also treaty or customary law rules which, for humanitarian reasons, lay down limits to be observed in the conduct of hostilities, the use of weapons, the behaviour of combatants and recourse to reprisals, as well as norms intended to ensure the proper application of those rules.44
As in 1949, if States objected to the term ‘international humanitarian law’ in the lead-up to the 1974–1977 Diplomatic Conferences, there is little record of it. No mention of possible resistance to the new terminology appears in the Reports of the Conferences of Government Experts in either 197145 or 1972,46 though there was debate as to what was included within the definition,47 with one expert calling for a definition ‘as this term was now for the first time used in an international instrument’.48 However, the debate seems to stop there, and when the community of States met to debate and eventually adopt what would become the Additional Protocols over a period of three years (1974–1977), it did so at a drafting conference entitled the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts.49 The term ‘international humanitarian law’ was now officially part of the law.
But what exactly was the term ‘international humanitarian law’ understood to cover? The dominant or orthodox account of this development suggests that ‘international humanitarian law’ is simply the new terminology for ‘the law of armed conflict’: following adoption of the Additional Protocols in 1977, the ‘laws of war had, for all useful purposes, been replaced by international humanitarian law’.50 On the other hand, critical accounts suggest that this claim is problematic from both legal and political perspectives: that conflating the laws of war with the principles of humanitarian law applicable in armed conflicts is legally incorrect, and that this conflation does political and ideological work, including making the conduct of warfare primarily subject to humanitarian considerations rather than the principle of military necessity.51 From a purely practical perspective, as indicated in part 1 above, it is noteworthy that the terms ‘law(s) of war’ and ‘law of armed conflict’ continue to be used in particular contexts. Against this background, we turn now to consider whether, and how, the new terms ‘law of armed conflict’ and ‘international humanitarian law’ are picked up in State practice, through corpus linguistics analysis of the language used by States.
3 Putting Words into Practice – Using Corpus Linguistic Tools to Chart the Reception of the Terms ‘the Law of Armed Conflict’ and ‘International Humanitarian Law’ in State Practice: a Case Study of Conflict in the Middle East from 1948 to 2020
Corpus linguistics involves the study of large bodies of texts: a ‘corpus’ is a defined body of searchable text data deemed appropriate for the study of some particular research questions and of a scale not amenable to manual analysis.52 While corpus linguistics allows for the analysis of large bodies of text, assembly and preparation of the relevant corpus or dataset is a time-consuming matter. In order to make the scope of our inquiry manageable, we needed to set specific parameters – time and space limitations did not permit us, at this first instance, to study all State practice following 1949 (when States adopted the term ‘armed conflict’ in the 1949 Geneva Conventions) and 1977 (when States adopted the term ‘international humanitarian law’ in the Additional Protocols) in relation to armed conflicts. We therefore needed to narrow the case study, either to the practice of a particular State or States, or to the practice in relation to a particular conflict or conflicts.
We made the admittedly not-unproblematic choice to look at resolutions in the General Assembly and the Security Council, as these are the major public forums where States engage with international law. State participation in General Assembly and Security Council resolutions is generally accepted as an example of State practice53 and can be important in determining how particular legal questions or issues are viewed by the international law community.54 However, we are aware that mere acceptance of the term ‘international humanitarian law’ or ‘the law of armed conflict’ in a resolution does not necessarily mean that States have unequivocally accepted the terms as their own preferred descriptor for the body of law applicable in armed conflicts.
We came to the decision to select, as a ‘pilot study’, one umbrella conflict – that of Israel and the Arab world. This was done for the primary reason that the time period for both the Israel conflict and the changing terminology aligned: the Conventions were introduced in 1949 and, since its creation in 1948, Israel has engaged in, or been engaged in, numerous conflicts with its neighbours, including the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, as well as continuing to occupy specific regions in the area. This provided a context in which to chart the changing terminology to see whether it changed with the conflict.
With these parameters in mind, we then looked to all General Assembly and Security Council resolutions adopted between 1947 and 2020 (for the General Assembly) and between 1948 and 2016 (for the Security Council) to see how many times the ‘target’ terms of ‘the law of armed conflict’ and ‘international humanitarian law’ appeared. We assembled a corpus of UN resolutions referring to the Israel-Palestine conflict over this time period, in both the Security Council and the General Assembly. With the age of this data, the texts came in various pdf formats, and so some manual editing was required to clean the data of extraneous text (such as other resolutions not relevant to the data set, or summaries of decisions made at a plenary session). Some resolutions were in both English and French: we resolved to study only the English versions of these resolutions; the French text was removed. Once the data was assembled, we loaded it into a corpus linguistics software program called #LancsBox,55 which, among other techniques, allows researchers to check on word frequencies56 and normalised frequencies (typically measured per 10K or per million words, allowing the comparison of frequency across data sets of different sizes) and to view ‘concordance lines’ (that is, to see a keyword in the context of the words immediately to either side of it).57
Table 1 describes the set of texts that constitute this corpus. A total of 75 resolutions have been passed by the Security Council between the years 1948 and 2016, compared with 666 resolutions passed by the General Assembly58 between the years 1947 and 2020. General Assembly resolutions are not only more numerous (by a factor of nearly 9 to 1) but, on average, more than three and a half times the length of Security Council resolutions.
Table 2 sets out the terms searched across these two corpora. The common terms to refer to this body of law, including ‘law(s) of war’, ‘law of armed conflict’ and ‘international humanitarian law’, were searched across the two data sets. Of these, ‘law(s) of war’ and ‘law of armed conflict’ did not appear in any of the total of 741 texts. ‘International humanitarian law’ appeared in 7% and 18% of the Security Council and General Assembly texts respectively. The first usage is in 1974, in a General Assembly resolution (a/res/3237 (xxix) – ‘Observer Status for the Palestinian Liberation Organization’), and then the term does not reappear until 1993. In the Security Council resolutions, the term appears a total of seven times, in five resolutions, with the first appearing in 2002. Given that two of these key terms have abbreviations – loac and ihl – these were searched but no instances were found.
The term ‘international law’ appears in both data sets, including in 5% of Security Council resolutions59 and 40% of General Assembly resolutions, making it the highest term of our set within the General Assembly resolutions. The term ‘international instruments’ makes a marginal appearance in the General Assembly resolutions (appearing in 3% of the texts) from 1971 to 1992. In the Security Council resolutions, there is also reference to the ‘General Armistice Agreement’ in the years from 1950 to 1966. General Assembly resolutions also frequently refer to specific instruments: 14 General Assembly resolutions reference ‘Convention iv of the Hague 1907’ and 65 reference the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (Geneva Convention iv)60 – this is mainly in reference to occupied territory. ‘International humanitarian law’ tends to be referenced in more recent resolutions. For example, in a 2020 resolution, the General Assembly ‘[c]alls upon Israel, the occupying Power, to comply strictly with its obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law’. However, within the same resolution, there is also specific reference to Geneva Convention iv. Likewise, Security Council resolutions tend to refer to ‘international humanitarian law’ only after 2002.61
By reading a selection of these texts, it became clear that, particularly before the 1990s, other terminology (rather than ‘the law of armed conflict’ or ‘international humanitarian law’) was used to reference this body of law. For instance, there is frequent reference to ‘the’ Geneva Convention. In fact, the term ‘the Geneva Convention’ is referenced in one-third of the Security Council resolutions62 and just over one-third of the General Assembly resolutions. By using the concordance function, it is apparent that this term is referencing Geneva Convention iv. Figures 1 and 2 are screenshots of concordance lines, which confirm that it is this convention being referred to in these resolutions. The time period for referencing Geneva Convention iv is 1979–2016 for the Security Council resolutions, and 1968–2020 for the General Assembly resolutions. Reference to the Geneva Conventions in plural terms is made, but much less frequently than to the specific Geneva Convention iv: the plural form appears in only 1% of the Security Council resolutions, and 5% of the General Assembly resolutions.
Concordance lines illustrating the use of ‘Geneva Convention’ in UN Security Council resolutions
Citation: Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies 14, 2 (2023) ; 10.1163/18781527-bja10080
Concordance lines illustrating the use of ‘Geneva Convention’ in UN General Assembly resolutions
Citation: Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies 14, 2 (2023) ; 10.1163/18781527-bja10080
4 Analysing the Results: Tensions in the State Practice of the Language of loac
Perhaps the most interesting finding from this small case study is that the terms ‘law of war’ and ‘law of armed conflict’ do not appear in the General Assembly or Security Council resolutions at all, while the term ‘international humanitarian law’ does. This suggests that, at least for these UN bodies, and in the context of resolutions relating to this particular conflict, ‘international humanitarian law’ is the preferred global term to describe this body of law.63 This confirms the orthodox account regarding the use of these terms, namely that ‘international humanitarian law’ is the contemporary terminology used to refer to what was previously known as the ‘law of war’ and the ‘law of armed conflict’.64 As Hampson has written, since 1977, ‘[t]he use of the term [international humanitarian law] became more and more widespread, until now it is the term used by the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly, the International Court of Justice (icj), the International Committee of the Red Cross (icrc) and the human rights machinery of the United Nations’.65
As foreshadowed above, however, critical accounts of the history of these terms challenge the assumption that international humanitarian law is simply the new term used to describe the laws of armed conflict and raise questions about the political and ideological implications of this terminology. Many of these accounts emphasise the distinction between traditional rules of the law of war relating to the conduct of hostilities (as embodied, for example, in the Hague Regulations) and those relating to the treatment of ‘victims of war’66 (as embodied, for example, in the Geneva Conventions) and argue that ‘international humanitarian law’ properly so-called should refer only to the latter. These scholars argue that the use of the term ‘international humanitarian law’ to describe both of these bodies of law is at best ‘something of a misnomer’67 and at worst a ‘myth’,68 a ‘political project by and for international humanitarian and human rights organizations in support of their own political objectives’.69 Thus, Page Wilson describes ‘a concerted effort to rebrand’ the law of armed conflict as international humanitarian law ‘first led by the International Committee of the Red Cross (icrc), and then taken up by human rights groups from the 1980s onwards’.70 For Wilson, the use of the term ‘humanitarian’ to describe this body of law was pursued by these organisations for political and ideological reasons, to shape the law and its application to their humanitarian agenda. On this account, unifying Hague and Geneva law under the umbrella of ‘international humanitarian law’ serves to subsume the idea of ‘military necessity’ in Hague law under the overriding imperative of humanitarianism, as well as making the interpretation of the law open to ‘anyone claiming a stake in humanitarian issues’.71 In other words, the law of armed conflict is no longer the domain of military lawyers alone, but also that of humanitarian and human rights ngo s.
Alexander, similarly, has shown how the field of ‘international humanitarian law’ has a relatively ‘short’ history: rather than being the natural successor of the law of war, it was created relatively quickly through a ‘contested and contingent process’72 driven in particular by the work of the icrc to expand the scope of its remit, but also by other actors seeking to expand the application of human rights principles to the regulation of armed conflict. These actors include not only human rights ngo s such as Human Rights Watch, as emphasised by Wilson, but also international legal scholars and key figures such as Seán MacBride, Secretary-General of the International Commission of Jurists and co-founder of Amnesty International, who advocated for the expansion of the human rights regime to the regulation of armed conflict.
On Alexander’s account, and as described in part 2 above, the term ‘international humanitarian law’ first came to prominence in 1971 with the icrc Conference of Government Experts on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts.73 As Alexander demonstrates, the term was used throughout the negotiations at the Diplomatic Conference, although there was some ‘inconsistency in the commentary’, with some speaking of, for example, ‘the international humanitarian law of armed conflict’.74 Following the Conference and the adoption of the Additional Protocols in 1977, however, Alexander notes that ‘commentators and states began to express concerns about Additional Protocol I’, fearing that ‘the new international humanitarian law was too humanitarian to be adopted’.75 Many States refused to sign or did not ratify, including the US, the UK, France and Australia.76 And it was generally accepted that Additional Protocol I did not represent customary international law, so the obligations contained in it were not applicable to States that had not ratified. Thus, legal commentary on the First Gulf War in the early 1990s, for example, generally argued that the obligations in Additional Protocol I were not applicable, as neither the US nor Iraq was a party. This, Alexander notes, was ‘connected with a widespread perception that the legal regime governing the Gulf War was not really a humanitarian law’, as the ‘central principle of the ius in bello was not humanity but, rather, the principle of military necessity’.77 As a result, at this point in time, there was significant uncertainty about the appropriateness of the term ‘international humanitarian law’ to denote ‘a ius in bello that was dominated by military imperatives’.78
According to Alexander, this all changed, relatively quickly, with the outbreaks of ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and international attempts to respond to these events, including through international criminal tribunals. ‘Suddenly, there was an institutional environment established to enforce international humanitarian law.’79 With a rush of enthusiasm for the humanitarian potential of law in responding to these conflicts, lawyers ‘almost without exception’ would argue that the provisions of Protocol I were accepted as customary international law.80 Thus, ‘the correct understanding of the ius in bello by the end of the 20th century was that it was a truly international humanitarian law … in which considerations of humanity trumped military necessity’.81
Our findings support Alexander’s claim that while the term ‘international humanitarian law’ came to the fore in the early-mid 1970s, with the Diplomatic Conference, it was not until the 1990s, and the outbreak of the conflict in the Balkans in particular, that it was confidently embraced as an appropriate description of the laws of war. The term ‘international humanitarian law’ first appears in General Assembly resolutions relating to Israel-Palestine in 1974, with a reference to the Conference itself.82 It then disappears from use until 1993, from which time it is used fairly consistently. Also of interest is the fact that the term ‘international instruments’ ceases to be used around the same time that ‘international humanitarian law’ starts to be used more consistently. The last reference in the Israel-Palestine General Assembly resolutions to ‘international instruments’ is in 1992, and it is in 1993 that the term ‘international humanitarian law’ begins to be used consistently. This seems to confirm Alexander’s thesis that it is only with the Balkan conflict in the early 1990s that the international consensus shifts to consider provisions of Additional Protocol I to be customary international law, thus justifying the reference to ‘international humanitarian law’ in Israel-Palestine resolutions rather than specific reference to the ‘international instruments’ by which the parties to the conflict are bound.
This conclusion, following from analysis of the General Assembly resolutions relating to Israel-Palestine, is supported by analysis of a larger, pre-existing corpus, the United Nations General Debate Corpus, which consists of the General Debate statements in the General Assembly from 1970 to 2020. Analysis of this corpus confirms the linguistic pattern noted in the General Assembly resolutions on Israel-Palestine. It shows that the term ‘international humanitarian law’ is first used in 1972 and then only sporadically used until 1992, at which point it becomes consistently used every year.
In relation to the Security Council, our results indicate that the term ‘international humanitarian law’ is not used in Security Council resolutions concerning Israel-Palestine until 2002. Manual analysis of Security Council debates, however, indicates that the relevant body of law starts to be labelled ‘humanitarian’ in the early 1980s. However, as Alexander notes with respect to the Diplomatic Conference itself, the language used is inconsistent with references to, for example, ‘humanitarian principles of international law’ or ‘humanitarian rules’. By the time of the Balkan conflict, however, ‘international humanitarian law’ is used consistently.
5 Looking Forward – Possible Future Analyses on the Terminology of loac
In general terms, then, our results support Alexander’s account of the contingent and contested rise of the term ‘international humanitarian law’. In particular, our results support her claim that while the term comes to prominence with the Diplomatic Conference and the adoption of the Additional Protocols in the 1970s, it is not consistently embraced by the international community until the early 1990s and the outbreak of the conflict in the Balkans, in particular. To the extent that our findings support such critical accounts of the history of the term ‘international humanitarian law’, suggesting that the story of its rise to prominence is more complex than traditionally assumed, a number of questions about the implications of this ‘new’ terminology follow. Wilson and Alexander note the political implications that may be associated with the change in terminology from ‘law of armed conflict’ to ‘international humanitarian law’. Other scholars note more technical, legal difficulties that may be associated with conflating Hague and Geneva law.83 From a linguistic perspective, the change raises interesting questions, in that while ‘international humanitarian law’ may have an autonomous legal meaning, it nonetheless retains traces of its ordinary meaning, so that the natural connotations of the term ‘humanitarian’ are likely to influence, in some way, the content of the legal concept itself.84 As Mégret has noted, the choice of whether to call the relevant body of law the ‘law of war’ or ‘international humanitarian law’ is not neutral: ‘It is not for nothing that the laws of war are typically referred to in polite company as international humanitarian law.’85 From this perspective, the fact that the General Assembly and the Security Council exclusively use this term in their resolutions relating to Israel-Palestine (and do not refer to the law of armed conflict or the law of war) has important implications, which deserve further study.
Also deserving of further study is the fact that, in spite of UN bodies using the language of ‘international humanitarian law’, other actors continue to use the terms ‘law of war’ and ‘law of armed conflict’. Hampson notes that ‘international humanitarian law’ ‘is not the term used by a significant number of armed forces. They still prefer either the “law of war” or the “law of armed conflict”’.86 Wilson similarly notes the dominance of these latter terms in military publications.87 This suggests that while States use the language of ‘international humanitarian law’ in some contexts, namely when participating in UN processes, they also use ‘law of war’ or ‘law of armed conflict’, particularly when engaging with their militaries. This raises interesting questions of when and why States deploy different terminology, as well as the implications this has for State practice and international law. Future research could fruitfully map the different terminology used by States in contexts beyond General Assembly and Security Council resolutions.
At the same time, our current findings do hint that States may be aware of the political and other difficulties associated with the use of the terms ‘international humanitarian law’, ‘law of armed conflict’ and ‘law of war’. The results discussed in part 3 indicate that, while the term ‘international humanitarian law’ is used in the resolutions relating to Israel-Palestine, it is much more common for the General Assembly and the Security Council to use broader terms (such as ‘international law’ or ‘international instruments’) or more specific terms, specifying the applicable law as the Geneva Conventions or, much more commonly, the Fourth Geneva Convention. This practice of specifying the law more generally or more particularly may be a response to the legal and political complications associated with the term ‘international humanitarian law’, not least the fact that, as Wilson has noted, ‘there is no international agreement which defines ihl on its own terms, let alone sets down its provisions in a comprehensive way’.88 The limited nature of our case study raises the question of whether this is a general practice of the General Assembly and the Security Council, or a practice adopted in relation to the particular political situation of conflict with Israel. Future research will consider the language used in relation to other conflicts to draw more general conclusions regarding this phenomenon.
Preliminary research on this issue suggests that there may indeed be particular political considerations that influence the choice of language in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Manual analysis of Security Council resolutions relating to other conflicts suggests that the first reference to ‘international humanitarian law’ is in 1982 in relation to the Iran-Iraq war, where the Security Council ‘[c]ondemns all violations of international humanitarian law, in particular, the provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 in all their aspects’.89 However, the use of this term is not universal, as resolutions passed that year regarding the ongoing Israel-Lebanon war contain no references to ‘international humanitarian law’. By 2000, the Security Council is regularly referring to ‘international humanitarian law’, for example in its resolutions relating to the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. But it is not until 2002 that the Security Council starts to use that language in its resolutions relating to Israel-Palestine. This may suggest that different politics are at work in different contexts, and it raises interesting questions of how the language of this body of law can be manipulated for political ends. Again, further research is needed to confirm whether this is indeed the case, and to explore the political, legal and linguistic dynamics at work here.
6 Conclusion
Over the course of the 20th century, the language used in treaties regulating the conduct of warfare shifted from referring to the ‘law(s) of war’ to the ‘law of armed conflict’ and ultimately ‘international humanitarian law’. But these changes in terminology were largely driven by civil society, particularly the icrc, rather than by States. This raises interesting questions of whether the changes in terminology are picked up in State practice – and, if so, how and when. Our larger research project seeks to answer this question using tools of corpus linguistics to help us map language patterns across large bodies of text. For this pilot study, we have focused on a particular type of text that manifests State practice, namely General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, with respect to a particular conflict, namely Israel-Palestine.
The results of this pilot study demonstrated that the terms ‘law(s) of war’ and ‘law of armed conflict’ were not used in General Assembly and Security Council resolutions relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict at all. The term ‘international humanitarian law’, however, was. This would seem to confirm orthodox accounts of the shift in terminology, which view it as linear and neutral, such that ‘international humanitarian law’ is simply the ‘new’ name for the ‘law(s) of war’. On closer analysis, however, our results suggest that the picture is more complex. Contrary to what orthodox accounts might predict, the term ‘international humanitarian law’ does not appear in the resolutions in any consistent way until 1993 in the General Assembly and 2002 in the Security Council. Prior to that time, both bodies demonstrate a marked preference for refraining from using a global term to describe this body of law, instead using more general terms (‘international law’ or ‘international instruments’) or referring more specifically to particular instruments, notably Geneva Convention iv.
This suggests that the shift to using the terminology of ‘international humanitarian law’ to cover the field of the ius in bello does not result, at least not directly, from adoption of the Additional Protocols in 1977. In this sense, our findings support the argument of scholars such as Alexander, who argue that the rise of ‘international humanitarian law’ was rather the result of a contingent and contested process, ‘the intersection of the work of a diverse group of actors, each focused on their own particular aims, strategies or tasks’.90 Alexander points, in particular, to changes in legal scholarship and practice following the outbreaks of ethnic conflict in the Balkans and Rwanda in the early 1990s. Our finding that the General Assembly resolutions on the Israel-Palestine conflict start referring to international humanitarian law in a consistent way from 1993 would seem to support this argument. If this is indeed the case, and the shift towards the terminology of ‘international humanitarian law’ was not linear and neutral, but contingent and contested, then this raises legal, linguistic, political and ideological issues which require further study.
Of course, it is important not to overstate the significance of our findings based on this small sample of State practice. It is possible that the way in which language is used in these resolutions does not reflect State practice more broadly. It is also possible that State practice varies in different contexts. Perhaps the particular politics of the Israel-Palestine conflict affect the choice of language used in these resolutions. In this sense, part of the significance of this pilot study is to identify avenues for further research. Most obviously, this includes expanding our study of General Assembly and Security Council resolutions to other conflicts. It could also include expanding our study to consider the way in which States use language outside the context of UN resolutions, such as in General Assembly and Security Council debates. Future research could also combine the use of corpus linguistics analysis with close legal and discourse analysis of particular texts to explore the legal and political implications of choice of language more fully.
In spite of these limitations, two things emerge clearly from our analysis. The first is that States do not automatically embrace the changing terminology in the treaties regulating warfare. The second is that corpus linguistics provides useful tools for mapping the use of legal language across large bodies of text and over time. Combined with traditional tools of legal and linguistic analysis, it has the potential to offer new insights into the language of law and war, as well as its legal, linguistic and political implications.
Pål Wrange, ‘Historicising International Humanitarian Law’ in Mats Deland, Mark Klamberg and Pål Wrange (eds), International Humanitarian Law and Justice: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (Routledge 2019) 9.
Dieter Fleck, ‘Introduction’ in Dieter Fleck (ed), The Handbook of International Humanitarian Law (4th edn, oup 2021) 4.
Gary Solis, The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War (3rd edn, cup 2022) 18; Robert Kolb and Richard Hyde, An Introduction to the International Law of Armed Conflicts (Hart 2008) 16–17; Emily Crawford and Alison Pert, International Humanitarian Law (2nd edn, cup 2020) 33.
For example, Mary Ellen O’Connell, while for the most part considering ihl to be synonymous with loac, notes that there are parts of the law of armed conflict that might not be considered part of ihl (such as the law of neutrality) because they lack sufficient humanitarian aims: Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘Historical Development and Legal Basis’ in Dieter Fleck (ed), The Handbook of International Humanitarian Law (4th edn, oup 2021) 21.
M Cherif Bassiouni, ‘The Normative Framework of International Humanitarian Law: Overlaps, Gaps and Ambiguities’ (1998) 8 Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems 199, 200; Hilaire McCoubrey, International Humanitarian Law: Modern Developments in the Limitation of Warfare (Ashgate 1998) 2.
For an excellent history of this change and its theoretical underpinnings, see further Amanda Alexander, ‘A Short History of International Humanitarian Law’ (2015) 26 European Journal of International Law 109.
In addition to the works cited above, see Page Wilson, ‘The Myth of International Humanitarian Law’ (2017) 93 International Affairs 563; Françoise J Hampson, ‘Law of War/Law of Armed Conflict/International Humanitarian Law’ in Michael J Bowman and Dino Kritsiotis (eds), Conceptual and Contextual Perspectives on the Modern Law of Treaties (cup 2018).
This part of the paper will not include a detailed history of the development of the law of armed conflict generally, but rather a history of the use of the terms in treaty law.
Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace (1609) Book 3, ch 1, § 1 (from Stephen Neff (ed), Hugo Grotius on the Law of War and Peace (cup 2012, with English translation by Francis Kelsey) 325). In the original Latin: “Cui quibusq ex causus bellum gerere liceat dictum est Videamus nunc quantum liceat”.
See generally Richard Shelly Hartigan, Lieber’s Code and the Law of War (Precedent 1983) 2–14.
US Department of War, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, General Orders No 100, 24 April 1863 (Lieber Code) art 11.
Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field (adopted 22 August 1864, entered into force 22 June 1865) 129 cts 361.
Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Explosive Projectiles Under 400 Grammes Weight (adopted and entered into force 11 December 1868) 138 cts 297, preamble.
Convention (ii) with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land (adopted 29 July 1899, entered into force 4 September 1900) 187 cts 429.
Convention (iv) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (adopted 18 October 1907, entered into force 26 January 1910) 187 cts 227.
Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, annexed to Convention (iv) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (adopted 18 October 1907, entered into force 26 January 1910) 187 cts 227.
See generally Clyde Eagleton, ‘The Form and Function of the Declaration of War’ (1938) 32 American Journal of International Law 19.
Convention (iii) Relative to the Opening of Hostilities (adopted 18 October 1907, entered into force 26 January 1910) 205 cts 264.
See, for example, the Alabama Claims Arbitration (1872) 1 Moore Intl Arbitrations 495, a case brought by the US against Great Britain claiming that Great Britain had violated the law of neutrality by allowing the fit-out of a Confederate vessel, the css Alabama, despite Great Britain’s declaration of neutrality. See further Tom Bingham, ‘The Alabama Claims Arbitration’ (2005) 54 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 1.
In 1883, Sir John Frederick Maurice undertook a study to examine how many wars between 1700 and 1870 commenced only after a formal declaration: he could find fewer than 10 instances where formal declarations of war were made before the commencement of hostilities: John Frederick Maurice, Hostilities without Declaration of War: An Historical Abstract of the Cases in Which Hostilities Have Occurred between Civilized Powers prior to Declaration or Warning from 1720 to 1870 (hm Stationery Office 1883) 4.
See Tanisha M Fazal, ‘Why States No Longer Declare War’ (2012) 21 Security Studies 557; icrc, Commentary on the First Geneva Convention: Convention (I) for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field (2016) para 204 <https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gci-1949/article-2/commentary/2016>, which notes: ‘Under the traditional theory of declared war, the mere fact that States are engaged in armed violence is insufficient to displace the law of peace and trigger the applicability of humanitarian law. Therefore, declared war in its legal meaning starts with a declaration of war, which is interpreted as the only expression of the States’ belligerent intent’ (footnote omitted).
As outlined in the 1907 Hague Regulations.
Under the Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (adopted 27 July 1929, entered into force 19 June 1931) 118 lnts 343. See also Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War ii (Westview Press 1996) 73.
See further Haruo Iguchi, ‘The Secrets behind Japan’s Ability to Cope with U.S. Economic Sanctions, 1940–1941’ (2010) 34 Diplomatic History 177; Edward S Miller, Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor (United States Naval Institute Press 2007); Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1937–1953 (Harvard University Press 2003).
icrc, ‘Report on the Interpretation, Revision and Extension of the Geneva Convention of July 27, 1929’ (report prepared for the 16th International Conference of the Red Cross, London, 1938) <https://library.icrc.org/library/docs/CI/CI_1938_DOC11_ENG.pdf>; ‘Mémorandum adressé par le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge aux Gouvernements des États parties à la Convention de Genève et aux Sociétés nationales de la Croix-Rouge’ (1945) 314 Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge 85.
icrc, ‘Report on the Interpretation’ (n 25) 7–8.
icrc, Report on the Work of the Preliminary Conference of National Red Cross Societies for the Study of the Conventions and of Various Problems Relative to the Red Cross, Geneva, July 26–August 3, 1946 (1947) 14.
icrc, Report on the Work of the Conference of Government Experts for the Study of the Conventions for the Protection of War Victims, Geneva, April 14–26, 1947 (1947) 8. See also icrc, Draft Revised or New Conventions for the Protection of War Victims Established by the International Committee of the Red Cross with the Assistance of Government Experts, National Red Cross Societies and Other Humanitarian Associations (1948).
Jean Pictet (ed), Commentary to Geneva Convention I for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field (icrc 1952) 32.
Final Record of the Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of International Conventions for the Protection of War Victims and Held at Geneva, 21 April – 12 August 1949 (1949) vol iib, 9–15.
ibid vol iib, 128.
Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (adopted 14 May 1954, entered into force 7 August 1956) 249 unts 215.
Dietrich Schindler attributes the introduction of the term ‘international humanitarian law’ to the icrc as early as the beginning of the 1950s; however, he does not cite an ‘origin document’ in which the term first appeared or was used. See further Dietrich Schindler, ‘International Humanitarian Law: Its Remarkable Development and Its Persistent Violation’ (2003) 5 Journal of the History of International Law 165, 171.
Pictet, Commentary to Geneva Convention i (n 29) 26.
ibid 28.
Convention (ii) for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded, Sick, and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea (adopted 12 August 1949, entered into force 21 October 1950) 75 unts 85.
Jean Pictet (ed), Commentary to Geneva Convention ii for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea (icrc 1960) 21.
J Picket, ‘The Principles of International Humanitarian Law’ (1966) 6 International Review of the Red Cross 455. Interestingly, Pictet would himself be reticent about using the terms ‘international humanitarian law’ and ‘the law of armed conflict’ interchangeably. Writing in 1975, he felt that the term ‘international humanitarian law’ ‘could be thought to exclude some parts of the laws of war … whose primary purpose is not humanitarian. Indeed, the term “international humanitarian law” could be seen as implying that the laws of war have an exclusively humanitarian purpose, when their evolution has in fact reflected various practical concerns of states and their armed forces on grounds other than those which may be considered humanitarian’: Jean Pictet, Humanitarian Law and the Protection of War Victims (AW Sijthoff 1975) 11.
See generally O’Connell (n 4) 11–13; Solis (n 3) 21–25.
Human Rights in Armed Conflicts, Resolution xxiii adopted by the International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran (12 May 1968).
icrc, Reaffirmation and Development of the Laws and Customs Applicable in Armed Conflicts (XXlst International Conference of the Red Cross, Istanbul, September 1969) 10.
ibid 10–11.
icrc, ‘Introduction’ (Doc ce/1), submitted by the icrc to the Conference of Government Experts on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts (Geneva, 24 May – 12 June 1971) (1971) 25.
ibid.
icrc, Conference of Government Experts on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts (Geneva, 24 May – 12 June 1971), Report on the Work of the Conference (1971).
icrc, Conference of Government Experts on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts (Geneva, 3 May – 3 June 1972), Report on the Work of the Conference (1972).
icrc, Conference of Government Experts 1971 (n 45) 35.
icrc, Conference of Government Experts 1972 (n 46) 174, para 4.18.
See Official Records of the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts, 16 vols (Swiss Federal Political Department 1978).
Alexander (n 6) 124.
See, for example, Alexander (n 6); Wilson (n 7).
Anthony McEnery and Andrew Hardie, Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory, Practice (cup 2012).
International Law Commission, ‘Ways and Means for Making the Evidence of Customary International Law More Readily Available’ (July 1950) UN Doc a/cn.4/34, 368–72.
Texaco Overseas Petroleum Company and California Asiatic Oil Company v Government of the Libyan Arab Republic (1978) 17 ilm 1 at 27. See also Stephen Schwebel, ‘The Effect of Resolutions of the UN General Assembly on Customary International Law’ (1979) 73 asil Proceedings 301.
Vaclav Brezina, Pierre Weill-Tessier and Anthony McEnery, #LancsBox v. 5.x. [software] (2020) <http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox>.
The word count of these two corpora is approximate: the data includes tokens (eg numbers indicating footnotes), which ideally should be excluded. In addition, different tools use different definitions of the unit of word. Thus, the word count here is based on the concept of ‘word’ applied in #Lancsbox.
McEnery and Hardie (n 52).
Some early resolution texts contain more than one resolution. If the text has only one identifying number, we have treated it as one resolution.
For example, in Resolutions 271, 478, 1544 and 2334.
Convention (iv) Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (adopted 12 August 1949, entered into force 21 October 1950) 75 unts 287 (Geneva Convention iv).
For example, in Resolutions 1397, 1405, 1435, 1544 and 2334.
For example, in Resolutions 271, 446, 465, 469, 471, 476, 592, 605, 607, 636, 641, 468, 469, 672, 681, 694, 726, 799 and 904.
Although, as noted above and discussed further below, these bodies seem to prefer either using more general terms (‘international law’ or ‘international instruments’) or making more specific reference to particular treaties (Geneva Convention iv, for example).
Wilson (n 7) 563; Hampson (n 7) 538–39; Alexander (n 6).
Hampson (n 7) 539.
ibid 538.
ibid 539.
Wilson (n 7).
ibid 579.
ibid 565.
ibid 577.
Alexander (n 6) 110.
ibid 122.
ibid 123.
ibid 126.
Though eventually France ratified in 2001, Australia in 1991, and the UK in 1998.
Alexander (n 6) 129.
ibid 130.
ibid.
ibid 132.
ibid 135.
unga Res 3237 (22 November 1974) UN Doc a/res/3237, entitled ‘Observer status for the Palestine Liberation Organization’.
Hampson (n 7).
Wilson (n 7).
Frédéric Mégret, ‘The Laws of War and the Structure of Masculine Power’ (2018) 19 Melbourne Journal of International Law 200, 204. Demonstrating the complexity at work here, in this article Mégret demonstrates how the very project of ‘humanising’ war effects a particular form of masculine domination.
Hampson (n 7) 539.
Wilson (n 7) 566.
ibid 578.
unsc Res 540 (31 October 1982) UN Doc s/res/540.
Alexander (n 6) 136.
