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With the attacks of 11 September 2001 very much casting their shadow, 2002 was a year in which issues concerning both thejus in belloand thejus ad bellumoccupied centre stage in international law and relations and dominated the news agenda, but often in a way that promoted confusion and misinformation rather than greater understanding of the law, and, as the year progressed, frustration and despair rather than optimism.Transnational terrorism was cemented as the declared pre-eminent security concern of many states, and, as a consequence, full speed into the 'global war on terror' (hereinafter GWOT), the integrity of international humanitarian law, human rights law and international law in general, including the role of international organisations such as the United Nations, came under increasing challenge. Focal points of rancorous, polarised debate were the fact and the conditions of detention of persons, including minors, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; the applicability and relevance of international humanitarian law in the context of the terrorist threat and the counter-terrorist response; the perceived conflict between human rights and national security; the coming into being of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the US's almost obsessive opposition to it; and, as the year drew to a close, the spectre of the use of force against Iraq without Security Council authorisation by an increasingly belligerent United States and a handful of its allies.

Nineteen ninety-nine was a year of taking stock. For humanitarian lawyers, this was facilitated by the fact that it was a year of anniversaries. As well as being the final year of the decade of international law, it was also the centenary of the first Hague peace conference and the first Hague Convention and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, providing ample occasion for reflection on the successes and failures of this branch of international law over the past century. The tone of the various commemorative meetings was chastened rather than celebratory. As one commentator noted: 'At the end of a century which has seen so much of war and in which the laws of war have proven so comparatively ineffectual, it seems obvious that that law must be seen as deficient and the record of the last hundred years be adjudged one of failure rather than achievement. (…) Yet the principle conclusion is not that the world needs new law, or different law, but that the law which we have needs to be made more effective.'The major developments in international humanitarian law have closely tracked a century that has seen society and the nature and aims of warfare change dramatically. Developments in the law have been reactive rather than anticipatory and have built on a model that was designed in response to imperatives that were different than those faced today and those that will be faced in the future. The time has long since passed in many countries when the state has a monopoly on violence. Entire societies have been militarised, and in many areas war has been 'privatised' as 'mercenaries, rebels, mutinous gangsters emerge to exploit the decline of the state'.

The defining moments of 2001, the terrorist attacks of September 11 against the United States of America, marked a turning point in international law and relations. By their scale and audaciousness, overnight they helped to propel the issue of international terrorism to the top of the international security agenda and particularly that of the USA, with consequences for many branches of international law, including thejus ad bellum, thejus in bello, international law relating to terrorism, international human rights law and international criminal law, that were just beginning to be felt as the year closed.

Nineteen armed conflicts took place in 2003, but in terms of political, media, and scholarly attention there was really only one that mattered: Iraq. It dominated the headlines and aroused passions worldwide, particularly amongst members of civil society, on a scale unseen since the Vietnam War. The military campaign itself followed on some of the most emotional and divisive debates ever seen at the Security Council, which were interpreted by many as exposing not so much the cracks but the fault lines in the system of collective security, and the sharp divide between those states committed to it — and the Security Council's role as the exclusive decision-maker in matters pertaining to the use of force — and thelone rangers.

Since the breakthrough adoption in 1977 of Protocols I and II Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the major issue and biggest challenge facing international humanitarian law (IHL) has been its implementation. The two Additional Protocols addressed many, though not all, of thelacunaeleft in IHL after the adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1949. As one commentator has noted: 'There is, however, aparticularly acute contrast between humanitarian law's highly developed rules, many of which enjoy nearly universal acceptance, and the repeated violations of those rules in conflicts around the world.'

Milestones, particularly those as special as the twin-birth of a new century and millenium, lend themselves to rhapsody and the urge to say something positive and forward-looking. The Yearbook is not merely succumbing to this tendency, however, when it observes that, in some important respects, 2000 proved itself an auspicious opening. There was a flurry of activity among states to implement international humanitarian law (IHL), most of it a consequence of states ratifying the several humanitarian law treaties that were concluded in the late-Nineties.