Episode 15: Now or Never, Or Maybe Later: The Use of Force to Recover an Occupied Territory

This episode accompanies the launching of a new rubric in
the European Journal of International Law – Legal/Illegal. The
first installment of Legal/Illegal, which appears in issue 32(4),
focuses on the question whether the use of force by a state to
recover a territory that has been occupied for many years may be
considered a lawful act of self-defence. In the Podcast, Michal
Saliternik interviews the authors of this section: Tom Ruys and
Felipe Rodriguez Silvestre on the illegal side, and Dapo Akande
and Antonios Tzanakopoulos on the legal side. Beginning with the
second Nagorno-Karabakh war, passing through the conflicts over
the Falkland Islands, the Golan Heights, Northern Cyprus, and the
Chagos Islands, and concluding with the Russian occupation of
Ukrainian territories, they discuss the compatibility of forcible
recovery of an occupied territory with the self-defence immediacy
and necessity requirements as well as with the obligation to
settle territorial disputes through peaceful means. They also
discuss questions of justice and fairness, both towards the
conflicting states and towards the inhabitants of the occupied
territory.