Ten years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011,Rethinking the Law of Armed Conflict in an Age of Terrorism, edited by Christopher Ford and Amichai Cohen, brings together a range of interdisciplinary experts to examine the problematic encounter between international law and challenges presented by conflicts between developed states and nonstate actors, such as international terrorist groups. Through examinations of the counter-terrorist experiences of the United States, Israel, and Colombiacoupled with legal and historical analyses of trends in international humanitarian lawthe authors place post-9/11 practice in the context of the international legal communitys broader struggle over the substantive content of international rules constraining state behavior in irregular wars and explore trends in the development of these rules.
From the beginning of international efforts to rewrite the laws of armed conflict in the 1970s, the legal rules to govern irregular conflicts of the state-on-nonstate variety have been contested terrain. Particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, policymakers, lawyers, and scholars have debated the merits, relevance, and applicability of what are said to be competing war and law enforcement paradigms of legal constraintand even the degree to which international law can be said to apply to counter-terrorist conflicts at all. Ford& Cohens volume puts such debates in historical and analytical context, and offers readers an insight into where the law has been headed in the fraught years since September 2001. The contributors provide the reader with differing perspectives upon these questions, but together their analyses make clear that law-governed restraint remains a cardinal value in counter-terrorist war, even as the law stands revealed as being much more contested and indeterminate than many accounts would have it.Rethinking the Law of Armed Conflict in an Age of Terrorism provides an important conceptual framework through which to view the development of the law as the policy and legal communities move into the second decade of the global war on terrorism.

Editors:
Christopher Ford is senior fellow and Director of the Center for Technology and Global Security at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.
Amichai Cohen is senior lecturer with the Faculty of Law at Ono Academic College in Israel.
Contributors:
Amichai Cohen
Steven David
Christopher Ford
Jeremy Rabkin
Juan Carlos Gómez Ramirez
Elizabeth Samson
Yuval Shany
John H. Shenefield
Ariel Zemach

Introduction- Rethinking Armed Conflict in an Age of Terrorism

by Christopher A. Ford

Chapter One- The Law that Turned Against Its Drafters: Guerrilla-Combatants and the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions

by Ariel Zemach

Chapter Two- The Strange Pretensions of Contemporary Humanitarian Law

by Jeremy Rabkin

Chapter Three- Targeted Killing: The Israeli Experience

by Steven David

Chapter Four- Guarding the Guards in the War on Terrorism

by Yuval Shany

Chapter Five- The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Puzzle: We Know How We Got HereNow, What Do We Do?

by John H. Shenefield

Chapter Six- Terrorism-related Adjudication

by Amichai Cohen

Chapter Seven- Necessity, Proportionality, and the Distinction in Non-Traditional Conflicts: The Unfortunate Case Study of the Goldstone Report

by Elizabeth Samson

Chapter Eight- Confronting Terrorism: Human Rights Law, or the Law of War?

by Juan Carlos Gomez Ramirez

Chapter Nine- Living in the 'New Normal': Modern War, Nonstate Actors, and the Future of Law

by Christopher A. Ford

Chapter Ten- Some Conclusions and Thoughts for the Future

by Amichai Cohen

About the Authors

Index