Why have states created international laws to regulate internal armed conflicts? This article is the first to theorize the emergence and design of these international rules, focusing on Common Article 3 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Drawing on original multicountry archival research, I develop the mechanism offorum isolationto explain the origins of Common Article 3, demonstrating the importance of social opprobrium pressure to explain why Britain and France switched from staunch opposition to support and leadership in 1949. Specifically, forum isolation pressured these European empires to concedeandto react strategically behind the scenes, saving face and safeguarding their security interests by deliberately inserting ambiguous language in the text of Common Article 3. This move later facilitated states' avoidance of this rule in many conflict cases.
Despite the common reference to international humanitarian law (IHL) in the discourse and practice of international politics, international relations (IR) scholarship has yet to consistently engage in an analysis of IHL that extends beyond the relatively narrow specifications of its regulative and strategic effects. In this theory note, we argue that this prevailing focus leaves the discipline with an impoverished understanding of IHL and its operation in international politics. We propose that the study of IHL should be expanded through a deeper engagement with the law's historical development, the politics informing its codification and interpretation, and its multiple potential effects beyond compliance. This accomplishes three things. First, it corrects for IR's predominantly ahistorical approach to evaluating both IHL and compliance, revealing the complicated, contested, and productive construction of some of IHL's core legal concepts and rules. Second, our approach illuminates how IR's privileging of civilian targeting requires analytical connection to other rules such as proportionality and military necessity, none of which can be individually assessed and each of which remain open to debate. Third, we provide new resources for analyzing and understanding IHL and its contribution to “world making and world ordering.”
This article analyzes the emergence of new human rights norms for transnational corporations. It first explores voluntary norm-making approaches, which have been a staple of this issue area since the 1970s. Second, it analyzes the formulation and eventual fall of the UN Draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights. A final section reflects on the work of the UN special representative of the secretary-general on business and human rights, John Ruggie, and the future of norm making in this area. It is argued that these three processes constitute differing but fundamental steps toward the construction of international human rights norms for corporations and that, although norm entrepreneurs have clashed in debates over voluntary versus binding standards, norm making in this area remains healthy thanks to a now more solid international awareness regarding the corporate responsibility toward human rights.
The USSR and Socialist states played a crucial and still largely underappreciated role in the re-negotiation of international humanitarian law (IHL) in 1949 and 1977. Drawing on new multi-archival research, I demonstrate that the support of the Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc states was essential to the negotiation of key legal achievements with regard to non-traditional conflict forms and actors, including rules on internal conflicts, national liberation war, and irregular fighters. They exerted influence chiefly through concerted action to create or side with majority coalitions alongside neutral Western or Third World countries, forcing their principal Western foes to accept rules they found undesirable. Yet Soviet-Western interactions in the re-making of IHL were not simply confrontational. In the 1970s, as Cold War hostilities cooled, East and West engaged in partial backdoor cooperativeness, leading to critical features of the Additional Protocols I and II, including rules for the protection of civilians and IHL oversight.
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