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Currently, International Humanitarian Law (IHL) also known as the law of armed conflict, makes the distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts. International armed conflicts are regulated by more treaties than their non-international counterparts. Furthermore, the regulation of international armed conflicts is also considerably more comprehensive than that offered for participants in and victims of non-international armed conflicts. This book asks whether the legal distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts remains viable or whether international law should move to maintain its consonance with the situations it seeks to regulate by developing a unified legal regime applicable in all armed conflicts. There is considerable precedent to support moves towards the elimination of the legal distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts. This book argues that IHL, a law which has, as one of its primary aims, the protection of the person in times of armed conflict, should not distinguish between types of armed conflict, specifically in how the law treats the vulnerable in times of armed conflict – those hors de combat due to illness and injury, and those deprived of their liberty through capture or surrender

Thomas Schelling won the Nobel Prize “for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.” This came after he had taught a game theory and rational choice course for forty-five years at an advanced level. This book presents the concepts Schelling taught as they are useful tools for understanding decisions and consequences. Mathematics often makes game theory challenging but it is presented as something very simple in this book. Along with a summary of the material Schelling presented this book looks at problems from his course and similar less challenging questions. While considerable analysis is carried out with the basic game theory tool—the two-by-two matrix—much of the book is descriptive and rational decision-making is presented through stories and explanation. Chapter supplements are added to illuminate points presented by Schelling and two chapters are case studies for detailed analysis of strategic thinking. The story of professional basketball coach Phil Jackson concerns the conflict between self-interest and group interest of star players in a multi-person form of the prisoner's dilemma. The second study illustrates the most dangerous decision-making moment in history, the Cuban missile crisis. This book is based on Thomas Schelling's course, which has provided guidance and insight to a great number of people around the world in academic and leadership positions.

Boethius wrote Of the Consolation of Philosophy as a prisoner condemned to death for treason, circumstances that are reflected in the themes and concerns of its evocative poetry and dialogue between the prisoner and his mentor, Lady Philosophy. This classic philosophical statement of late antiquity has had an enduring influence on Western thought. It is also the earliest example of what this book identifies as a distinctive and vitally important medium of literary resistance: writing in captivity by prisoners of conscience and persecuted minorities. This book reveals why the great contributors to this tradition of prison writing are among the most crucial figures in Western literature. The book pairs writers from different periods and cultural settings, carefully examining the rhetorical strategies they used in captivity, often under the threat of death. It looks at Boethius and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as philosophers and theologians writing in defense of their ideas, and Thomas More and Antonio Gramsci as politicians in dialogue with established concepts of church and state. Different ideas of grace and disgrace occupied John Bunyan and Oscar Wilde in prison; Madame Roland and Anne Frank wrote themselves into history in various forms of memoir; and Jean Cassou and Irina Ratushinskaya voiced their resistance to totalitarianism through lyric poetry that saved their lives and inspired others. Finally, Primo Levi's writing after his release from Auschwitz recalls and decodes the obscenity of systematic genocide and its aftermath. This book speaks to some of the most profound questions about life, enriching our understanding of what it is to be human.

While the use of imprisonment continues to rise in developed nations, we have little sociological knowledge of the prison's inner world. Based on extensive fieldwork in a medium-security prison in the UK, HMP Wellingborough, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the prison's social anatomy. It explains how power is exercised by the institution, individualizing the prisoner community and demanding particular forms of compliance and engagement. Drawing on prisoners' life stories, it shows how different prisoners experience and respond to the new range of penal practices and frustrations. It then explains how the prisoner society — its norms, hierarchy, and social relationships — is shaped both by these conditions of confinement and by the different backgrounds, values, and identities that prisoners bring into the prison environment.

Applying rational-choice theory to international law and international relations, this book offers a comprehensive theory of the subject, how it operates, and why it works. Taking as a starting point that states comply only when it is in their self‐interest to do so, the book demonstrates that international law nevertheless supports cooperation among states. This book develops a theory of international law to explain how concerns about reciprocal non‐compliance, retaliation, and reputation discourage states from violating their international legal commitments. By building a theory from the ground up, this book is able to address international law in all its forms, including treaties, customary international law, and “soft law.” It explains that contrary to conventional views on the subject, there is no stark difference between these different types of international law. Rather, each represents a position on a spectrum of commitment and is distinguished by the strength of the obligation it imposes. Once the various legal forms are recognized as different in degree rather than kind, other features of the system are easier to understand. The book discusses how the substantive content of an international agreement relates to its form, including whether the agreement provides for dispute resolution, monitoring, exit, escape, and reservations. With respect to customary international law, this book explains how and why such rules of law work, and how existing notions of custom must be adapted to accommodate the rational choice approach.

This is one of the fullest descriptions of the fighting in Hong Kong in 1941 and subsequent imprisonment of Hong Kongers, but in addition it is the view of a mature professional soldier, one who had signed on in 1919 and in his long service had seen much, spending time on the North West Frontier in India. The author of this book was a Quartermaster Sergeant in the Royal Artillery during the battle for Hong Kong in December 1941. His job was to keep the artillery supplied and so he criss-crossed the mainland and Hong Kong Island during the fighting, getting a broader view of what was going on than most participants. Fortunately he kept a diary during those terrible days. At the end of the battle, with his fellow soldiers, he became a prisoner of war, but he continued somehow to maintain his diary. He spent most of the war in the Argyle Street camp and provided the most complete coverage of life there.

This book offers a fresh, rigorous and compelling interpretation of John Rawls's reasons for taking his so-called “political turn”. The book takes Rawls at his word that justice as fairness was recast as a form of political liberalism because of inconsistencies Rawls found in his early treatment of social stability. The book argues that those inconsistencies are best seen by identifying one of the threats to stability with which the early Rawls was concerned: the generalized prisoner's dilemma. Showing how the Rawls of A Theory of Justice tried to avert that threat shows that the much-neglected third part of that book is of considerably greater philosophical interest than is generally appreciated. The book painstakingly reconstructs Rawls's attempts to show that a just society would stable, and just as carefully shows why Rawls came to think those arguments were inconsistent with other parts of his theory. The book then shows that the changes Rawls introduced into his view between Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism result from his attempt to remove the inconsistency and show that the hazard of the generalized prisoner's dilemma can be averted after all. Recovering Rawls's two treatments of stability helps to answer contested questions about the role of the original position and the foundations of justice of fairness.