About the author(s):
Boyd van Dijk is a Senior Researcher at Sciences Po, Paris, and a former fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Melbourne Law School. He is the author of the award-winning Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (OUP), and is currently completing a new monograph (also with OUP) on the usages of international law in armed conflict in the Global South after 1949.
Boyd van Dijk (Sciences Po) has recently published “Norm Making from the Margins: Armed Groups, the Algerian War, and South-South Legal Politics” in International Organization. The article is available in open access.
In the article, he asks where the model of the IHL-invoking armed group has come from. Focusing on the Front de Libération Nationale’s legal activism during the Algerian War (1954-62), he suggests that Algerian revolutionaries acted as norm entrepreneurs rather than norm takers, contesting IHL’s scope and applicability while developing new institutional practices of insurgent normativity: ICRC detention visits to armed groups, POW release ceremonies, anti-colonial lawyering in French courts, and the GPRA’s unilateral accession to the Geneva Conventions at Bern in 1960. These normative practices then circulated globally. Other armed groups – from the Mozambican FRELIMO, Palestinian PLO, Vietnamese insurgents, to the ANC in South Africa – developed what the FLN had first systemtically developed, continuing its challenge beyond scope alone toward substantively contesting IHL’s foundations from the perspective of asymmetrical warfare. The article draws on Algerian, Mozambican, Namibian, South African, and state-socialist archival materials absent from existing scholarship.
The article can be read here.