Course description Spring 2024
Introduction to International Law
The course will contain two main elements. Firstly a presentation of the general aspects of the international legal system, such as - characteristics of the system, - the relevant actors, - sources of international law, - rules of interpretation, and - relationship of international law with national legal systems.
Secondly the course will introduce the most fundamental rules of international law from a basic division into primary, secondary and tertiary rules. Primary rules, which can be found in treaty law as well as international customary law, contain rights and obligations for states. In particular these rules encompass - The prohibition of the use of force - The prohibition of intervention - Self-determination of peoples - Minority protection - Law of the sea and International crimes. Secondary rules on state responsibility describe the legal consequences of breaches of international law. In addition, international law entails individual responsibility for certain acts which can be prosecuted by domestic as well as international courts. Tertiary rules are procedural rules for dispute resolution, typically in the context of international organizations.
Introduction to International Security
This course will provide students with the foundational concepts to understand and analyze the contemporary security environment. While news reports are replete with information on the growth of the Chinese economy, the various endogenous and exogenous challenges to European security, or the development of new military technologies, there is a need to better understand the dynamics underpinning those issues. Therefore, this class will focus on traditional issues in security studies such as power, deterrence, arms control or alliances, and more recent issues such as human security and environmental change. The class will systematically combine conceptual analysis with contemporary empirical examples of the dynamics described, in order for students to develop their analytical skills.
Human Rights in International Law and Securuty
The course is a mixture of law and political science that studies the ideological, philosophical, historical, and practical underpinnings of human rights, together with their contemporary application and development.
The course is designed to be part of a progressive application of skills learned in the first half of the first semester in MOISL, through an application of those acquired international relations and international law skills to legal and policy debates in contemporary human rights.
The first purpose of the course is to provide students with knowledge of the many facets of human rights law, including global conventions, regional conventions, relevant case law, and the analytical tools to understand prevailing international human rights law.
The second purpose is to provide students with the theoretical tools to understand how human rights are constructed and contested within the international system, how they function and interact with other ideational structures, and how major paradigms in international relations understands their purpose and power.
The third purpose is to consider how rights are conceptualized and litigated as a means of preventing conflict, i.e. to regard rights as a counterpoint to questions of security.
New Wars and Conflicts
The course, New Wars and Conflicts, provide the students with a theoretically informed understanding of changes in modern warfare since the end of the Cold War as well as insight into the distinct characteristics of different types of contemporary wars.
New Wars introduces the most important theories and concepts of contemporary warfare and enables the students to place current military conflicts in historical and theoretical context. The course thus also addresses the basic question of whether the nature of war has fundamentally changed during the past two decades.
The Laws of New Wars
For the purposes of this course, the laws of war will be sub-divided into two categories:
Firstly, the rules regulating the use of force against another state (jus ad bellum), including the prohibition of the use or threat of force under the UN Charter, the right to self defence (including pre-emptive strikes), the use of force as authorized by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter (including UN peacekeeping operations with relevant mandates) as well as the use of force in regard to the UN norm “responsibility to protect” and the controversial concept of “humanitarian intervention.” This segment will also look at how international law deals with potential violations of jus ad bellum as crime of aggression and through prosecutions before the International Criminal Court.
Secondly, the norms governing the actual use of force in international and internal armed conflict (jus in bello) and accountability for potential violations of this body of law, notably The Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, the Additional Protocols thereto as well as the UN Genocide Convention and the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court. This includes basic concepts and distinctions such as the notion of armed conflict, the most serious crimes under international law, proportionality, military necessity, asymmetric warfare, combatants and civilians, including prisoners of war and other detainees as well as cyber-attacks and the use of drones. This segment will include a discussion of selected aspects of the relation between the laws of armed conflict and international human rights.
From Theory to Practice - Job Skills and the International Crisis Simulation
This course is designed to allow the students to use the theories and concepts encountered during the first two semesters of the master’s in International Security and Law in a practical, real-life inspired crisis simulation. Aside from providing the students with in-depth knowledge about a flashpoint in international relations, and an opportunity to apply their knowledge to a concrete case, the course also teaches