Bell: Of Jus Post Bellum and Lex Pacificatoria: What's in a Name?

Christine Bell (Univ. of Edinburgh - Law) has posted Of Jus Post Bellum and Lex Pacificatoria: What's in a Name? (in Ius Post Bellum: Mapping the Normative Foundations, Carsten Stahn, Jennifer S. Easterday, & Jens Iverson eds., pp. 181-206, 2014). Here's the abstract:

Contemporary discussion of the term jus post bellum has emerged through two key disciplines. The first is that of philosophy, where philosophers, mainly North American, have been provoked by the questions raised by US-led military intervention in Iraq, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, to consider how just war theory might apply post international intervention. Here the approach has been to try to locate an articulation of jus post bellum as an obligation of repair and reconstruction that would extend the just war tradition, as typified by the work of Walzer, Orend, and May. The second discipline has been that of international law and engagement with jus post bellum as a legal project that attempts to define and articulate a better international legal regulation of post-conflict landscapes. A holistic approach to this second project has been pursued most notably by Carsten Stahn and the Leiden School, whose stated ambition is to move toward a jus post bellum legal regime that would stand as a third dimension to the current jus ad bello and jus in bellum, so as to regulate the management of post-conflict societies. This legal fashioning of a jus post bellum is conceived as applying across a range of quite different post-conflict contexts: civil wars, other internal conflicts that do not meet the scale of civil war, and the internationalized constitution-making and restructuring processes that have succeeded international military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

This chapter largely leaves aside the first philosophical project to interrogate seriously the second. I aim to contribute to the discussion of whether a new jus post bellum regime operating across different types of conflict is possible and desirable, and if not, how we should best situate and respond to contemporary developments in international law relating to terminating intra-state conflict.