International Law and New Wars
Christine Chinkin, Mary Kaldor
Cambridge University Press
This is a book about how international law related to the regulation of<br>political violence fails to address the contemporary experience of what we<br>call ‘new wars’ – bouts of armed violence in places such as Syria and<br>Ukraine, Mali and Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South<br>Sudan, to name but a few of these zones of hostilities and insecurity at the<br>time of writing. Contemporary international law, largely constructed in<br>the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rests to a great extent on outmoded<br>conceptions of war drawn from the experience of European wars –<br>inter-state clashes involving battles between regular armed forces, which<br>we call ‘old wars’.