Non-International Armed Conflicts in International Law

This dispassionate analysis of the legal implications of non-international armed conflicts explores the rules regulating the conduct of internal hostilities, as well as the consequences of intervention by foreign States, the role of the Security Council, the effects of recognition, State responsibility for wrongdoing by both Governments and insurgents, the interface with the law of human rights and the notion of war crimes. The author addresses both conceptual and specific issues, such as the complexities of 'failing' States or the recruitment and use of child soldiers. He makes use of the extensive case law of international courts and tribunals, in order to identify and set out customary international law. Much attention is also given to the contents of available treaty texts (primarily, the Geneva Conventions, Additional Protocol II and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court): what they contain and what they omit.

1. The framework; 2. The preconditions of a NIAC; 3. Thresholds and interaction of armed conflicts; 4. Insurgent armed groups and individuals; 5. Foreign intervention in a NIAC; 6. Recognition; 7. State responsibility; 8. The principal LONIAC treaty provisions; 9. Additional treaty texts; 10. NIAC war crimes; 11. LONIAC customary international law; 12. LONIAC and human rights law; Conclusions.

Yoram Dinstein is a Member of the Institut de Droit International and a Professor Emeritus at Tel-Aviv University. He is a former President of the University (1991–9), as well as former Rector and former Dean of the Faculty of Law. He served twice as the Stockton Professor of International Law at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He was also a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of International Law in Heidelberg, a Meltzer Visiting Professor of Law at New York University and a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Toronto.