Book symposium

“Rebel Courts” Book Symposium – Rebel Courts: A Tour de Force

Professor René Provost’s new book Rebel Courts: The Administration of Justice by Armed Insurgents is a must read for anyone dealing with or interested in the topic addressed and with non-State armed groups (NSAGs) more broadly. Its focus on a little-explored facet of rebel governance is primarily normative and conceptual, but is underpinned by a fascinating review …

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“Rebel Courts” Book Symposium – Rebel Justice Can Be Music to My Ears

Recently, I was asked by a prominent activist for the rights of indigenous peoples whether international law prohibited the taking up of arms when all other measures had failed. Her eyes lit up when I pointed to the third recital in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Whereas it is essential, if man is not …

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“Rebel Courts” Book Symposium – The Prosecution of Conflict-related Offences by Courts of Armed Groups

René Provost’s latest book, Rebel Courts, addresses the numerous legal issues surrounding courts established by non-state armed groups in armed conflict. Combining a legal pluralistic methodology with field work and case studies, Provost’s analysis of rebel courts ranges from the legality of their establishment, to the applicable law and due process guarantees, to the recognition of …

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“Rebel Courts” Book Symposium – The Paradoxical Recognition of Rebel Rule

Are the courts administered by rebel groups, the people who participate in them, and the decisions made in them, recognizable by other legal venues, such as states or international courts, whose legitimacy is rarely questioned? René Provost takes up these questions in the fourth part of his book, Rebel Courts: The Administration of Justice by Armed …

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“Rebel Courts” Book Symposium – Discipline and Order

Timbuktu is a 2014 Franco-Mauritanian film set in the iconic Malian city. This is a repressed Timbuktu, however, a space occupied by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA). The NMLA fought the Malian government in the north of the country. This jihadist movement, linked to Al Qaeda, imposed through its Ansar Dine (a …

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Book Launch – Detention and Confinement in Armed Conflict

On May 31st, at 20:00 (CET) /2pm (EDT) ALMA is holding a virtual book launch on two important new books on Detention and Confinement in Armed Conflict. The two books are (i) “Detention by Non-State Armed Groups under International Law” by Ezequiel Heffes (one of our co-editors and Senior Policy and Legal Advisor at Geneva …

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Book symposium “Rebel Courts: The Administration of Justice by Armed Groups”: Introduction

A facet of the current war in Ukraine that has attracted less attention, understandably so in the circumstances, concerns transitional justice in Donetsk and Luhansk if Ukraine is able to fully repel Russian forces and regain control of all its national territory. Both Donetsk and Luhansk are self-proclaimed ‘people’s republics’ that have had de facto …

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“Negotiating Survival” Book Symposium – Author Response to Contributors

I am incredibly grateful for all of the thoughtful contributions to this symposium, and read them with genuine excitement. The research for the Negotiating Survival and the writing process took many twists and turns. Initially, the focus wasn’t even civilian life under the Taliban. I intended to investigate the Taliban itself, and specifically how ideology …

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“Negotiating Survival” Book Symposium –Glancing at the Taliban Organisation

Negotiating Survival is an outstanding piece of scholarship. The book is the latest addition to a (relatively) recent, fieldwork-intensive, wave of civil war research that is interested in how rebels rule areas under their control (see, for instance, Mampilly 2011, Arjona et al. 2015, Stuart 2021). More specifically, the work fits within a particular strand of this rebel governance literature …

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“Negotiating Survival”: Book Symposium – The Normative Dimension of Rebel Governance in Afghanistan

Ashley Jackson’s book, Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan, is an important contribution to the way we understand armed insurgency. It challenges a vision of the absolute centrality of kinetic violence in insurgency to draw attention to the significance of more subtle power dynamics between rebels and the civilian population. In its approach, in its focus, and …

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