Civil War, Foreign Intervention, and International Law: The (Uncertain) Relevance of a Democratic Norm

Speaker: Professor Brad Roth (Wayne State University)

Chair: Professor Louise Mallinder (QUB)

Although the United Nations Charter forbids, with the narrowest of express exceptions, the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states, this prohibition of cross-border military incursions implicitly excludes intervention grounded in an invitation attributable to the territorial state.  But what criteria establish the issuer of the invitation to be the authentic organ of the state’s international legal personality?  Prior to the 1990s, a nearly irrebuttable presumption in favor of the holder of “effective control through internal processes” had problematized interventions by invitation of a government needing foreign assistance to maintain or re-establish that same effective control; respect for a territorial population’s self-determination was thought to entail an international duty of neutrality in civil conflicts.  Has an emerging standard of governmental legitimacy, based on “free and fair elections,” come to displace the legal norm of non-intervention civil conflicts?

This Lecture will address this question in the context of the current work of the International Law Association Committee on “The Use of Force: Military Action with Consent,” which will be issuing its final report in August 2026.

Professor Brad R. Roth

Brad R. Roth is Professor of Political Science and Law at Wayne State University in Detroit. His scholarship applies political theory to problems in international and comparative public law, with a special focus on crises of political authority.

Brad is the author of Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law (Oxford University Press, 1999), Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement (Oxford University Press, 2011),  and a wide range of book chapters, journal articles, and commentaries dealing with questions of sovereignty, constitutionalism, human rights and democracy.  His interest in Northern Ireland stems from his previous work on self-determination and statehood questions (e.g., Israel-Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, and Taiwan) and on retrospective and extraterritorial applications of criminal law to conflict participants. 

Brad was a Visiting Scholar at the Mitchell Institute in Fall 2024.  He served from 2010 to 2018 as one of three American Branch representatives to the International Law Association’s Committee on Recognition/Non-Recognition of States and Governments, and currently serves on the ILA Committee on The Use of Force: Military Action on Request.

Professor Louise Mallinder

Louise Mallinder is Interim Director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice and a Professor of Law and at Queen’s University Belfast.  At the University of Chicago she is a Faculty Affiliate of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, and was the 2024 Pozen Professor of Human Rights.  She holds a PhD in law, an LLM in human rights law, and BA in economic and social history and politics, all from Queen’s University Belfast. 

Louise’s book Amnesty, Human Rights and Political Transitions: Bridging the Peace and Justice Divide was awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize and the Hart Socio-Legal Studies Association Early Career Prize.  She is co-editing The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia on Law and Peace, and co-authored Lawyers in Conflict and Transition (2022).

Louise is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Higher Education Academy.  She is also a member of the Institute for Integrated Transitions Law and Peace Practice Group, and of the ESRC and AHRC Peer Review Colleges.  She was Chair of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights non-governmental organization based in Belfast, during 2015-2020, and was Vice-Chair during 2013-2015 and 2020-2024.