The Complicity and Limits of International Law in Armed Conflict Rape

The inauguration of the International Criminal Court and the proliferation of criminal tribunals over the last twenty years are often presented as historic and progressive moments in the trajectory of international law’s response to victims of rape in armed conflicts. However, these moments may signal not only inclusion, but also repression. They signal not just progress, but also a renewed rhetorical and institutional legitimization of colonialism. Historicizing the advent of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court, this Article examines some ways that international law obfuscates its complicity in armed conflict rape, looking particularly at calls within the profession for greater efficiency, nation-state security, and reparations for victims. In doing so, this Article grapples with questions concerning the limits and alternatives to our current legal imagination towards rape in armed conflict

Hail Monitor Sensor

An inexpensive and simple hail monitor design has been developed that has a single piezoelectric ceramic disc and uses a metal plate as a sounding board. The structure is durable and able to withstand the launch environment. This design has several advantages over a multi-ceramic sensor, including reduced cost and complexity, increased durability, and improvement in impact response uniformity over the active surface. However, the most important characteristic of this design is the potential to use frequency discrimination between the spectrum created from raindrop impact and a hailstone impact. The sound of hail hitting a metal plate is distinctly different from the sound of rain hitting the same plate. This fortuitous behavior of the pyramid sensor may lead to a signal processing strategy, which is inherently more reliable than one depending on amplitude processing only. The initial concept has been im proved by forming a shallow pyramid structure so that hail is encouraged to bounce away from the sensor so as not to be counted more than once. The sloped surface also discourages water from collecting. Additionally, the final prototype version includes a mounting box for the piezo-ceramic, which is offset from the pyramid apex, thus helping to reduce non-uniform response (see Figure 2). The frequency spectra from a single raindrop impact and a single ice ball impact have been compared. The most notable feature of the frequency resonant peaks is the ratio of the 5.2 kHz to 3.1 kHz components. In the case of a raindrop, this ratio is very small. But in the case of an ice ball, the ratio is roughly one third. This frequency signature of ice balls should provide a robust method for discriminating raindrops from hailstones. Considering that hail size distributions (HSDs) and fall rates are roughly 1 percent that of rainfall, hailstone sizes range from a few tenths of a centimeter to several centimeters. There may be considerable size overlap between large rain and small hail. As hail occurs infrequently at KSC, the ideal HSD measurement sensor needs to have a collection area roughly 100 times greater than a raindrop-size distribution sensor or disdrometer. The sensitivity should be such that it can detect and count very small hail in the midst of intense rainfall consisting of large raindrop sizes. The dynamic range and durability should allow measurement of the largest hail sizes, and the operation and calibration strategy should consider the infrequent occurrence of hail fall over the KSC area

Going Nowhere: The Rhetoric of Warfare and Humanitarian Intervention in Global Law and Policy Debates

From Kosovo and Iraq to Syria and Crimea, the specter of military intervention is a core theme within international law and policy literature. Rather than address ‘warfare’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ as something actually occurring ‘out there in the real world’, this essay focuses on their functions within the text as a rhetorical device that helps constitute the structural conditions of disciplinary argument. In the face of what feels like escalating threats requiring immediate reaction, this essay seeks to demonstrate that it is instead exactly the right moment for reflection on the analytical toolkits that we take with us as partisans of a legal persuasion into given conflicts

International Law as a Cyborg Science

Abstract International law academics have increasingly turned to engage deliberately engage computer-oriented technologies. There is little work in the literature that reflects on how this engagement itself takes place, what it tells us about the state of the discipline, and the consequences of concentrating on the phenomena of digital technologies. This paper shares some possible conceptual taxonomies and theoretical concerns in disciplinary self-reflection about our digital futures.</p