Trial lecture - time and place
December 14th at 09:15am-11:00am in Gamle festsal, 1st floor Urbygningen
Adjudication committee
- Professor Bård Anders Andreassen, University of Oslo
- Dr. Achim Wennmann, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland
- Dr. Olga Martin-Ortega, University of Greenwich
Chair of defence
Head of Department Trygve Bergsåker
Summary
Does international law regulate the economic activities that sustain war?
States have long guarded against international interference in their war economies. But today there is an increasing tendency to impose rules on the economic activity connected to war. Acting collectively or on their own, states have sought to sharpen the focus of multilateral sanctions, strangle terrorist finances, constrain the flows of small arms and light weapons, and exclude minerals mined in war zones from the supply chains of global commerce. A steady trickle of litigation has seen courts of different jurisdictions prosecute pillage and slavery in war and pursue business people and companies for committing or enabling crimes in situations of armed conflict.
The thesis examines how international law regulates the economies that help sustain today’s wars. The thesis focuses on the international legal norms that have arisen to regulate phenomena that arise at the nexus of commerce and conflict. Drawing on advances in our understanding of the social and economic dynamics in situations of irregular warfare, the thesis discusses developments in international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international human rights law and the law of international peace and security.
The thesis maps the global regulatory system that has arisen to respond to the nexus of commerce and conflict and resolves a principal uncertainty for international lawyers, namely the nature of the problem to be regulated and the normative content of the applicable rules of international law.