This course will explore contemporary and historical trends and cases from throughout the world regarding international humanitarian law and war crimes. Our focus will be on the application of these concepts to contexts of ongoing or potential armed conflict, and their implications for Taiwan and East Asia. This will include recent and ongoing cases such as Ukraine, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and the Philippines, as well as historical cases such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, and East Timor.

Our emphasis will be on the convergence between issues related to international law, international criminal law, and international human rights law within the context of cases of ongoing or past armed conflicts. This will include in depth analysis of cases that have emerged within contexts of crimes against humanity and state violence (including genocide and feminicide), and on the contributions of current developments in international humanitarian law to an understanding of such processes.

We will approach these cases and their theoretical and conceptual implications from a de-colonial, critical, comparative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural perspective. This will include emphasis on exploration of the increasing convergence in such contexts between international humanitarian law and key provisions of international criminal law and international human rights law. It will also include cases related to legacies of authoritarian rule during the Cold War era in Latin America, Africa, and Asia as well as in the post-Soviet context.

We will also explore the potential role in key cases of processes of transitional justice and tribunals of conscience (including Taiwan’s “Constitutional Court Simulation”) as mechanisms intended to help influence popular opinion as to complex human rights issues, and how literature and culture reflect the impact of contexts of armed conflict.

The focus of the course will be on an overview of the state of the art of the most recent, cutting edge inter-disciplinary scholarship regarding the historical origins, development, and impact, and social and cultural dimensions of the case studies we will explore, and on the responses and perspectives that have been generated by social movements grounded among affected groups.