This chapter maintains that the concept of individual responsibility for offences committed in non-international armed conflicts has evolved through an instant customary process, from 1992 until 1998. There is still a question mark as to what is the exact ambit of criminal liability in internal conflicts. The existing distinction between international and internal armed conflicts is not a contemporary creation. The difference lies not in the nature of the actual hostilities themselves but in that people of the same land are naturally friends, their land being sick and torn by faction. Depending on the severity of hostilities, the organisation and level of international legitimacy enjoyed by the dissidents, two stages of civil conflict have traditionally been recognised: insurgency and belligerency. Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions calls into application a set of minimum humanitarian standards with regard to those armed conflicts that are 'not of an international character'.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which the basic war strategies of the two sides affected neutrals, and in the legal innovations and controversies involved. From the Allied side, came the set of techniques sometimes given the broad collective title of 'long-distance blockade'. From the Central powers' side, the outstanding innovation was a new style of preying on enemy commerce at sea: submarine warfare, which was waged by means that departed significantly from those of traditional maritime war. An important resemblance between the Great War and the Napoleonic wars of the previous century was the prominent part played by sovereign right measures, as contrasted with traditional belligerents' rights per se. At the very outset of the War, Germany provided a spectacular demonstration of its readiness to commit serious infringements of the normal rights of neutrals under the rubric of necessity.

Chapter 1 provides a brief history of nuclear weapons and introduces readers to the broad contours and main characteristics of the First and Second Nuclear Ages. It begins by discussing Einstein’s role in developing, and eventually opposing, nuclear weapons, before then outlining significant developments in the First and Second Nuclear Ages by drawing upon the statements of world leaders, policy documents, international treaties, secondary literature, and artefacts of popular culture such as the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strangelove and the TV series 24. Whilst mainly providing an introductory historical overview for readers who may be unacquainted with the history of nuclear weapons, the argument of the first chapter is that the nuclear exterminism that E. P. Thompson warned of in the early 1980s was gradually tempered by the development of arms control agreements and the consolidation of a norm around the non-use of nuclear weapons.`

Neutrality did more than merely survive the creation of the League. It even experienced something of a renaissance in the wake of the most striking failure of the League system: the unsuccessful attempt to stop the Italian conquest of Ethiopia from 1935 to 1936, by imposing economic sanctions against Italy. This humiliating failure led many to conclude that the collective-security apparatus was too weak to rely on in a crisis. There was general agreement too that neutrality was not abolished by the Pact of Paris for the Renunciation of War of 1928. One regional codification effort should be noted: the Pan-American Convention on Maritime Neutrality of 1928. The 'new neutrality' group disagreed with its community-interest rival in not being hostile to the very concept of neutrality per se. Neutral solidarity, in the spirit of the Spanish Civil War, was one of the most striking features of World War II.

The conclusion highlights the significance of everyday humanitarianism in a broader context. People who seek to instigate social change are inevitably challenged to consider their own, limited actions with what they consider as the wider context or causes. I suggest that beyond a reflexive understanding, a scalar approach can provide a blueprint for action. Making and operating within a set of interlinking scales, consciously or not, can offset doubts about lacking significance. It provides a sense of how one’s own actions matter in a wider world, and those of others. Challenging scales and the values associated with them, has wider applicability. People seeking social change consider how their own, limited actions link with wider issues including social injustice, environmentalism, or the climate crisis.

The European Convention on Human Rights, although now just one among many human rights treaties, is certainly the most fully developed and the best observed. By the same token, the institutions created to supervise the Convention, originally the European Commission and Court of Human Rights, and now the new Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, have through their work provided an inspiring model for other human rights systems. It is vital to lay down in advance the rights and freedoms that must be respected in a democratic society and to create institutions to see that they are observed. In December 1966 the two Covenants and the Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights were approved by the General Assembly and ten years later came into force.

Chapter 2 tackles the ‘problem of the singular’ (Ticktin 2015) with which humanitarianism has been diagnosed. While aimed at the entirety of suffering humanity, its efforts, whether carried out by large organisations or lone individuals, can only ever have a partial reach. The situation of everyday humanitarians in Cambodia is no exception. This chapter traces their often acute awareness of the bigger picture, such as the socio-political landscape of Cambodia, and how they feel positioned and act within this. Some arrive at what they are doing after having become disenchanted during careers in large aid organisations. Others have had less linear trajectories, but are ambitious for the future of their projects, such as bringing their activities to a larger group of beneficiaries. For either process, the making of scales is crucial: their insistence that ‘small is beautiful’ provides an ongoing source of inspiration and assurance for some, and their actions become meaningful within this particular scale. For others, their attention remains fixed not on a whole nation but on members of a particular community, such as training a group of single mothers, to help improve their livelihoods. A key practice to sustaining everyday humanitarianism is the adoption of temporal, spatial or numerical scales which express their priorities, manifest in the popular mantra, ‘changing the world, one village at a time’. This does not imply ignorance or neglect of other forces that shape the lives of their beneficiaries, and often affect them adversely, but means articulating their position within this context.

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.