In this innovative, inter-disciplinary and imaginative study, Sam Selvadurai asks how much the prior strategic and ethical views of international lawyers, as well as their general approach to law, influence their views on the use of force. He offers suggestions drawn from risk management and strategic assessment to help them to navigate their way through hard cases.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King’s College London
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The War Crimes Research Group invites you to a book talk with Dr Sam Selvadurai.
Speaker: Dr Sam Selvadurai, Deputy Director Strategy and Head of the Policy Unit FCDO, and Visiting Research Fellow, King’s College London
Chair: Dr Natasha Kuhrt, Senior Lecturer in International Peace & Security, Department of War Studies, King's College London
Discussant: Professor Guglielmo Verdirame, Professor of Public International Law, King’s College London and Twenty Essex
Lawyers often rely on contestable ethical and strategic intuitions when dealing with legal and factual uncertainties in 'hard cases' of resort to force. This area of international law relies on multiple tests which can be interpreted in different ways, do not yield binary 'yes/no' answers, and together define 'paradigms' of lawful and unlawful force. Lawyers have to assess complex, incomplete factual evidence, and to forecast the immediate and long-term consequences of using armed force. Legal rules cannot resolve the uncertainties involved. Law cannot be separated from politics in international affairs, and ‘black letter’ law is impossible in matters of war and peace.
Strategy and the legitimacy of international law are deeply intertwined in a hazy twilight of interpretative and factual uncertainty. This is shown in Dr Sam Selvadurai's brilliant interdisciplinary analysis that draws on legal risk management, strategic intelligence assessment and political forecasting to argue that lawyers’ contrasting interpretations on the use of force are politically, ethically and culturally embedded.
At this event
Senior Visiting Research Fellow
Senior Lecturer in International Peace & Security
Professor of International Law
Event details
The Dockrill Meeting Room (K6.07)Strand Building
Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS