YIHL Vol. 28 (2025) – Call for Papers

Theme: Facts in International Humanitarian Law

In all fields of law, factual determinations are a necessary step in the application of a rule to a specific case. During armed conflict, the factual determinations necessary to assess belligerents’ conduct are especially contested and difficult to make. Oftentimes, full information is only available to an attacking party, which may be unwilling to disclose it, for example, on grounds of national security. In other cases, belligerent parties which control the territory where alleged violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) have occurred might themselves conceal or manipulate factual information. Sometimes, belligerents deny reporters, judicial investigators, and commissions of inquiry access to areas of hostilities. In still other instances, belligerents undermine and dispute the credibility of fact-finding mechanisms or expert bodies to cultivate factual doubts amongst the public. Furthermore, fake news, and other forms of disinformation produced by readily available technology, can be used to distort facts or construct alleged facts.

Problems of fact in armed conflict, however, do not only stem from belligerents’ conduct; they also emanate from indeterminacies within IHL itself. For instance, how much knowledge is needed to determine that a certain object is indeed a military objective, and what obligations do parties have of disclosing information used for deciding to target it? When serious violations of IHL are committed under obscure circumstances in which belligerents blame each other, on whom should the burden of proof ultimately fall? How should belligerents act in situations of uncertainty, so endemic in war, and how should third parties assess uncertainty ex post? More specifically, how is one to assess whether a civilian population lacks essential needs, or whether a belligerent force has effective control over a given territory? These are only a handful of illustrations of the range of fundamental issues raised by the contentious role of facts in IHL.

Volume 28 of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law seeks contributions that analyse the interplay between facts and IHL from doctrinal, critical or normative perspectives. We are equally interested in analyses of belligerent conduct that inhibits factual assessments, of new technologies that manipulate or construct facts, and of indeterminacies internal to the rules of IHL themselves.

Submission Timeline

Interested authors should send an abstract of a maximum of 500 words to the Managing Editor of the Yearbook, James Patrick Sexton (J.Sexton@asser.nl), by 13 June 2025. This abstract should include (i) a working title; (ii) your main research questions and hypotheses; (iii) what gap your analysis/argument would fill in the literature; and, (iv) the provisional structure of your reflections. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by 27 June 2025, and the deadline for the submission of final papers, which should be no longer than 10,000 words (including footnotes), is 24 October 2025. Submitted articles should conform to the YIHL Author's Guidelines and will be sent for double-blind peer review. The Editorial Board aims to publish Vol. 28 (2025) at the end of 2026. The publisher of the Yearbook is T.M.C. Asser Press, working in partnership with Springer Nature regarding the production and distribution.