Charli Carpenter

Mladic, OBL and International Justice

by Charli Carpenter | 26 May, 2011 |

It's hard to overstate the significance of Ratko Mladic's arrest last night. Moreso that Slobodon Milsoevic, Serbia's president during the 1991-1995 war of ex-Yugoslavia, and moreso that Radovan Karadzic the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the war, Mladic is reviled by Bosnian survivors of the conflict as the former leader of the Bosnian Serb Army. Though best known for his his calculated role in the war's most infamous massacre of over 7,000 noncombatants at Srebrenica - along with the subsequent massacre at Zepa, this was his crowning achievement after several years of war...

Cutting Edge Research on Popular Views of War Law

by Charli Carpenter | 24 May, 2011 |

My Rules of War class this past Spring was an Honors version of the course, and to challenge my students I asked them to do original research on popular conceptions of international humanitarian law, an issue the International Committee of the Red Cross takes quite seriously. The assignment was to identify a concept in the rules of war, gain a firm understanding of the law, then identify a set of data on how people see those rules, and use content analytic or discourse analytic coding methods to study how far apart the representations of the law in text are from the rules as understood or...

Harold Koh at Opinio Juris: “Killing OBL was Legal.”

by Charli Carpenter | 20 May, 2011 |

Like Robert Haddick, though for different reasons, I was glad to see a State Department spokesperson publicly issue the legal justification for the manner in which the OBL raid was carried out.* Also as a blogger, I was delighted to see the explanation take the form of a much-trumpeted guest post at Opinio Juris. Slightly disappointed, however, at the content of the post, posted earlier today. To begin with, Harold Koh focuses solely on jus in bello concerns, although important legal questions were about whether it was legal to conduct the raid on Pakistani soil. I can imagine a number of...

Why Isn’t Access to Pain Medicine a Global Public Health Priority?

by Charli Carpenter | 19 May, 2011 |

The more I think about it, the more atrocious it is that a three year old burn victim in Pakistan or Libya cannot automatically access morphine. Imagine being such a child's parent, watching her suffer without pain relief. Imagine being a “collateral damage” victim undergoing surgery for shrapnel removal without anesthetic. Or imagine being an earthquake survivor like the Haitian 10-year-old above, having your mangled limb amputated and then trying to recover with no means to manage your pain.Recently I spent some time talking to Jason Nickerson, a PhD candidate in population health at the...

Congo Rape Study: Systematic or Simplistic?

by Charli Carpenter | 16 May, 2011 |

I have not yet read the new report on rape in the Congo, but judging from the news coverage of its reported findings, I have three thoughts:1) I am not as concerned as some critics about the methods used (a population sample of household interviews) or the staggering results: 400,000 women assaulted in a single year. I am concerned about the comparisons to the US (or other countries) since unless the same methods are replicated in the US (or other countries) there is no way to compare rape rates or to accurately call Congo the "rape capital of the world." 2) Though the emphasis is on the...

Why the Geneva Conventions Need a Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism

by Charli Carpenter | 9 May, 2011 |

Someone recently asked me whether, in the wake of the Richard Goldstone's qualifications of his infamous report, the UN was losing its credibility to issue fact-finding studies on humanitarian law violations. In my view, no matter how "credibly" a study is conducted, it is vulnerable to such critiques under the existing system - in which all humanitarian law reporting is partial, ad hoc and selective. That's because unlike other international regimes, the Geneva Conventions comes with no official monitoring body. At Foreign Affairs, I discuss this at more length and argue that it could and...

Was “Justice” Served?

by Charli Carpenter | 4 May, 2011 |

In the wake of the jubilant response to bin Laden's killing, it is heartening to see such a quick discussion erupt over its legality. The State Department has released its legal rationale for the operation here. The Atlantic Wire summarizes various arguments. Ken Anderson considers what the debate itself tells us about international law development.My views on extrajudicial execution are well known, but I'm not sure I agree with Paul Campos that this event counts as such - whether or not this is understood as a law enforcement operation vs. a military engagement. In the former, officers are...

White House: Osama Bin Laden Is Dead.

by Charli Carpenter | 2 May, 2011 |

POTUS speaking to the nation this evening:11:40: "They took care to avoid civilian casualties." Hmm. No word as to whether they succeeded.11:41: "Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader. He was a mass murderer of Muslims." That was good.11:43: "Today's achievement is a testament to the greatness of the American people." I see. Killing this individual is on par with walking on the moon. We can all be very proud. The "war" will continue. My immediate take: they've done a masterful job at playing the media and making a huge story and enormous nationalistic success out of a single operation in a vast...

A Beast in the Heart of Certain Small Units

by Charli Carpenter | 28 April, 2011 |

Excellent in-depth discussion of the Stryker Brigade in the New York Times. What's great about this piece is that the author goes into considerable depth to understand the structural context behind the so-called "Kill Team"'s campaign of recreational murder against civilians, and resist the seductive and typical "bad apple" story.That said, I think this piece over-determines the impact of simply being in a conflict zone and under-emphasizes the significance of unit structure and culture. It's true that the longer a war drags on the greater the likelihood of some units 'going rogue' in this...

Early Questions About the Guantanamo Leak

by Charli Carpenter | 25 April, 2011 |

... which hit the stands this evening via NYT, WAPO, the Telegraph and numerous other media outlets; courtesy of Wikileaks, many say.Interestingly, NYT reports Wikileaks was not responsible for this release, claiming the documents were originally leaked to Wikileaks but were released to the media by "another party":These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.If not Wikileaks, who? Well, who knows? Openleaks, founded by defectors...

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