In Lawmaking under Pressure, Giovanni Mantilla analyzes the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict. Until well into the twentieth century, states allowed atrocious violence as an acceptable product of internal conflict. Why have states created international laws to control internal armed conflict? Why did states compromise their national security by accepting these international humanitarian constraints? Why did they create these rules at improbable moments, as European empires cracked, freedom fighters emerged, and fears of communist rebellion spread? Mantilla explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s.

By the 1949 Diplomatic Conference that revised the Geneva Conventions, most countries supported legislation committing states and rebels to humane principles of wartime behavior and to the avoidance of abhorrent atrocities, including torture and the murder of non-combatants. However, for decades, states had long refused to codify similar regulations concerning violence within their own borders. Diplomatic conferences in Geneva twice channeled humanitarian attitudes alongside Cold War and decolonization politics, even compelling reluctant European empires Britain and France to accept them. Lawmaking under Pressure documents the tense politics behind the making of humanitarian laws that have become touchstones of the contemporary international normative order.

Mantilla not only explains the pressures that resulted in constraints on national sovereignty but also uncovers the fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict.

About the Author

Giovanni Mantilla is a university lecturer at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Christ's College. Follow him on X @giofabman.

Reviews

Giovanni Mantilla has written what will likely become a landmark history of the evolution of the Geneva Conventions. [L]ike all good works of political science, Lawmaking Under Pressure is as important for the gaps it leaves open as for the questions it resolves.

* Opinion Juris *

Lawmaking Under Pressure is an incredibly detailed and insightful account of the history of non-international armed conflict. Giovanni Mantilla has certainly produced a book that will be mandatory reading.

* Armed Groups and International Law *

Mantilla examines the process by which constraints on national sovereignty eventually came about in the context of the 'fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict'.

* Law & Society Review *

Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.

* Choice *

Lawmaking Under Pressure is a stimulating and original contribution to the historical scholarship on IHL. With an ease of writing and robustness of insight it is sure to be of lasting interest to students of international law.

* Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies *

In Lawmaking under Pressure, Mantilla deftly combines international relations theory with legal and diplomatic history to explain the processes of social pressure through which a collection of states and nongovernmental organizations broadened IHL to internal conflicts, despite the opposition of major states. Mantilla raises numerous questions for future research [and in] a time when some worry that US influence is waning, such questions portend noteworthy, practical insights.

* International Studies Review *

The analysis is well researched and well written and accurate in its main points.

* Human Rights Quarterly *


Awards
Winner of Francis Lieber Prize 2020 (United States). Runner-up for International Collaboration Section Book Award 2020 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781501752582
Author Giovanni Mantilla
Format Hardback
Page Count 264
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm