Use of Force

On July 26th, a military junta overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum. International condemnation followed culminating in the ECOWAS order, on August 10th, to deploy “its standby force to restore constitutional order in Niger”. In an excellent article published on West Point Lieber Institute, Professors Russell Buchan and Nicholas…

‘The nomos of the earth’ is changing again as US-China relations are spiralling downwards rapidly. The increasingly likely scenario of a hot war between China and the US appears to be on everyone’s mind. Here Taiwan finds itself everywhere in the conversations of various international fora (here, here, and…

On 22 May 2023, two Russian paramilitary groups – the Liberty of Russia Legion (LSR) and the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) – conducted a cross-border raid from Ukrainian territory into the Belgorod region of Russia. After briefly ‘liberating’ some border villages, the fighters were forced to retreat on to Ukrainian territory again. This was not the first such…

One of the distinctive features of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict is the massive provision of belligerent materials (and intelligence, here and here) to Ukraine (here): around 30 States have provided lethal war materials, including the EU through its European Peace Facility; other countries have only provided non-lethal materials.