William Banks – författare

In Counterinsurgency Law, William Banks and several distinguished contributors explore from an interdisciplinary legal and policy perspective the multiple challenges that counterinsurgency operations pose today to the rule of law - international, humanitarian, human rights, criminal, and domestic.Addressing the considerable challenges for the future of armed conflict, each contributor in the book explores the premise that in COIN operations, international humanitarian law, human rights law, international law more generally, and domestic national security laws do not provide adequate legal and policy coverage and guidance for multiple reasons, many of which are explored in this book. A second shared premise is that these problems are not only challenges for the law in post-9/11 security environments-but matters of policy with implications for the international community and for global security more generally.

An internationally-recognized authority on constitutional law, national security law, and counterterrorism, William C. Banks believes changing patterns of global conflict are forcing a reexamination of the traditional laws of war. The Hague Rules, the customary laws of war, and the post-1949 law of armed conflict no longer account for nonstate groups waging prolonged campaigns of terrorism-or even more conventional insurgent attacks. Recognizing that many of today's conflicts are low-intensity, asymmetrical wars fought between disparate military forces, Banks's collection analyzes nonstate armed groups and irregular forces (such as terrorist and insurgent groups, paramilitaries, child soldiers, civilians participating in hostilities, and private military firms) and their challenge to international humanitarian law. Both he and his contributors believe gaps in the laws of war leave modern battlefields largely unregulated, and they fear state parties suffer without guidelines for responding to terrorists and their asymmetrical tactics, such as the targeting of civilians. These gaps also embolden weaker, nonstate combatants to exploit forbidden strategies and violate the laws of war.Attuned to the contested nature of post-9/11 security and policy, this collection juxtaposes diverse perspectives on existing laws and their application in contemporary conflict. It sets forth a legal definition of new wars, describes the status of new actors, charts the evolution of the twenty-first-century battlefield, and balances humanitarian priorities with military necessity. While the contributors contest each other, they ultimately reestablish the legitimacy of a long-standing legal corpus, and they rehumanize an environment in which the most vulnerable targets, civilian populations, are themselves becoming weapons against conventional power.

An internationally-recognized authority on constitutional law, national security law, and counterterrorism, William C. Banks believes changing patterns of global conflict are forcing a reexamination of the traditional laws of war. The Hague Rules, the customary laws of war, and the post-1949 law of armed conflict no longer account for nonstate groups waging prolonged campaigns of terrorism-or even more conventional insurgent attacks. Recognizing that many of today's conflicts are low-intensity, asymmetrical wars fought between disparate military forces, Banks's collection analyzes nonstate armed groups and irregular forces (such as terrorist and insurgent groups, paramilitaries, child soldiers, civilians participating in hostilities, and private military firms) and their challenge to international humanitarian law. Both he and his contributors believe gaps in the laws of war leave modern battlefields largely unregulated, and they fear state parties suffer without guidelines for responding to terrorists and their asymmetrical tactics, such as the targeting of civilians. These gaps also embolden weaker, nonstate combatants to exploit forbidden strategies and violate the laws of war.Attuned to the contested nature of post-9/11 security and policy, this collection juxtaposes diverse perspectives on existing laws and their application in contemporary conflict. It sets forth a legal definition of new wars, describes the status of new actors, charts the evolution of the twenty-first-century battlefield, and balances humanitarian priorities with military necessity. While the contributors contest each other, they ultimately reestablish the legitimacy of a long-standing legal corpus, and they rehumanize an environment in which the most vulnerable targets, civilian populations, are themselves becoming weapons against conventional power.

Georg Brandes was known as the "Father of the Modern Breakthrough" for his influence on Scandinavian writers in the late nineteenth century. A prominent writer, thinker, and speaker, he often examined intellectual topics beyond the literary criticism he was best known for. In this collection, William Banks has translated a number of Brandes's pieces that engage in the concerns of oppressed peoples. By collecting, annotating, and contextualizing these works, Banks reintroduces Brandes as a major progenitor of thinking about the rights of national minorities and the colonized.Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples includes thirty-five essays and published speeches from the early twenty-first century on subjects as diverse as the Boxer Rebellion, displaced peoples from World War I, Finland's Jewish population, and imperialism. This collection will interest interdisciplinary scholars of human rights as well as those who study Scandinavian intellectual and literary history.