UN System - JIB/JAB-The Laws of War Podcast

In this episode I speak with Monica Hakimi of Columbia Law School and Janina Dill of the University of Oxford about the legal implications of the unlawful US and Israeli war attacks on Iran. We begin by establishing the unlawfulness under jus ad bellum before turning to the larger and more unsettling questions raised by this moment: whether the UN Charter system on the use of force is dying or already dead, and what distinguishes this crisis from prior violations. Janina argues that the preventative self-defense being advanced by the US, if normalized, would be fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law, drawing on the German concept of Rechtsstaatlichkeit to show why a system in which states use force based on unilateral threat assessments is not a legal order but a regime of self-help. Monica situates the crisis within longer structural trends — the slow transfer of decision-making authority away from the Security Council and toward individual states acting unilaterally, the erosion of US commitment to the system that long predates the Trump administration, and the failure of states collectively to rally behind the Charter when it mattered. From there, we explore what states, as well as international lawyers and legal scholars should be doing in a moment when unlawfulness has given way to open lawlessness and complete disregard for the law. A rich and urgently important conversation.

Materials:

– Janina Dill, “The Illegality of the US Attacks Against Venezuela is Beyond Debate – How the World Reacts is Critical,” University of Oxford Expert Comment, Jan. 7, 2026.

– Monica Hakimi, “The End of the U.S.-Backed International Order and the Future of International Law,” 119 American Journal of International Law, 279 (2025) (with Jacob Katz Cogan).

Reading Recommendations:

Monica Hakimi:

– Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (2012).

– Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (2010).

– American Journal of International Law, Vol. 120, Special Issue 1: “The Past and Future of International Law” (January 2026).

Janina Dill:

– The international law blogosphere: Just Security, EJIL:Talk!, Opinio Juris, Articles of War.

– Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” (2016).

– Annette Stimmer, The Politics of International Norms (2025).

Craig Martin:

– Philippe Sands, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy (2022).

In this episode, I speak with Tom Ruys, Professor at the Faculty of Law, Ghent University, Belgium. We discuss a debate he recently sparked with a blog post on the question of whether states my invoke the right of self-defense to justify the use of force to recover previously occupied territory, looking specifically through the lens of the recent seizure of territory in Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan in a short sharp armed conflict with Armenia. Tom and his co-author, Filipe Rodriguez Silvestre, argue that the initial occupation (in the 1988-94 conflict in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh) cannot be characterized as a continuing armed attack, and that self-defense cannot justify the use of force to recover the territory. In a responding blog post, Dapo Akande and Antonios Tzanakopoulos of Oxford argue that such a use of force can indeed be an act of self-defense, and that Azerbaijan’s actions are in fact so justified — and so we explore the competing arguments. To start things off, however, we do discuss Tom’s seminal book, ‘Armed Attack’ and Article 51 of the UN Charter, both to lay the foundation for discussing self-defense in Nagorno-Karabakh, and to explore whether any of his positions have evolved since publication of the book ten years ago. Finally, we discuss briefly his recent work on economic sanctions, and the relationship between sanctions and the collective security regime. Not to be missed!