In 2023 the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement marks its twenty-fifth anniversary. For many the Agreement projects a global image of a successfully concluded end to conflict. However, key aspects of the agreement remain under-enforced or simply undelivered: in particular, provisions related to significant and wide-ranging guarantees addressing human rights and equality of opportunity. As a result, socio-economic and cultural deficits persist, undermining the capacity to achieve a ‘positive peace’. In this article we address the question of how transformative the Agreement and associated reforms have been in addressing the root causes of the conflict and the structures that underpinned it. In doing so, we deploy Clara Sandoval's typology of different forms of societal change – ‘ordinary’, ‘structural’ and ‘fundamental’ – to guide our thinking and analysis, and tackle the most fundamental of questions in peace agreement literature and practice: whether, in fact, peace agreements can undo the fundamental causes that trigger and sustain violence. The article outlines the transformative promise of the Agreement, the multiple interlocking factors that have undermined that promise and the role of civil society in sustaining that transformative potential. Our conclusions point to a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes the ‘ordinary’ in transitional settings and a caution against the hyperbole of the transformative. We view transformative change as slothlike in its emergence, specifically grounded in progressive and cumulative re-orderings that can accompany peace processes. Rather than a moment of radical change, transformation follows from the cumulative impact of symbolic gesture, specific legal provision, procedural practice, mechanisms of accountability, and an engaged and vibrant civil society.

This article contributes to the understanding of why states resort to targeted, or smart, sanctions to meet the threat of cyber intrusions and whether this type of response is a forced measure or an effective tool to halt, prevent and punish attacking states. The tools of analysis used in the article are legal positivism and political theories, including Mancur Olson's theory of groups and Francesco Giumelli's analytical framework for assessment of sanctions. The authors address the effectiveness of sanctions as a reaction to cyber-enabled activities through the lens of regulation introduced in the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, which are the most developed counter-cyber sanction regimes, analysing publicly known cases of cyber-related sanctions.

The use of force in foreign territories has been contained in the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, with the authorisation of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, in ‘cases deemed legitimate by international law’ and where required by international treaties to which Turkey is a party. Yet Turkey's extraterritorial use of force against armed non-state actors lead to the most important question of identifying the circumstances under which the Turkish authorities have long justified military intervention in foreign territories. This article aims to assess whether Turkey's use of force and alleged extraterritorial self-defence contravenes international law. In order to address how Turkey interprets the right to use armed force and the right of self-defence, and to bring clarity to the state's approach to international law on the use of force (jus ad bellum), the article explores Turkey's practice based on the assessment of the Turkish military intervention in Syria, in line with both bilateral security or defence treaties to which Turkey is a party and the use of force in self-defence. The aim is to determine whether Turkey's justifications are compatible with the jus ad bellum criteria.

An expert panel formed by Stop Ecocide International has proposed an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which, if adopted, would create a new international crime of ecocide. However, the panel's proposal is compromised throughout by anthropocentrism in the sense that it places too much emphasis on the needs of humans and not enough on the needs of the environment. It is argued here that this anthropocentric dilution of ecocide resulted from the panel's lack of standing, influence and confidence on the international stage. Its weakness pushed it towards a strategy of producing something palatable to states in the hope of securing their support. That strategy will prove futile. The article considers whether other actors, such as the international courts or experts working in different contexts, might be better placed to design the blueprint for ecocide. It concludes, tentatively, that the International Law Commission remains the architect best positioned to set out a bold vision of ecocide.

Some have proposed the development of technologies that improve our moral behaviour – moral enhancement – in order to address global risks such as pandemics, global warming and nuclear war. I will argue that this technology could be weaponised to manipulate the moral dispositions of enemy combatants. Despite being morally controversial, weaponised moral enhancement would be neither clearly prohibited nor easily prohibitable by international war law. Unlike previous psychochemical weapons, it would be relatively physically harmless. I argue that when combatants are liable to lethal aggression to achieve an aim of war, they are also liable to weaponised moral enhancement to achieve that same aim. Weaponised moral enhancement will loosen just war requirements in both traditional and revisionist normative just war theories. It will particularly affect revisionist theories’ jus ad bellum requirements for humanitarian and preventive wars. For instance, weaponised moral enhancement could be more proportional and efficacious than lethal aggression to effect institutional changes in preventive and humanitarian wars. I will conclude that, despite evading international war laws and loosening normative just war requirements, the intuition that weaponised moral enhancement would gravely harm combatants can be defended by arguing that it would severely disturb personal identity, which could potentially ground future prohibitions.

Both international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) make extensive references to humanity. Yet the role attributed to humanity differs between the two. Humanity is seen in IHRL as the source of the rights, whereas in IHL it is interpreted as a moral obligation to avoid harm. This article challenges this perspective. Relying upon contemporary interpretations of IHL, it will be argued that, in a moral sense, IHL matches up closely with IHRL. Crucial here is that humanity, rather than reflect a utilitarian perspective to avoid harm, is worded in stronger terms. To reflect this accurately, it is argued that IHL is best seen as a reflection of TM Scanlon's contractualism as opposed to utilitarian reasoning. Relying upon the similarities in moral reasoning visible in both bodies of law, the article argues that this should also be reflected when it comes to redress for violations. In a concrete sense, the argument here is that this also presents a moral requirement to recognise individual claims within IHL. To give legal effect to this moral demand, it is suggested that IHRL might play a role in bridging the gap between the moral and legal considerations in IHL.

In 1989, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, in the Anwar Hossain Chowdhury case, first embraced implicit unamendability or interpretative unamendability of the Constitution – that is, the basic structure doctrine. Since then, the basic structure or the basic feature doctrine has been recognised as the theoretical premise underpinning judicial review of constitutional amendments in Bangladesh. In 2011, the Parliament adopted Article 7B of the Constitution, which introduced explicit or codified unamendability of a substantial number of provisions of the Constitution. This article argues that with the adoption of Article 7B, the basic structure doctrine has lost its relevance as the most important normative tool for determining the validity of future constitutional amendments, and this was confirmed in the Asaduzzaman case, in which the parliamentary mechanism for the removal of Supreme Court judges was held unconstitutional on the basis of Article 7B of the Constitution. It is also argued that the reasoning provided in the majority opinion of the Asaduzzaman case is not entirely flawless.

This article aims to show how reform of the law on terrorism not only has the power to create new criminal procedures, it can also create a distinct, parallel field operating alongside general criminal law. This parallel configuration presents certain unique features and processes which merit their own typology – namely, anti-terrorism criminal law (ATCL). First, the article discusses how states have responded to terrorism through reform of four key arenas: military law, immigration law, administrative law and criminal law. Comparison is then drawn between the United States and Israel in their respective approaches, showing that Israel has executed far more sweeping and significant reforms over the last four decades, mainly in criminal procedure. Examples are given to illustrate how Israel's evolving anti-terrorism legislation – and specifically, the new Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016 – changed the criminal procedural landscape to such a degree that it constituted the new field of ATCL. I contend that this move was anti-liberal in its definition and targeting of terror suspects, and in its pursuit of emergency aims and intelligence gathering rather than liberal criminal law objectives. Further, I show that liberal theory struggles to explain the integrated change model that Israel has implemented in its counter-terrorism reforms, and that the theoretical framings of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault may explain it more effectively.