The guardians

Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions. By Boyd van Dijk. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 376. Index.

“…12 Although this passage can be read as an implicit recognition that war crimes were committed on a grand scale by Dutch forces, the concluding work of the inquiry was nonetheless severely criticized by various scholars and civil society agents for not explicitly using the label "war crimes." 13 In line with such critiques, Van Dijk has elsewhere argued 14 that formal inquiries should also examine the contributions of colonial states to international lawmaking with particular attention to their efforts to ensure that colonial actions would escape the law's reach. In December 2023, the Dutch government endorsed the main conclusions of the historical study and took full responsibility for Dutch actions during the Indonesian War of Independence.…”