For this episode we thought we’d look at when you can call something a war. In the past months and weeks we’ve seen U.S. strikes on boats in international waters of the Pacific and the Caribbean, often off the coast of Venezuela. Washington says they are targeting drug dealers and actually invoke international law saying the United States is engaged in “a non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels.

But can a state just announce it’s at war and does that mean it is in a war? Spoiler alert here, our experts say no. We sat down with Tamsin Phillipa Paige, Associate Professor with Deakin Law School, and co-host of the Called to the Bar pocast and Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg, Fellow in Human Rights at the London School of Economics & Political Science. You may known them from their social media presence and their frequent participation in the annual EJIL symposium on International Law and Pop Culture.

Steph got the idea for the pod after listening to Called to the Bar episode 51 also with Tamsin and Alonso who got into the nitty gritty of the U.S. strikes but skimmed over a lot of the foundational knowledge that people who studied law will have been taught, but not us journalists.

Of course it helped peak Steph’s interest that her favourite tribunal – the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – made a big appearance because of the importance of what the judges said in the Tadic case. We also talk about the International Court of Justice and its landmark cases on armed conflict namely the Nicaragua case and the Oil Platforms case – to use the shorthand.

The chat was jampacked with references to articles so we’re posting the links here. There was this article by Adil Haque, the work of Robert McLaughlin was mentioned as was Austin Turk’s article on Sociology or Terrorism. Tamsin’s passionate speech about war metaphors and fairy tales references the work or George Lakoff and his Metaphore and War.

To get away from it all Alonso gets into comics and recommends the 2016 reboot of the Flintstones which features social commentary and a genocidal war . Tamsin reaches for the urban fantansy books of Seanan McGuire and the steampunk universe of Gail Carriger. Steph has already downloaded books by both authors on her e-book reader, as nothing says take a break from international law quite like vampires, fae, shapeshifters and werewolves.

This podcast has been produced as part of a partnership with JusticeInfo.net, an independent website in French and English covering justice initiatives in countries dealing with serious violence. It is a media outlet of Fondation Hirondelle, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.