The law of armed conflict has its origins in both customary and conventional law. Though the object of an armed conflict is to achieve victory over the adverse party with the least possible expenditure of men, resources and money, principles of humanity remain relevant. In conducting hostilities the opposing forces should be guided by three basic principles: necessity, humanity and chivalry. Perhaps the most significant international agreement relating to a specific weapon is the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol. Without specifying any particular weapon, in 1976 a Convention was adopted on the Prohibition of Military or any other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. It is forbidden to use starvation as a weapon against the civilian population, but it is lawful to take steps necessary to deprive the adverse party of his food supplies.

By the Middle Ages the power of the Church was such that it was able to forbid Christian knights from using certain weapons as hateful to God. In fact, the feudal knights were aware of what they knew as 'the law of chivalry'. The 'law of chivalry' was a customary code of chivalrous conduct that controlled the knight's affairs, which was enforced by arbitrators specially appointed or, in England and France, by Courts of Chivalry. Contrary to the Geneva Law is the law concerning means and methods of conducting actual military operations in armed conflict. This is known as Hague Law, although it had its origin in a conference of fifteen European states called in Brussels at the invitation of Czar Alexander II of Russia. Another instrument that seems to have been applied as expressing accepted law, even though it never received a single ratification, is the Declaration of London.

In 2014 Toronto, the first Canadian sanctuary city, reaffirmed its commitment to improving undocumented migrants’ access to programmes and services from city-funded agencies. However, research shows that official policy has not been consistently realised in practice. Service providers experience difficulties such as unfamiliarity with the needs of undocumented migrants and lack of formal organisational policy. Moreover, confusion still exists as to the nature of and extent to which municipal programmes cohere with federal/provincial law. Consequently, fear of arrest, detention, and removal from Canada still result in the marginalisation of undocumented migrants, and susceptibility to exploitation and abuse. This chapter provides a critical analysis of the operation of sanctuary city policy in the Greater Toronto Area. Using the theoretical framework of ‘local governance’, this chapter offers a reflection on the importance of the municipal context in crafting policy responses to the legal, economic, and social marginalisation of undocumented migrants. The chapter maps the nature and extent to which formal policy effectively protects the human rights of undocumented migrants. Drawing on research conducted from 2015 to 2016, the chapter explores the insights and perspectives of city officials, civil society organisations, and practitioners in the Greater Toronto Area.

The purpose of oratory had long been understood as moving the passions, a capacity that held special relevance for the culture of sensibility, which placed sympathy at the heart of communication. This chapter explores how lawyers used speech-making to make sympathetic engagements within the courtroom and to persuade listeners to their truth. Speech-making is a bodily practice and this chapter explores how lawyers’ bodies, voices and oratory skill became implicated in the making of manly character and so truth. As truth was produced through sympathetic exchange, emotion was placed at the heart of the legal system. Through the press, the model for manliness presented by lawyers was given public airing, making a claim to Irishness rooted in a polite education, the ability to speak well and to judge with sensibility.

This chapter introduces the main focus of the book, and discusses a range of current work exploring debates on migration, citizenship, and rights focused on sub-national spatial scales, including the urban, the neighbourhood, and the spaces of everyday life. The introduction thus examines some of the ways in which migration is experienced, politicised, and policed when framed as a concern for cities, communities, and everyday life, rather than purely for the policies, rhetoric, and imaginaries of the nation-state. The chapter works through three key bodies of work to explore this rescaling process and to set the framework for the rest of the collection: first, the increasing devolution of mechanisms of security and border enforcement to local levels, and to cities in particular, suggesting a growing governance of migration at the urban level; second, the growth of sanctuary movements across the Global North, from social movements and campaigns to the legal establishment of sanctuary cities; and third, the connections between cities and forms of irregular migrant activism that seek to contest the boundaries and nature of citizenship. In exploring these areas of recent debate, the introduction establishes the context for the collection’s two main parts – sanctuary cities and urban struggles.

This chapter introduces the study of the law of armed conflict by considering the nature and legality of war. The treatment of Napoleon served as a precedent for the policy adopted by the principal Allied and Associated Powers at the end of World War I when considering the treatment to be accorded to those responsible as authors of that war. A more definite attempt to render the war illegal is to be found in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The United States was not a member of the League, but by virtue of being among the victors in 1918 was an important power whose views could not be ignored. In 1946 the General Assembly at its first session adopted a resolution affirming 'the principles of international law recognised by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal'.

The concept of war crimes, with trial and condemnation of those committing them, is not new. From the time of the 'classical' fathers until the end of the nineteenth century there is little to comment upon with regard to the law concerned with war crimes. This was until the promulgation of the Lieber Code in 1863 by US President Abraham Lincoln. While international law permits national tribunals to try war criminals, these tribunals are established under national law according to the jurisdictional limits and procedure established by that law, although the definition of war crimes is usually that prescribed by international law. Many of the crimes described in the London Charter as war crimes or crimes against humanity are synonymous with those named as grave breaches in the Geneva Conventions and Protocol I.

During World War II, because of the intensive bombing attacks experienced by the civilian population, some, like the United Kingdom, set up trained units to work in the field of civil defence, assisting those injured or rendered homeless because of air raids. Civilian civil defence personnel may carry light individual weapons for their own protection or to preserve order, but not weapons like fragmentation grenades or those intended for non-human targets. Military personnel assigned to civil defence duties may perform the duties only within their own national territory and must not commit any act outside those duties which might be inimical to the adverse party. If the parties to the conflict are not parties to the Protocol they are not bound by any treaty regulations concerning the activities or rights pertaining to civil defence.

The relations between a belligerent government and the adverse party's nationals are regulated partly by international and partly by national law. Civilians in the adverse party's territory are treated broadly speaking in accordance with the provisions of the national law, and while their freedom of movement may be restricted their treatment overall must be in accordance with Geneva Convention IV. If the capitulation relates to the surrender of an inhabited place, it may contain stipulations concerning the treatment of the civilian population. Conditions in a capitulation should relate only to the immediate purpose of effecting the surrender and not contain terms which would forbid the surrendered personnel from carrying arms in the future, for that is a political and not a military issue. Passports may be granted by a commander on his own authority or in accordance with his own military law.

Verbal dexterity was particularly useful within a legal system where the cross-examination was a key mechanism for accessing truth. This chapter explores the cross-examination as a vehicle for truth and a technique for negotiating legal and social power relationships. This chapter begins with an exploration of how Irish-language speakers and Irish-English speakers with a ‘strong brogue’ were represented in the press, highlighting the tensions that multilingual Ireland caused for a truth formed through wordplay. It then explores banter and joke-telling as a key strategy during cross-examination, before looking at the limits of the possibilities of humour, particularly for elite men who conformed to codes of honourable manliness. Through providing an opportunity for men from different ranks to challenge lawyerly manliness, the cross-examination became a space to assert Irishness as an identity, one that was legitimate, manly and rooted in the way of life of the lower orders.

This chapter explores the role of storytelling in the courtroom by ordinary people. It explores how men and women used wider popular culture, including their own rhyming culture, in producing legal narratives, asking what their choices say about identity construction. It then looks at storytelling as a tool for lower-order men to negotiate power relationships. It argues that the opportunity for storytelling provided a key moment where lower-order people could assert identity in the courtroom, reshaping courtroom power dynamics to take account of their needs and interpretations of the world. In doing so, lower-order Irish people produced hybrid identities, which complicated any simple story of what it meant to be Irish.

This chapter sketches out the contours of the logic of counterterrorism and argues that it is informed by a rationalist framework, or ‘the logic of expected consequences’, which reproduces the classical view of sciences. This chapter then shows that this logic transforms cognitive radicalised subjects into behavioural terrorists and creates distance and remoteness between securitisers and securitised subjects. To demonstrate this argument, the idea of remote securitisation is first unpacked, showing how it is achieved through the use of metaphors, euphemisation and the logic of consequences. Finally, the chapter introduces two vantage points to address the problems created by remoteness, one well established and the other more radical, from which the classical view collapses: Pierre Bourdieu’s social and relational ontology and the idea of a Quantum Human.