With the devastating news from Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan among other wars, we witness a crisis of the international regime for protecting civilians in armed conflict. However, this is not a total collapse but a return to the troubling world that the legal protections for civilians in the 1949 Geneva Conventions were made for.
Category: Law and Ethics
Civil Society Participation in International Criminal Justice
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is in trouble. To commentators and observers of the Court, one crisis seems to lead on to the next, so that the field of international criminal justice has been described as being in ‘perpetual crisis’.
The Ambivalent Juridification of Humanitarian Space
While humanitarians remain sceptical of legal regulation, litigation, and lawyers, the sector is going through a process of juridification. This blog post takes stock of the ambivalence to law and emergent shifts in the sector and calls for international law scholars to pay more attention. ‘We have a toxic relationship with the law’ the aid… Read more »
Ethical Dilemmas in Humanitarian Negotiations
This blog provides reflections from both humanitarian practitioners and researchers on the ethical dilemmas associated with humanitarian negotiations and how humanitarian organisations respond to them. The blog post includes the following contributions: Ethical dilemmas in humanitarian negotiations, by Kristoffer Lidén and Kristina Roepstorff Challenges to neutrality and impartiality, and their value, by Jérôme Grimaud No… Read more »
Reflections on Humanitarian Negotiation
This blog provides reflections on the study and practice of humanitarian negotiation, delving into ethical considerations such as power, representation, compromise, competition and tacit aspects of negotiation. People have probably always held humanitarian negotiations in human history as they have asked and argued for the right to help people in war, disaster and epidemics. In… Read more »
Oppenheimer, Ukraine and Cluster Bombs
In desperate situations, it is essential that ethics are not sacrificed, as happened in practice in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the cinema, currently we can follow the United States’ development of the atom bomb, headed by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the same time, Nazi Germany was in the process of developing… Read more »
Hallucinations and Existential Threats — Yet More Power to AI
Every so often, we observe debates around the threats of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Not least from fictional movies and some skeptics. But this debate around promises and perils of AI has, as of late, taken a pivotal turn — with the emergence of AI chatbots such as Chat GPT or Google’s Bard. The model underpinning… Read more »
50 Years Hence: Can the Apollo Missions Inspire Us Today?
Last week, 50 years ago, Apollo 17’s lunar module left the moon. Since then, no one has set foot there. Let us pause for a moment to think about the signficance of that rather unique adventure called Apollo. The Apollo program defies belief. At a time when much of modern technology – not least computer… Read more »
When Are Economic Sanctions Morally Justified?
In spite of widespread support for the sanctions against Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, international economic sanctions remain a controversial instrument in world politics. In this blog post, we discuss how the ethical criteria of just cause, proportionality, last resort and reasonable chance of success can help us think about the justice of sanctions.
The US Declares Chip-War on China
The United States recently announced a new set of restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductors, chip-making equipment, and supercomputer components to China. The interim final rule further escalates the geopolitical dispute between the US and China and raises concerns about the increasing fragmentation of the digital domain.