This special volume of International Law Studies focuses on the contemporary war at sea between Iran and the United States that began in 2026. It examines how the United States assembled, from statutes and executive orders on the one hand and from centuries of customary international law on the other, a legal architecture for interdicting Iran’s oil trade that finances the regime. That U.S. architecture has two halves. Operation Epic Fury is the military campaign. Operation Economic Fury, and its successor, Operation Economic Outcast, is the Treasury-led campaign of sanctions, asset seizures, and terrorism forfeiture statutes directed at the oil smuggling and weapons networks that sustain Tehran. These efforts leverage the peacetime law of the sea and the law of naval warfare. Together, the two approaches form a single hybrid campaign, or “ghost war” waged against Iran at sea. Moreover, the U.S. campaign demonstrates the ability to operate simultaneously in peacetime and armed conflict, effectively operating in the “gray zone” between normal peacetime and armed conflict.
National security has expanded from existential and military threats into trade, investment, technology, supply chains and industrial policy. This chapter asks how states perceive which security game they are playing. Material vulnerabilities and weaponized interdependence can rationally alter incentives. Furthermore, strategic interaction is networked rather than dyadic: policies and influence propagate through alliances, trade relations and third states. National narratives, framing and behavioural mechanisms shape perceived payoffs, actors and time horizons. Positive-sum interdependence may consequently be reframed as zero-sum competition, generating security dilemmas, while bandwagon effects and behavioural security inflation can exacerbate that process. Measures rational in the short run may create greater insecurity over time. National institutions determine who defines and contests threats and thus comparative variations matter. International law is therefore not merely a constraint. By stabilising expectations, providing information and monitoring, coordinating networked responses and limiting opportunistic security exceptions, it can preserve opportunities for positive-sum cooperation and prevent security narratives from becoming self-fulfilling realities.
Long-standing debates about collective security recur around a single question: why does it fail? This chapter argues that the questions we ask shape what we are able to see, and that mistaking some questions for the only ones worth asking can obscure more productive lines of inquiry. Using the classic interrogatives-why, what, who, when, where and how-as an organising device, it examines how international legal theory has approached collective security: as a matter of ideology, description, community, selectivity, and process. Surveying liberal, Marxist, realist, institutional, constitutional, feminist and Third World traditions, it shows how different questions can open up avenues of inquiry or collapse them into a search for hidden coherence, a single culprit, or an inherited ideal. Theory serves collective security best, it concludes, when it resists explanatory closure and attends to the contingent processes through which legal authority is constituted and contested.
The latest issue of the Virginia Journal of International Law (Vol. 66, no. 3, 2026) is out. Contents include: 
Disasters – whether natural, technological, or public health-related – are increasing in frequency, scale, and complexity, with profound human, economic, and geopolitical consequences. While advances in early warning systems, infrastructure, and coordinated response have reduced some vulnerabilities, new risks driven by climate change, demographic shifts, and global interdependence threaten to reverse these gains. Against this backdrop, the need for effective legal and institutional frameworks for disaster management has never been more urgent.
This open access book offers a comprehensive yet accessible overview of contemporary international disaster management from both an institutional and legal perspective. Part I examines the principal actors and coordination mechanisms shaping the international response, with particular attention to the evolution of the United Nations system and the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism as the most advanced regional model. Part II turns to the legal frameworks governing disaster management, distinguishing between post-disaster response and recovery measures on the one hand, and pre-disaster prevention and preparedness - most notably disaster risk reduction - on the other.
Drawing on the latest empirical data and recent normative developments, including the Sendai Framework and the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters, the volume situates disaster law and policy within broader debates on resilience, sustainable development, and climate adaptation. Intended as a reference text, this book is particularly valuable for scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers seeking a structured understanding of the evolving institutional landscape and legal architecture of disaster management at both global and regional levels.
Seventy-five years after the adoption in Rome of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), this volume offers a critical reflection on the impact that the ECHR has had on the Italian legal order, as a living instrument constantly interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights in light of the socio-cultural, political and normative transformations of the European society. In a historical context marked by renewed sovereignist pressures and growing challenges to the European system of human rights protection, the volume aims to reaffirm the centrality of the ECHR as a common heritage of values and guarantees, indispensable for the effective enjoyment of fundamental rights, democracy, and the rule of law in Italy and Europe.
The latest issue of Climate Law (Vol. 16, no. 3, 2026) is out. Contents include: Amidst the renewed debate on Europe's digital sovereignty, this paper counterintuitively questions the implicit assumption, underpinning legal scholarship and policymaking, that sovereignty can be effectively materialised solely within a state’s territory. The paper argues that the creative tailoring of international law and innovative technologies can be leveraged to effectively exercise digital sovereignty also outside a state’s territory. The discussion focuses on Estonia’s novel data embassy, which includes the establishment of a data centre in Luxembourg’s territory to host and run Estonia’s critical governmental datasets and essential services. Although initially perceived as an “oddity”, this model of digital sovereignty gains increasing traction in international practice. The legal means for Estonia to retain sovereign control over its data centre vis-à-vis Luxembourg is the creation of a sui generis bilateral treaty regime which assigns diplomatic status to the data centre. The analysis critically evaluates the parties’ rights and obligations concerning the functioning, inviolability and protection of the centre, and the protection of the centre’s content and communications. It does so by analysing their agreement, in light of diplomatic law and EU cybersecurity law. Furthermore, the paper furnishes new insights on third states’ obligations under diplomatic law, international humanitarian law and the principle of sovereignty regarding the protection of the data centre from physical and cyber interferences. The analysis identifies certain legal concerns pertaining to the implementation of the data embassy model and paves the way for states and other actors to navigate legal hurdles with legal certainty.
Alongside the States’ instruments of geoeconomic realignment used to enforce strategic foreign political and security interests, unilateral sanctions stand out as a particularly potent weapon. From the perspective of public international law, and in particular with regard to the legal position of investors protected by BITs, the arguments and justifications for such unilateral sanctions raise a number of thoroughly challenging questions—questions which, despite the sharp increase in the use of these sanctions in recent times, have not yet been sufficiently clarified.
The sanctioning State is very likely to argue that its sanction, despite its severity, qualifies as a genuine exercise of police powers. In that case there would therefore be no violation of the BIT at the primary treaty level. But does the doctrine of police powers confer, as it were, unlimited power and authority? Or should the sanction, alongside further conditions such as an ‘individualised nexus’ and others which derive from the principle of the rule of law be proportionate? Given that the principle of proportionality has so far only been recognised in selected areas of public international law, how can such a principle of proportionality be adequately justified and applied? If this prinicple were to apply, should it apply only relating to the expropriation clause, or should it apply to all the standards set out in a BIT? And finally: why do the outcomes of cases before the European Court of Justice often differ in this respect from those decided by investment tribunals?
Sanctions are usually a response to violations of international law by the sanctioned state. Could potential violations of a BIT standard be justified as a permissible countermeasure at the secondary level of customary international law? Can the countermeasures defence be raised (at all) against a non-State actor? And does this really depend on whether the investor's rights are qualified as individual direct rights or merely derivative rights? Could an investor rely on ILC Art. 50 (1)(b), which exempts fundamental human rights from countermeasures? Could it be argued a fortiori that, if Article 51 of the UN Charter permits under strict conditions even military support in favour of the state under attack, it must in principle also permit less intrusive, non-coercive measures, such as sanctions, which serve the same defensive and protective function?
And finally, what is arguably the most challenging question, as most sanctions are imposed by States that have not been directly injured, can these non-injured States justify their sanctions as ‘third-party’ or ‘collective’ countermeasures? Has a justification under customary international law emerged for such countermeasures? And if so, what would be the prerequisites for such permissible 'third-party' or ‘collective’ countermeasures, and what would be their consequences?
If the findings are correct, that (i) the doctrine of police powers imposes ever stricter conditions; that (ii) as regards the justification as collective countermeasures, there is likely to be a lack of opinio iuris for a corresponding universally accepted customary international law; and that, (iii) even the individual treaty defence, by way of an essential security interest exception, rarely prevails, then this effectively means: in a great many cases, sanctioning States face the risk of being held liable for breaches of a BIT – even though they are (often) acting through their (politically legitimised) sanctions in the service of ‘obligations erga omnes’. So, it appears that current public international law remains ‘under-calibrated’ for sanctions and, therefore, endangers the effectuation of general goals of public international law.
Against the background of this finding, what normative guiding principles should be drawn to ensure that public international law can continue to serve as a credible framework for the limitation of state power and the allocation of risk in a geo-economically fragmented world? Those are the questions the present contribution addresses.
The deployment of “bodyguard satellites”—spacecraft designed to autonomously detect and counter hostile space objects—has moved from classified capability development to explicit national security policy across a growing number of States. This article examines the circumstances under which interference with another State’s satellite may be legally justified under international law, analyzing several possible grounds: self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, forcible countermeasures, non-forcible countermeasures, and necessity. Drawing on a survey of national space defense policies, jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice, and the law of State responsibility, the article reaches two principal conclusions. First, across all justificatory frameworks, reversible non-kinetic measures—jamming, dazzling, spoofing, and cyber interference—represent the only category of response that the existing legal framework can reliably accommodate, while kinetic destruction is presumptively impermissible due to debris generation, irreversibility, and the availability of non-kinetic alternatives. Second, the application of terrestrial justification frameworks to outer space produces structural indeterminacy, primarily because the armed attack threshold cannot be reliably located at the moment of engagement, and the imminence requirement cannot bear the weight the framework places on it given the operational logic of autonomous bodyguard satellite systems. The article concludes that a multilateral legal framework, enshrining reversibility as a presumptive constraint and establishing an agreed threshold for prohibited force against space objects, is urgently required.