The Concept of Aggression in International Law

1935 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quincy Wright

The press reports characterized the resolution of the Chaco Commission of the League of Nations Assembly as amounting “to condemning Paraguay henceforth as the aggressor in the Chaco War.” This resolution of January 16, 1935, recommended a raising of the arms embargo in behalf of Bolivia, because Bolivia had accepted and Paraguay had rejected the Assembly’s report made on November 24, 1934, under Article 15, paragraphs 4 and 9 of the Covenant.

1930 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 674-693 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunter Miller

The Conference for the Codification of International Law which met at The Hague from March 13 to April 12, 1930, was the first international conference specifically called for that purpose.In 1924 the League of Nations set up a Committee of Experts for the progressive codification of international law. The task of that committee was to select and propose for the first conference on codification a certain number of subjects within the field of international law. Three subjects, namely, Nationality, Territorial Waters and The Responsibility of States for Damage Caused in Their Territory to the Person or Property of Foreigners, were finally agreed on as the subjects to be considered by the first conference.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 847-875 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROTEM GILADI

AbstractThe article explores the demise of the ‘colonial war’ category through the employment of French colonial troops, under the 1918 armistice, to occupy the German Rhineland.It traces the prevalence of – and the anxieties underpinning –antebellumdoctrine on using ‘Barbarous Forces’ in ‘European’ war. It then records the silence ofpostbellumscholars on the ‘horror on the Rhine’ – orchestrated allegations of rape framed in racialized terms of humanity and the requirements of the law of civilized warfare. Among possible explanations for this silence, the article follows recent literature that considers this scandal as the embodiment of crises in masculinity, white domination, and European civilization.These crises, like the scandal itself, expressedantebellumjurisprudential anxieties about the capacity – and implications – of black soldiers being ‘drilled white’. They also deprivedpostbellumlawyers of the vocabulary necessary to address what they signified: breakdown of the laws of war; evident, self-inflicted European barbarity; and the collapse of international law itself, embodied by the VersaillesDiktattreating Germany – as Smuts warned, ‘as we would not treat akaffirnation’ – as a colonial ‘object’, as Schmitt lamented.Last, the article traces the resurgence of ‘colonial war’. It reveals how, at the moment of collapse, in the very instrument embodying it, the category found a new life. Article 22(5) of the League of Nations Covenant (the Covenant) reasserted control over the colonial object, furnishing international lawyers with a new vocabulary to address the employment of colonial troops – yet, now, as part of the ‘law of peace’. Reclassified, both rule and category re-emerged, were codified, and institutionalized imperial governance.


2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-664 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN LEGG

AbstractThis paper will address an often-neglected agenda of the much-derided League of Nations: its ‘social’ and ‘technical’ works. These targeted human security through regulating different forms of international mobility, including the fight against trafficking in women and children. The League used conventions and conferences to commit nation-states, in a legal model, to standardized anti-trafficking measures. It also, however, worked to educate and inform states, voluntary organizations, and the general public about the nature of trafficking and the ways of combating it. The latter techniques are here interpreted using Foucault's governmentality writings, which encourage us to look beyond the juridical epistemologies of international relations and international law, but not beyond the interlacing of laws and norms, here explored through interwar League governmentalities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 636-662
Author(s):  
SUZANNA KRIVULSKAYA

When the Rev. Pierce Connelly denounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism in 1835, he inadvertently started a small newspaper war among the burgeoning religious press in America. While Catholic periodicals celebrated their newest addition in print, Protestant newspapermen were scandalized. They worried about how the clerical husband's conversion might affect his marital life should he pursue ordination in the Catholic Church. Soon, the Connellys dissolved their marriage in Rome and moved to England, where Pierce became a priest, and his wife Cornelia entered a convent. When, thirteen years later, Pierce reconverted and sued Cornelia “for the restoration of conjugal rights” in an English court, the case became an international sensation – with both British and American newspapers covering the developments and using the saga to comment on larger religious and political issues of their time. The two scandals demonstrate how the transatlantic press debated contested global concerns about the limits of religious freedom, the changing nature of marriage, church–state relations, and international law.


2021 ◽  
pp. 141-142
Author(s):  
Martin Wight

In this note Wight describes pendulum swings in opinion about the requirements of justice in war in Western civilization since the Middle Ages. Medieval Catholicism emphasized the righteousness of the ruler’s cause and asserted orthodoxy against infidels or heretics. Prominent writers on international law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Gentili, Grotius, and Vattel) marked a shift toward secularization and rationalism (with both sides usually able to claim justice) and restraint in the laws of war governing the methods of combat. Moser’s study of international law, published in 1777–1780, was representative of an ‘age of positivism’ (1763–1918) in which all sovereign states had a right to resort to war or to remain neutral, while codifying obligations concerning the conduct of war. The Covenant of the League of Nations, signed in 1919, initiated a return to restrictions on the right to resort to war, reinforced by the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, also known as the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, which was upheld by the Nuremberg Tribunals. The Covenant ruled out aggression as unjust, while action in defence of the Covenant would be just by enforcing collective security. The Soviet Union reintroduced Holy War with its view of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and the Cold War as just causes that advanced Communist revolutionary objectives. Counter-force strategies of nuclear deterrence may be regarded as strengthening restraint in the methods of war, compared to counter-value or ‘anti-city’ approaches.


Author(s):  
Dimitar Tyulekov ◽  
Ilko Drenkov ◽  
Jani Nikolla

The League of Nations sets strict professional frameworks that are subordinate to scientific knowledge and international law and respect, without any differences between small and big powers. The first chairman, Eric Drummond, who headed up to 1934, established a huge international prestige of the organization and achieved a number of successes in peace building. The League’s policy in the Balkans is revealed mainly through its relations with Albania and Bulgaria, which both joined the League in December 1920. The two countries rely on the international organization for the peaceful resolution of their political, minority and social problems. Under the supervision of the League of Nations, a number of agreements for voluntary and mutual exchange of people between Greece and Bulgaria are being concluded, which aims to soothe the Macedonian problem in Aegean Macedonia. Under her patronage are the agreements between Greece and Albania regulating the protection of Greek minorities and schools, as well as settling the border dispute between the Serb-Croat-Slovene Kingdom and Albania in 1921. The rapid intervention of the United Nations suspended the Greek aggression on Bulgarian territory in the autumn of 1925 and prevented a possible new war. Dimitar Shalev's petitions from Skopje to the United Nations aim to achieve the Yugoslav state's humane treatment towards Bulgarian minorities within its borders, but political dependencies and overlapping contradictions are an obstacle to peaceful and sustainable political outcomes. In the second half of the 1930s, the League lost its initial prestige, and in the course of the emerging new global conflict it fell into political dependence, marking its collapse. Unresolved issues and contradictions, along with the harsh political post-war realities, quickly bury the League’s noble impetus.


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