The Use of Force in International Law: A Case-based Approach

The international law on the use of force is one of the oldest branches of international law. It is an area twinned with the emergence of international law as a concept in itself, and which sees law and politics collide.
The number of armed conflicts is equal only to the number of methodological approaches used to describe them.

Many violent encounters are well known. The Kosovo Crisis in 1999 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 spring easily to the minds of most scholars and academics, and gain extensive coverage in this text. Other conflicts, including the Belgian operation in Stanleyville, and the Ethiopian Intervention in Somalia, are often overlooked to our peril. Ruys and Corten's expert-written text compares over sixty different instances of the use of cross border force since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, from all out warfare to hostile encounters between individual units, targeted killings, and hostage rescue operations, to ask a complex question. How much authority does the power of precedent really have in the law of the use of force?

Tom Ruys, Professor of Law, University of Ghent, Olivier Corten, Professor of Law, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Alexandra Hofer, Doctoral Researcher, University of Ghent

Olivier Corten teaches public international law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and is co-director of the Revue Belge de Droit International. He is the author or co-author of ten books and of more than one hundred and fifty articles.

Tom Ruys studied Law and International Relations at the Universities of Ghent, Nottingham, and Leuven. He joined the faculty of law at the University of Ghent as a tenure-track professor within the department of public international law. Tom Ruys is the author of several publications and has been awarded the Lieber Prize by the American Society of International Law. He is a member of the International Law Association's Committee on the Use of Force, Co-Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of the Use of Force and International Law, and a member of the editorial board of the Revue Belge de Droit International.


Assistant editor Alexandra Hofer is a Doctoral Researcher in the Faculty of Law, in the Department of European, Public and International Law at the University of Ghent.