Prof. Amichai Cohen 

Recent conflicts, including the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the war in Gaza, invite us to consider the tools that international law offers to prevent wars or to hasten their termination. We begin with the insight that has informed luminaries such as Clausewitz and Schelling that war is a continuation of a bargaining process that failed to achieve a more peaceful solution. Violence could reflect the following reasons:  indivisible goals, asymmetric information, ability to impose externalities on third parties and thereby finance the war, commitment problems, and, finally, intra-state agency problems. This inquiry demonstrates that while the traditional focus on the contribution of international law to regulating war has been on the prohibition of the threat or the use of force and the role of the UN Security Council, in fact, international law provides a much broader if indirect set of norms and institutions designed to increase the costs of the military option and reduce the costs of the peaceful one. This approach may explain the evolution of various norms and resolve questions that have indecisive answers in contemporary doctrine.
I will focus on one specific reason for the continuation of wars – Gambling for Insurrection, and show how this particular phenomenon plays out in armed conflicts. The question is whether international pressure and norms might respond to this challenge.

 

Amichai Cohen is a Professor of Law at the Ono Academic College, and a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute

 

Eyal Benvenisti  is the Academic Director of the Center for the Applied Research of Risks to Democracy at Tel Aviv University.