The question of what constitutes an armed conflict has featured prominently in international law debates. However, international lawyers have paid less attention to the inextricable question of who is engaged in a conflict, focusing solely on whether there is an armed conflict. Against this backdrop, Alexander Wentker's Party Status to Armed Conflict in International Law explores why it matters and how it is established that a State, international organization, or armed group is a party to an armed conflict. The first part of the book demonstrates that party status is central at all levels of the international legal regulation of armed conflicts, with parties to armed conflict being both key addressees of international law and central reference points for regulating individuals and third parties. In response to increasingly widespread cooperation practices, the book's second part advances an analytical framework for identifying parties to conflicts with multiple parties on the same side (or 'co-parties'). Party Status to Armed Conflict in International Law is aimed at academics, students, and practitioners seeking to understand how armed conflicts are legally regulated. It presents readers with a refined account of how responsibilities are allocated in armed conflicts, enabling deeper insight into how international law can best respond to the realities of contemporary conflicts.

International Law in the U.S. Legal System provides a wide-ranging overview of how international law intersects with the domestic legal system within the United States, and points out various unresolved issues and areas of controversy. Curtis Bradley covers all of the principal forms of international law: treaties, decisions and orders of international institutions, customary international law, and jus cogens norms. He also explores a number of issues that are implicated by the intersection of U.S. law and international law, such as foreign sovereign immunity, international human rights litigation, war powers, extradition, and extraterritoriality. This book highlights recent decisions and events relating to the topic (including decisions and events arising out of the war on terrorism), while also taking into account relevant historical materials, including materials relating to the U.S. Constitutional founding. Written by one of the most cited international law scholars in the United States, the book is a resource for lawyers, law students, legal scholars, and judges from around the world.

How relevant is the concept of war today? This book examines how notions about war continue to influence how we conceive rights and obligations in national and international law. It also considers the role international law plays in limiting what is forbidden and legitimated in times of war or armed conflict. The book highlights how, even though war has been outlawed and should be finished as an institution, states nevertheless continue to claim that they can wage necessary wars of self-defence, engage in lawful killings in war, imprison law-of-war detainees, and attack objects which are said to be part of a war-sustaining economy. The book includes an overall account of the contemporary laws of war and delves into whether states should be able to continue to claim so-called 'belligerent rights' over their enemies and those accused of breaching expectations of neutrality. A central claim in the book is as follows: while there is general agreement that war has been abolished as a legal institution for settling disputes, the time has come to admit that the belligerent rights that once accompanied states at war are no longer available. The conclusion is that claiming to be in a war or an armed conflict does not grant anyone a licence to kill people, destroy things, and acquire other people's property or territory.

This edited volume uncovers the extent of the contribution of lawyers to international politics over the past three hundred years. It also examines how practitioners of international relations, including politicians, diplomats, and military advisers, have considered their tasks in distinctly legal terms.

Ultimata feature as a core concept in the coercive diplomacy scholarship. Conventional wisdom holds that pursuing an ultimatum strategy is risky. This book shows that the conventional wisdom is wrong on the basis of a new dataset of 87 ultimata issued from 1920–2020. It provides a historical examination of ultimata in Western strategic, political, and legal thought since antiquity until the present, and offers a four-pronged typology that explains their various purposes and effects: 1) the dictate, 2) the conditional war declaration, 3) the bluff, and 4) the brinkmanship ultimatum. The book yields a better understanding of interstate threat behaviour at a time of surging competition. Background materials can be consulted at www.coercivediplomacy.com.