international humanitarian law

The human rights regime adopts a legalist approach to limit the harm the powerful may inflict on the vulnerable The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing ‘war against terrorism’ test the limits of the legalist approach. Human rights constrain state responses to terrorism more directly than they govern the conduct of terrorists. As a result, the international human rights regime is disadvantaged rhetorically and politically.

This volume aims not to retrace the fairly familiar terrain of establishing the legal character of human rights, or to argue the proposition, now well accepted, that human rights are part and parcel of the discipline of international law, but to consider the influence of human rights and humanitarian law on general international law. Although human rights and humanitarian norms are central to the book, then, it is not a book about human rights and humanitarian law.

A Most Uncertain Crusade traces and analyzes the emergence of human rights as both an international concern and as a controversial domestic issue for US policy makers during and after World War II. Rowland Brucken focuses on officials in the State Department, at the United Nations, and within certain domestic non-governmental organizations, and explains why, after issuing wartime declarations that called for the definition and enforcement of international human rights standards, the US government refused to ratify the first UN treaties that fulfilled those twin purposes.