The concluding chapter summarises the core arguments of the book and reflects on the dawn of the Third Nuclear Age as well as developments since January 2021. The central argument is that the ills of the Third Nuclear Age have not gone away with the departure of Donald Trump. Instead, as Russia brutally invades Ukraine and Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear sabre, as India accidentally launches a nuclear-capable missile into Pakistan, as China builds more nuclear missile silos, and as the UK increases the cap on its nuclear warhead stockpile, many of the issues analysed in this book are here to stay. Despite the renewal of nuclear arms control treaties such as New START, alongside the nuclear weapons states’ reaffirmation of the Reagan–Gorbachev principle that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’, the chapter argues that the Third Nuclear Age is still a time of potentially unparalleled catastrophe. The final section of this chapter explores what can be done to challenge and overcome the exterminism of the new nuclear age, and draws together some of the positive developments made during the period of analysis – such as the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in January 2021 – to suggest where we go from here.

Chapter 7 argues that in addition to kinship, a key driver of humanitarian efforts are affinity ties (Ho 2017). These are commonalities between those offering support and those whom it is aimed at. Recognising such affinities challenges the trope of the ‘white saviour’ (Cole 2012), which reiterates the importance of interventions by those from the Global North, making others invisible. This chapter nuances the ‘white saviour’ narrative and makes visible the wealth of aid relations that derive from affinity ties, based on similarity and shared biographies. Such commonalities can be shared experiences of deprivation while growing up; experiences of abandonment, displacement or bereavement. It surfaces in notions of a pan-‘Asian-ness’, shared by everyday humanitarians from other Asian countries. Even as supporters from the Global North are foregrounded on websites of their aid projects, this often serves the purposes of fundraising, and networking with potential donors. This feeds into a ‘white saviour’ narrative, but obscures the often fundamentally cooperative nature of such initiatives. Everyday humanitarian ventures often rely on close collaborations between Cambodians and foreigners from other parts of Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, and are by no means the prerogative of those from the Global North. The chapter argues that the figure of the ‘white saviour’ needs to not only be critiqued, but the mechanisms through which it is continuously reinvigorated, to be made visible. This recognises the complexity of interactions at stake, and understand who is offering support to whom, how, and with what consequences.

Implementation of the rights was originally monitored by two organs created by the Convention, the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights, and a body which already existed, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. With the entry into force of Protocol No. 11 in November 1998 this situation changed and monitoring is now carried out through quite different arrangements. It would be wrong to conclude this review of the original institutional machinery of the Convention without making the general point that over the forty years or so in which the arrangements were in operation the Convention proved to be the most effective international system for the protection of human rights that has yet been devised. When Protocol No. 11 came into force at the end of 1998 there was a firm foundation on which to build the new institutional structure.

The interaction of law, politics and financial considerations have proved detrimental for staging criminal prosecutions, even to this day, but ultimately have not negated the criminal liability of perpetrators. This chapter explores the various forms of direct participation in humanitarian law offences. These are: planning and conspiracy; ordering others to commit a crime; incitement and dissemination of hate propaganda; and complicity. The chapter describes the concept of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since the adoption of the Genocide Convention, the concept of criminal conspiracies has attracted the attention of the ILC regarding its Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind. Draft Article 2 deals with the individual responsibility of participants in international offences. An order is unlawful when it violates international humanitarian law, regardless of its legitimacy under national law.

This chapter outlines the book’s innovative rendering of grassroots development and humanitarianism through a scalar approach (Carr and Lempert 2016). This addresses the problems of partial reach of all forms of humanitarianism, and documents how everyday practitioners devise a range of size-related and geographical scales that allow them to situate their efforts. It extends this scalar approach to social relations, and demonstrate what kind of relations are made, to what purpose, and how they upend conventional narratives of humanitarian objects. Taken together, they furnish an understanding of how its limited reach, and its partiality constitute not an obstacle, but a condition for humanitarian action.

Chapter 6 argues while geographical distance is not central for driving humanitarianism, neither is the strange distant other. Rather, a vast amount of financial assistance flows along kinship networks. Remittances from migrant workers to their families are well documented. In contrast, overseas aid given through taxpayers or private donors, is not meant to be bound by kinship ties. This would run counter to the aspiration of impartiality that underpins institutionalised humanitarianism. In practice, everyday humanitarians do precisely this: crafting kin relations with the people they support. Indeed, such partial relations are central to their way of operating. This is because kinship, other that friendship, does not demand, or imply equality. For professional aid workers who feel alienated by aid bureaucracy, ‘adopting’ a young person allows them to be embedded locally in a way difficult to achieve otherwise. For everyday humanitarians, both Cambodians and foreigners, making others into kin creates social relations which entail responsibilities. They allow for inequality to be accommodated, while calling for the provision of assistance. This can take the form of sponsoring an adopted son or daughter through school; supporting a Cambodian family that they have become part of; or conceiving a group of children at an after-school club as one’s family. Such humanitarian kinship runs counter to the principle of impartiality. What motivates humanitarian support is the creation of partiality through kinship ties. Being partial provides a rationale for whom to support, solving the problem of resource allocation posed by the limited-ness of their efforts.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, writers on international law began to propound where to seek the general law of neutrality. The result was the emergence of three rival schools of thought purporting to explain the law of neutrality. The three schools are the conflict-of-rights theory, code-of-conduct school, and community-interest school. Several important features of the school of thought should be carefully noted. One is its general stress on rights rather than duties, in practice, rather more on the rights of belligerents than of neutrals. Another fundamental feature of this approach is that neither the neutrals' nor the belligerents' rights are rooted in the law of war per se. Both are derived instead from general principles of international law. Two areas will serve to give a favour of coherent schools' divergent approaches: contraband and blockade.

Article 6, like Article 5, is one of the longest and most important provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. It guarantees the right to a fair trial. In the Golder case in 1975 the Court had to decide a point of fundamental importance relating to the scope of Article 6(1): whether this provision is concerned only with the way legal proceedings are conducted, or whether, in addition, it confers a right of access to the courts. The right guaranteed by Article 6(1) is to a fair and public hearing 'by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law'. Like the provisions of Article 6(3), the presumption of innocence is a specific aspect of the right to a fair trial, and for obvious reasons applies only in criminal cases.