Terrorism and International Law

A law book, and it should be read as one.

Igor Blishchenko and Nikolai Zhdanov were Soviet international lawyers, and this does what a monograph in that field is supposed to do. It works through the 1937 League of Nations Convention, the Tokyo, Hague and Montreal air conventions, the 1971 OAS Convention, the 1973 Convention on Internationally Protected Persons, the 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism, the 1979 Hostages Convention and the law of mercenarism. It reproduces the drafting record of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on International Terrorism by document symbol. It cites Georg Schwarzenberger, Paul Wilkinson, Pierre Mertens, Brian Jenkins and the American Journal of International Law, mostly accurately and sometimes generously. It ends by arguing for a permanent international criminal court - a proposal that took another fourteen years to reach Rome.

A reader expecting a pamphlet will find something closer to a seminar.

The doctrinal problem it takes up is a real one: how to define terrorism in law without either exempting state violence or criminalising national liberation movements, which was precisely the deadlock that had held the UN Sixth Committee for a decade.

The text closed in the second half of 1982 - the last events discussed are the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that June - and was published two years later. Its companion volume in political register is Grachev's In the Grip of Terror.

Translated by Lev Bobrov.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.