Prof Nehal Bhuta to discuss "Dangerous proportions: Means and Ends in Non-Finite War" with Oxford PIL Discussion Group
Mon 8 February 2021
Prof Nehal Bhuta of Edinburgh Law School and Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi of the T.M.C. Asser Instituut will give a discussion on "Dangerous proportions: Means and Ends in Non-Finite War" hosted by the Oxford Public International Law Discussion Group.
The event will take place virtually on Tuesday 9 February 2021 from 12:45.
Professor Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at Edinburgh Law School and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He will speak alongside Dr Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Asser Institute (University of Amsterdam), and Teaching fellow at SciencesPo Paris and the Managing Editor of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law.
There will be time after their presentation for questions and discussion. The meeting should conclude by 14:00.
About the seminar
Philip Alston’s deep worries about the institutionalization of the tactic of targeting killing, the ensuing extension of warfare and its corrosive consequences for any meaningful possibility of scrutinizing the legality of such strikes, proved far-sighted. The chapter focuses on the accompanying re-articulation of the right of self-defense by states active in the war on terror and demonstrate that it has fashioned a set of interconnected legal propositions that we call “revisionist.” This revisionist framework, we show, cumulatively engenders a highly permissive framework for the preventive, extraterritorial, use of lethal force against individuals and non-state groups, with a geographically and temporally expansive scope. We do not argue that this permissive version of self-defence is now lex lata or even de lege ferenda. We also distinguish ourselves from the view that the revisionist framework departs from “the ‘old days’ when the law was allegedly certain” – that is, when the law required a high threshold of effective control by the territorial state over the non-state armed group. Instead, building on Robert Brandom’s Hegelian account of the determinateness of legal concepts, we frame the revisionist framework as a historically-embedded process of determination of the new content of the concept of self-defense. The chapter shows that these conceptual revisions bring with them a reconfiguration of the structure of legal relationships presupposed by the jus ad bellum’s concept of proportionality, and a new (in)determinacy which renders the concept more permissive than constraining.
RSVP for this event before noon on Monday 8 February.