In The Roles and Functions of Atrocity-Related United Nations Commissions of Inquiry in the International Legal Order, Catherine Harwood explores how United Nations inquiries navigate considerations of principle and pragmatism to discern their identity in the international legal order.

The seventh edition of this successful textbook on the techniques and institutions used to solve international disputes.

This book explores, through the lens of the conflict in Syria, why international law and the United Nations have failed to halt conflict and massive human rights violations in many places around the world which has allowed tens of millions of people to be killed and hundreds of millions more to be harmed. The work presents a critical socio-legal analysis of the failures of international law and the United Nations (UN) to deal with mass atrocities and conflict. It argues that international law, in the way it is set up and operates, falls short in dealing with these issues in many respects. The argument is that international law is state-centred rather than victim-friendly, is, to some extent, outdated, is vague and often difficult to understand and, therefore, at times, hard to apply. While various accountability processes have come to the fore recently, processes do not exist to assist individual victims while the conflict occurs or the abuses are being perpetrated. The book focuses on the problems of international law and the UN and, in the context of the many enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions in Syria, why nothing has been done to deal with a rogue state that has regularly violated international law. It examines why the responsibility to protect (R2P) has not been applied and why it ought to be used, generally, and in Syria. It uses the Syrian context to evaluate the weaknesses of the system and why reform is needed. It examines the UN institutional mechanisms, the role they play and why a civilian protection system is needed. It examines what mechanism ought to be set up to deal with the possible one million people who have been disappeared and detained in Syria. The book will be a valuable resource for students, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of public international law, international human rights law, political science and peace and security studies.

Our world is in urgent need of global answers on subjects such as Big Data, climate change, and the interconnected global economy. This volume tackles those issues and more, with the goal of advancing more democratic modes of decision-making.

This volume in the Lieber Studies series explores how the law of armed conflict is made and shaped. It examines the fundamental materials of the law of armed conflict, key actors and influences, the spaces where the law is made, as well as questions of unmaking.

This book provides an accessible and engaging account of the contemporary laws of war. It highlights how, even though war has been outlawed and should be finished as an institution, states continue to claim that they can wage necessary wars of self-defence, engage in lawful killings in war, and imprison law-of-war detainees.

The League of Nations - Perspectives from the Present is an accessible and richly illustrated edited volume displaying a wide variety of cutting-edge research on the many ways the League of Nations shaped its times and continues to shape our contemporary world. A series of bite-size studies, divided into three thematic parts, investigates how the League affected the world around it and the lives of the people who became part of this 'first great experiment' in international organisation. Recent research has reinterpreted the League as a laboratory of global economic, political and humanitarian governance. Expanding on this, the volume aims to show that the League is an 'academic site', where international history - as a discipline - has re-invented itself by integrating new approaches from social, cultural and media history. With an introduction by Director-General Michael Moller of the United Nations Organisation in Geneva, this work is a timely reminder of the fragile, varied and enduring history of multilateralism, on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

This sixth, revised edition of International Institutional Law covers the most recent developments in the field. Although public international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the African Union, ASEAN, the European Union, Mercosur, NATO and OPEC have broadly divergent objectives, powers, fields of activity and numbers of member states, they also share a wide variety of institutional characteristics. Rather than being a handbook for specific organizations, the book offers a comparative analysis of the institutional law of international organizations. It includes chapters on the rules and practices concerning membership, institutional structure, decision-making, financing, legal order, supervision and sanctions, legal status and external relations. The book’s theoretical framework and extensive use of case-studies is designed to appeal to both academics and practitioners.

Providing a refreshing take on transitional justice, this second edition Research Handbook brings together an expanse of scholarly expertise to reconsider how societies deal with gross human rights violations, structural injustices and mass violence. Contextualised by historical developments, it covers a diverse range of concepts, actors and mechanisms of transitional justice, while shedding light on new and emerging areas in the field.

This book provides a detailed examination of how norms concerning human rights, civilian protection and prevention of mass atrocities have fared in the regions of Southeast Asia and Africa. Originated as a spin off of the journal GR2P (vol. 8/2-3, 2016), it has been enriched with new chapters and revised contents, which contrast the different experiences of those regions and investigates the expression of human protection norms in regional organisations and thematic policy agendas as well as the role of civil society mechanisms/processes. Hunt and Morada have brought together scholar-practitioners from across the world.The collection identifies a range of insights that provide rich opportunities for south-south exchange and mutual learning when it comes to promoting and building capacity for human protection at the regional level.