Naz K. Modirzadeh is a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School and the founding Director of the HLS Program on International Law and Armed Conflict. She writes and teaches primarily in the field of public international law, with a focus on non-use of force, armed conflict, the U.N. Security Council, and counterterrorism issues. Modirzadeh is on the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Lieber Institute for Law and Warfare at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
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The Security Council’s latest resolution is a watershed development for humanitarian assistance, spurred by years of research and advocacy, and will need to be monitored closely going forward to assess its practical impact.
Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict has released a new briefing on an emerging debate: Can and should a U.N. counterterrorism body authoritatively interpret and assess compliance with international humanitarian law?
Editor's Note: This piece is crossposted on Lawfare and EJIL:Talk!
States frequently take actions and make statements that implicate international law. But because they do not—and, indeed, could not—express a view on each such act or statement by all other states at all times, silence seems to be the norm, rather than the exception, in international relations.
Ryan Goodman recently wrote a post in Just Security titled “Why the Laws of War Apply to Drone Strikes Outside ‘Areas of Active Hostilities’ (A Memo to the Human Rights Community).” Its main point is that to be taken seriously, human rights organizations and activists should stop characterizing military attacks in territories outside areas of active hostilities as unlawful and, instead, should focus on interpretations and implementation of the law of armed co
In April 2017, the Pentagon created an “Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team,” pending a transfer of $70 million from Congress. The premise of this initiative is that maintaining a qualitative edge in war will increasingly require harnessing algorithmic systems that underpin artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
We just entered the second year of a purported “era of persistent conflict” forecasted to extend to 2028. In that context, does it really matter if we can tell that a particular war has definitively concluded? Who gets to decide, and who should decide, how to calibrate a legal test to authoritatively determine the end of armed conflict?
The Defense Science Board recently identified five “stretch problems”—goals that are “hard-but-not-too-hard” and that have a purpose of accelerating the process of bringing a new autonomous capability into widespread application: