This chapter discusses how states ought to behave in tiems of armed conflict, highlighting the role of such mechanisms as proportionality and military necessity

This chapter documents the relevance of the ‘standard of civilisation’ for contemporary international law, despite the marked decline of explicit invocations of the concept. It does so by documenting the continuing existence and purchase of arguments that oscillate between the ‘logic of improvement’ and the ‘logic of biology’. By focusing on two distinct legal fields that have been highly relevant to the war on terror, the laws of occupation and jus ad bellum, this chapter documents the importance of conforming with the imperatives of the neoliberal state in order to be recognised as a subject of international law. In the first part, the chapter offers a detailed examination of the neoliberal reforms imposed in occupied Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority. It details both the promises anchored to the adoption of neoliberal capitalism and the constant negation of such promises based on Orientalist stereotypes based on Iraqis’ purported incapacity to government themselves. In the second part, this chapter focuses on the controversial ‘unwilling or unable’ doctrine situating it within the political economy of the ‘war on terror’ and the demand that post-colonial states subscribe to its imperatives.

Since 1996 the Islamic Movement in Israel has organized a popular mobilization campaign under the slogan “al-Aqsa is in Danger.” The movement has re-centered al-Aqsa Mosque as the central religious-nationalist symbol of the Palestinian struggle. In the process, it has tried to enlist the Palestinian community inside Israel, Jerusalem, and the occupied Palestinian territories as well as the Arab and Muslim worlds. Pious Muslim women have joined this campaign en masse, participating in the kind of public protest action that goes well beyond the traditional gendered division of labor advocated formally by the Islamic Movement. The chapter examines these and other women’s activities for al-Aqsa to trace their strategies of the removal of intra-communal divisions and the domestication of the holy – which are in many ways similar to their deployment in the Jewish Israeli cases. Activities include organizing religious, educational, and recreational activities for women, students, and children, celebrating personal occasions such as marriages, utilizing social media to articulate the bond between women and al-Aqsa, and other activities that enhance Muslim presence at the site and transform it from a distant, divided, and exclusive place of worship to one enmeshed in the everyday.

This chapter is about Allied plans to ‘wear down’ Greater Germany by strategic bombing, and to weaken its hold on occupied territory by encouraging an underground Resistance; some Allied leaders saw these methods as an alternative to a direct ground attack. Resources of the German war economy. Food production and war industry. The limited economic utilisation by the Germans of occupied territory. Forced (slave) labour as a key German asset. Albert Speer and the efforts to intensify the war economy. German technical innovation and ‘miracle weapons’. The Allied war economies in comparison. Development of strategic bombing by Britain and the USA. Relationship between strategic bombing and the ground campaigns. German missile programmes; the American the atomic bomb project. Occupation by Germany and collaboration with the occupiers. Development of the European Resistance, supported from Britain by the SOE. Role of the Communists in the Resistance. The Partisan movement in Russia and Yugoslavia. The effectiveness of the Resistance, relative to Allied conventional forces. Lack of large-scale opposition to Hitler in Germany, despite the July 1944 bomb plot. The resilience of the Nazi regime requires, in the end, occupation by ground armies; ‘wear down’ by underground movements and air bombing is not enough.

As will become evident through the course of this chapter, development in its human rights context is primarily a value that translates into individual and communal well-being. This well-being may be linked to industrial or other financial development, although the correlation between the two is neither self-evident nor necessary. If this right to well-being is to make a difference in the lives of people, whether in poor or rich nations, it must be susceptible to quantifiable measurement through which one is able to assess its progress and realisation. In the last decade experts have developed a list of detailed indicators which allow us to assess well-being more accurately. At the same time, wealthy nations have abandoned ad hoc unilateral efforts to assist their poorer neighbours to escape perpetual cycles of poverty by entering into institutionalised multilateral commitments to contribute part of their annual earnings to developmental goals. These goals are also vigorously pursued by multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

Chapter 6 describes the crisis of representative politics in the mid- to late 1960s, at the national level, the level of youth organisation, and within the university. This crisis prompted a turn towards the occupation as a political tactic, the general assembly over representative organisations, and a preference for forms of direct democracy. The protest movements demanded autonomy, although they were not always clear how this would operate. However, forms of direct democracy such as the occupation had a short life-span and generated criticism for demagogy and its domination by student leaders. I argue that the protest movements found it difficult to reconcile their anti-hierarchical drive and the intense politicisation that led towards formation of a new political party.

The introduction sketches the scope and nature of Allied internment and outlines the key questions that internment raises. It situates internment within the history and historiography of postwar Germany and the broader study of the history of camps. It shows that internment, especially by the western powers, has often been overlooked. Even studies of post-Nazi transitional justice often neglect it, focusing instead on trials of Nazi and war criminals and on professional and civil sanctions against Nazi Party members and fellow travellers. The introduction argues that including internment reveals post-Nazi transitional justice to have been more severe than has long been believed and that Allied measures did not rest on undifferentiated accusations of German collective guilt, but on a more nuanced approach. The introduction identifies multiple meanings of terms such as ‘denazification’ that are crucial for understanding internment. It also discusses the existing literature on internment and the controversial question of the comparability of the Soviet and western cases. It argues that comparison is legitimate and that black-and-white depictions of brutal, arbitrary Soviets and fair, friendly westerners oversimplify a more complex reality. Finally, the introduction outlines the book’s structure, sources, and scope, which includes some comparison with Austria.

This chapter investigates the Allied occupation of France, especially the way this occupation was managed politically between 1815 and 1818, as an instance of the new European security system and corresponding culture at work. The preparations for this occupation, mainly through the deliberations and activities of the Allied Council of Ambassadors, provide a perfect case study to show how contentious and conflict-ridden this Allied cooperation was (on matters of finance, French politics and military matters), but also how it moved towards a more collective, consensual method of decision making in a highly volatile environment. This – until the present not fully contextualised and researched – Allied Council of Ambassadors responsible for executing the occupation was arguably the first instance where Europe’s system of collective security was inaugurated on the ground, albeit haphazardly and contested, between 1815 and 1818.