ABSTRACT
Perhaps the very first truism to confront any scholar or student of the international laws of war or armed conflict is that these laws operate on the essential premise that a war or armed conflict has come into existence in a legal sense – that is, as a matter of international law. After all, it is that condition of ‘war’ or ‘armed conflict’ that presents the organising logic and design of these laws. It is that condition which supplies the raison d’être for the intervention of international law and, for better or for worse, it articulates what these laws are actually for. Recognising the possibilities of this condition in its various historical iterations,1 international law thus counterpoised the laws of war against the so-called laws of peace,2 proceeding from ‘some kind of more or less definite boundary between times of war and times of peace’.3
