The Lawfare Podcast

On this week’s Lawfare Podcast, Gregory Johnsen outlines the state-of-play currently in Yemen. Johnsen, who is a writer-at-large for Buzzfeed News, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, and an all-things-Yemen-expert, walks Ben through the byzantine power politics in Sanaa that led to the conflict now engulfing Yemen and he explains why the war shouldn’t be viewed as just another Sunni-Shia fight. Yet while he clarifies that the issues that sparked the war are much more local, he warns that the longer the conflict goes on, the more likely it is to expand. Johnsen also outlines the events that led to the Saudi intervention and just whether or not Yemen, which he says is really twelve separate countries now, can ever be put back together again.  

Johnsen is the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia. Follow him on Twitter for the latest updates on Yemen.  

Direct download: Episode_140---Gregory_Johnsen_on_Yemen.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:54pm EDT

Last week, Ben attended a symposium at the Pentagon on the rise of so-called “hybrid conflicts,” whereprofessionals from around the national security establishment attempted to define the idea as well as its implications for existing legal structures and the law of war. In this week’s podcast, Brig. Gen. Richard Gross, the legal counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explains that the DOD’s senior leadership has increasingly begun discussing conflicts such as Ukraine, Syria, and the South China sea, in terms of hybrid conflict. He and Ben explore what lawyers should do with the idea, asking is it really new and should the law adjust to deal with it?

Direct download: Episode_139--An_Interview_with_Richard_Gross.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:55am EDT

On this week’s Lawfare Podcast, Ben sits down with Professor Gabriella Blum, professor at Harvard Law School, and Dustin Lewis, a senior researcher at Harvard Law Schools’ Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, to discuss their new report written with Naz Modirzadeh entitled Medical Care in Armed Conflict: IHL and State Responses to Terrorism. The conversation takes a look at whether we should consider medical care a form of illegitimate support to terrorists. Their argument? We shouldn't, because IHL lays down extensive protections for medical care, and those protections in many instances should also constrain domestic material support cases. Yet the authors make clear that in their view, there's also more to be done, as there are gaps and weaknesses in the protections afforded by IHL itself.   

Lawfare ran a summary of the report earlier this week, which you can read here

Direct download: Episode_138--Medical_Care_in_IHL.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:47pm EDT

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