In this Issue

This issue opens with the first entry under our new, annual rubric, The EJIL Foreword. Taking the ongoing debate concerning the United Nations’ role in the Haitian cholera tragedy as his starting point, Jan Klabbers presents a masterly tour d’horizon of the intellectual origins, current state, and future prospects of the law of international organizations. In the process, he reconstructs – and exposes the blind spots and biases – of a functionalist theory that he identifies as specific to and underlying that law.

In the next article in the issue, Janina Dill presents a novel framework for understanding the different set of demands made on states in war. Identifying ‘three logics of waging war’ – associated respectively with international humanitarian law, military strategy, and an individual rights-based morality – she concludes that the three cannot be reconciled, presenting war-making states with an irresolvable ‘trilemma’. On a related topic, but adopting a very different approach, Amanda Alexander presents a new and revisionist history of international humanitarian law, locating its origins in the work of a particular set of actors from the 1970s onwards. Bart Smit Duijzentkunst and Sophia Dawkins, draw from relational contract theory to construct an innovative model of arbitration in peace processes, and demonstrate the value of that theory and model through a set of carefully presented case studies. And Ulf Linderfalk’s short article on the perennially relevant topic of treaty interpretation adduces a series of well-chosen examples to elucidate the relationship between the aims and means of interpretation.

In Roaming Charges, the ‘Moment of Dignity’ is  a photograph that celebrates the small traditions we risk losing in our fast-moving world. The photographer is Martin Lestra, PhD researcher at the European University Institute. We remind our readers that submissions to Roaming Charges are welcome.

The articles section of this issue is rounded out by the return of two of our regular rubrics, EJIL: Debate! and Critical Review of International Jurisprudence, both addressing topics relating to the European Court of Human Rights. Under the first, we present Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez’s somewhat provocative article on the issue of gender balance within the Court, assessing the politics of the appointment process through a detailed analysis of the self-presentation by the 120 or so women who have applied for positions on the Court. We publish Replies by Françoise Tulkens and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, both of whom have direct, personal experience of that process. Finally, Paolo Lobba surveys the development of the Court’s jurisprudence on Holocaust denial, which he argues has important implications for ‘denialism’ in relation to other core international crimes.
The Last Page, offering nourishment for the soul as well as the mind, presents a poem by Dimitri Van den Meerssche entitled ‘Calling Themis’.