Law Promotion Beyond Law Talk
The Red Cross, Persuasion, and the Laws of War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12198749 |
|---|---|
| Authors | S R Ratner (University of Michigan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 459-506 |
| Publication date | 2011-05-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of International Law (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0938-5428 • E-ISSN: 1464-3596 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ejil/chr025 |
| OpenAlex | W2124740274 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 14 |
The International Committee of the Red Cross casts itself as both a unique protector of individual victims of war and a special guardian of the body of international humanitarian law. It manages and reconciles these two roles through a complex, unconventional strategy that includes secret communications with warring parties, ambiguity in conveying its legal views to them, and, at times, a complete avoidance of legal arguments when persuading actors to follow international rules. This modus operandi not only challenges some standard views about the methods used by actors seeking to convince law violators to comply with norms; it also opens the door to a richer theoretical understanding of legal argumentation in that process of persuasion. The resulting construct consists of a matrix of inputs that determine how a persuading entity will deploy legal arguments and outputs that convey the dimensions of the resulting argumentation. Both the theory and the ICRC's work suggest that entities concerned with compliance would often do best to settle for a target to act consistently with a norm rather than to internalize it. They also raise difficult moral questions about whether compliance with international law is the optimal goal if it has adverse consequences for the values an institution seeks to uphold
Ambiguity · Argumentation theory · Compliance (psychology · Construct (python library · Epistemology · International law · Law and economics · Norm (philosophy · Persuasion · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Psychology · War, Ethics, and Justification · Law · Social Psychology
Constructivism and International Law
Confronting Rifles with Words
Cybernorms
Historical Foundations and Limitations of International Refugee Law
The fight for humane war
Signaling restraint
The Empirical Turn in International Legal Scholarship
Humanitarian Public Diplomacy in Comparative Perspective
Human rights, humanitarianism, and the practices of humanity
Money or Mandate? Why International Organizations Engage with the Climate Change Regime
International law and its discontents
Constructing Norms for Global Cybersecurity
Five shades of grey
From armed conflict to urban violence
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2025 (14) |
| Highly cited | No |