INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND CONTEMPORARY ARMED CONFLICTS: ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF INTERNATIONAL LEGAL RESPONSES

Abstract

The international legal order built after 1945 rested on two connected premises: that the use of force between states would be prohibited and centrally policed through the United Nations Security Council, and that the conduct of any fighting that nonetheless occurred would be restrained by a settled body of humanitarian law. Eight decades on, both premises are under sustained strain. Non-international armed conflicts, from the Lake Chad Basin to Syria, now vastly outnumber traditional interstate wars, hybrid and proxy warfare blur the line between the two, and a permanent member of the Security Council has itself become a party to a major war of aggression. This article assesses the effectiveness of the international legal responses available to these realities using doctrinal research methodology: the jus ad bellum framework governing recourse to force, the jus in bello framework governing the conduct of hostilities, the judicial and quasi-judicial institutions, the International Court of Justice, the ad hoc tribunals and the International Criminal Court, built to enforce them, and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine developed to address the gap between the two. Using the Boko Haram insurgency in North East Nigeria, the Syrian civil war and the war in Ukraine as recurring illustrations, the article argues that international law has proven considerably more effective at classifying and condemning violations than at preventing or punishing them, and that this gap between normative clarity and practical enforcement, rather than any deficiency in the underlying legal rules, is the central challenge facing international security law today.