How does the prospect of endless war against a terrifying abstraction mobilize and perpetuate support for its cause? While the war on terror clearly trades in notions of fear, outrage, and horror it also mobilizes a whole set of feelings less obviously associated with terror – the condescending, intimate colonial desires associated with “soft” power and humanitarian tactics. Considering romance as a lens through which to understand popular narratives about the war on terror, this essay explores intimacy and desire – as well as their intersections with discourses of happiness and honor – as forms of affective capture that serve to perpetuate the war on terror. Though the war on terror is most often associated with a mood of fear, popular stories framed through liberal individualism suggest that it also cultivates an attachment to the affective assemblage of security-happiness-compassion, echoed in the tactics of humanitarian or “soft” power.

The chapter discusses the legality of the use of force which occurred in the framework of the Syrian conflict. Particularly exhaustive are discussions regarding two issues: first, the right of State A to use force in self-defence against non-state actors operating in State B, without State B’s consent (such as in the context of US actions against ISIS in Syria); second, the right of humanitarian intervention, or the responsibility to protect, as it is sometimes called. The chapter critically reviews current literature on these two subjects and applies them to the Syrian context. Additionally, the chapter covers the less frequently discussed subject of the exclusive right of the recognised government to ask for international support. Specifically, it suggests that current discussions of these issues are deficient because we lack a full understanding of the role of jus ad bellum in armed conflicts that are intra-state and transnational (that is between a state and a non-state actor in another country). Recent conflicts have raised awareness of this deficiency. This chapter will delineate the emerging general principles regarding the role of jus ad bellum in intra-state conflicts in general and in Syria in particular.

This chapter seeks to identify and classify the different legal types of conflicts that have occurred in Syria since violence erupted in March 2011. It reviews the legal definitions and international and non-international armed conflicts, and the significance of the distinction between them. The author argues that multiple conflicting wars – both international and civil - have been and are being fought in Syria. Using the earlier theoretical discussion, the chapter analyses different international conflicts (which she argues exist between Syria and the US-led coalition, Turkey and Israel) and the civil wars (between Syria and the anti-Government armed group; among various armed groups; and between foreign states against armed groups, namely ISIS and the YPG, located and operating in the territory of Syria. The conclusions emphasise the importance of conflict classification to understanding and analysing the violations committed during the Syrian war(s), and their importance to peace and justice in post-conflict Syria.

Providing humanitarian relief to affected populations is a top priority following a major sudden onset disaster (SOD). The main form of medical relief to affected areas is the emergency medical teams (EMTs). These are groups of health professionals and support staff operating locally or outside their country of origin by providing healthcare to disaster-affected populations. Despite best intentions, for decades EMTs were disorganized and followed no clear standards. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the EMT Working Group of the World Health Organization‘s global health cluster initiated a global effort to standardize the EMTs system. This new system was put to the test in 2013 with the deployment of medical aid to the Philippines following Typhon Haiyan, and later on during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the earthquake in Nepal in 2015. This chapter reviews the history of medical aid to disaster affected areas, the process of coordinating and standardizing EMTs and the latest implementation of the new EMT coordination system.

The fragile political status quo between Israel and Syria existing since the end of the last formal war between the two states in 1972 – a tense and fragile armistice – serves as the background for Israel’s policy in the current Syrian conflict surveyed in the chapter. Israel’s policy was modeled according to an organising principle combining humanitarian and military activity: building civilian bridges, on the one hand, while acting militarily to secure Israeli interests, on the other hand. Israel was acting initially as a ’passive onlooker’, then as a ’good neighbour’, and, more recently, as a declared rival against the Iranian presence in Syria. The chapter explores these Israeli policies, in addition to ’humanitarian diplomacy’ – the civilian and government assistance provided in the Syrian Golan Heights area – and Israel’s role in the efforts to build a set of common interests with Syrian opposition groups. Finally, this chapter addresses the new challenges and opportunities facing Israel in light of the shifting situation across its north-eastern border.

The Syrian war’s most fundamental characteristic is the systematic disregard for the most basic rules of international law – and notably international humanitarian law – displayed by its belligerents. The result has been unparalleled human suffering, the scale, complexity, and severity of which are yet to be fully understood. This chapter looks briefly at the unrest that preceded the Syrian conflict before focusing on those violations of international humanitarian law which quickly became hallmarks of the Syrian war. It gives particular focus to two violations of international humanitarian law: the conducting of indiscriminate attacks, including attacks by governments and armed groups; and the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield and the investigations to determine the perpetrator(s). Finally, it asks whether the Syrian conflict represents a nadir in the international community’s response to a war where international humanitarian law is breached with impunity and, if so, whether the value of the law of wars has been eroded.

This chapter focuses on triage management in both national and international mass casualty incidents. They be a sudden-onset natural disaster, a public health emergency of international concern, or a war or armed conflict resulting in the deployment of field level hospitals that are focused on civilians, the military, or both, and are capable of rapid deployment and expansion or contraction to meet immediate emergency requirements for a specified period of time. The goal of triage is to treat as many victims as possible who have an opportunity for survival. Triage does not exist in isolation, but represents a complex process that balances clinical requirements with resource allocation and system management where the decision operatives are the likelihood of medical success and the conservation of scare resources.

This chapter is concerned with tracing the history of the drafting of the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). In seeking to understand how and why ENMOD came about, the chapter locates its emergence in the extant superpower rivalry between the USSR and USA around the time of the war in Indochina. Its provisions, it is argued, reflect the complex roles of those powers within the Cold War – as scientific innovators, military superpowers, ideological adversaries and hesitant bilateralists – and survives as a quintessential juridical exemplar of Cold War thought and practice.

As the military and economic situation deteriorated in Germany, so did the military’s ability to respect the pre-war agreements on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Shortages worsened throughout 1917 and 1918, causing all social classes to feel the effects of the war in the pits of their stomachs. Tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war in Germany had no option but to rely on whatever their captors could feed them. Conditions were dire, but Germany was able to defray some of the long-term costs of feeding prisoners of war by granting some of them access to humanitarian aid from the Red Cross. The food situation at Karlsruhe had become so desperate in 1917 that British officers imprisoned there were offered 30 pfennigs a day to forgo the German-supplied rations so that they could be used to feed starving civilians.

This chapter lays the theoretical groundwork for the argument. In the first section, I outline the legal regime governing armed conflict. The second section provides an initial definition of reciprocity and reviews two literatures explaining its importance to compliance with international legal regimes such as IHL. In section three, I outline what I am calling the “humanization of humanitarian law” thesis. This is the view that states are and can be expected to implement IHL obligations even if their adversaries do not. In section four, I present a more nuanced view of reciprocity. I demonstrate, via H. L. A. Hart’s theory of law as the union of primary and secondary rules, how states have maintained reciprocal strategies for dealing with IHL non-compliance through secondary rules. I then explain how the domestic, multi-actor setting of state decision making allows policy makers to use these secondary rules to respond to IHL non-compliance. In the last section, I examine logic of appropriateness theories found in the international relations and international law literatures that could serve as a basis for the humanization of humanitarian law thesis.