Dr Ziv Bohrer - Transnational conflicts: A new kind of war?

What body of international law is applicable to transnational conflicts: peacetime-general international law, Law of International Armed conflicts, law applicable to non-international armed conflicts, or a new law altogether? The ‘Goofiness’ of transnational conflicts is commonly attributed to their novelty. Yet, nearly two decades have already passed since the debate over their classification of conflicts began, and an accepted resolution is still lacking. This classification dispute is not alone. Since the early 2000s, international lawyers have been perpetually debating several conflict classifications. Some of the classification debates have already emerged before the ‘rise’ of transnational conflicts, but all have intensified since then. Given the correlation between the intensification of these debates and the rise of these conflicts, transnational conflicts are assumed to be a primary cause for the present classification crisis; they are deemed a new kind of war that is eroding the core distinctions upon which IHL has long been premised. In his topical talk Dr Bohrer will question that widely accepted assumption and argue that it simply incorrect to assume that such conflicts are novel or their regulation is or requires to be novel.