Abstract
The twenty-first century has redefined the nature of international law and modern conflicts in that international law no longer respond to the old form of warfare; rather, contemporary international law must respond to warfare that involve state and non-state actors. It is against this background that this book’s main task is an examination of the various bodies of law that ought to respond to the use of force in modern conflict. This is not an easy feat to achieve given that there is no single body of law that is best applicable to modern conflicts, especially, if such conflicts range from self-defence, counterterrorism, targeted killings, counterinsurgency operations during armed conflicts, non-state actors and state actors. On one hand, there is international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict), modern human rights law and enforcing ‘customary international law’. On the other hand, there are rules pertaining to coalition operations, or rules on the status of forces in non-combat zones and their deployment in combat zones. The insight into the various applicable law in modern conflict has traditionally been a narrative of specialist international lawyers (some of whom lacked tactical or strategic experience in military operations), and, in this book, an insider’s narrative has been developed regarding the deployment of international law during armed conflicts with a fresh perspective. As such, the book reveals that international law is not only in conflict with itself (the relationship between international humanitarian law and human rights law) but also has an operational function that fills a normative gap often ignored in the traditional scholarship. This immense work (covering 15 chapters over 600 pages) is both a reference work for the scholarly international lawyer who specialised in the law of armed conflict and a legal manual for lawyers serving in their nation’s armed forces with active military operations. The book can be criticised for tilting the nature of the law of armed conflict in the direction of states that are engaged in armed conflict – but such a critique would not be fair, given that the author made tremendous efforts to compare and contrast the various elements or applicable law to armed conflicts. Having packaged the applicable law of armed conflicts in a grand transnational convergence vortex, the book conveniently argues for a holistic solution or a ‘holistic operational law approach designed to address the evolving, diverse, and unique security threats facing the international community’ (p. 570). This holistic approach also includes ‘defaulting to the application of human-rights based law enforcement’ (p. 605) and developing an operational law approach to security. The book appeals to a wide readership some of which will be critical, while others will endorse its holistic approach to the applicable law of armed conflicts.