The War Lawyers | A conversation with Dr. Craig Jones

Polis Project Conversation Series

In this conversation, The Polis Project’s Suchitra Vijayan discusses Prof. Craig Jones's recent book The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare. Over the last 20 years, the world's most advanced militaries have invited a small number of military legal professionals into the heart of their targeting operations and spaces that generals and commanders had exclusively inhabited. These professionals, trained and hired to give legal advice on an array of military operations, have become war lawyers. The book War Lawyers examines the laws of war as applied by military lawyers to aerial targeting operations carried out by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israel military in Gaza. Drawing on interviews with military lawyers and others, this book explains why some lawyers became integrated into the command chain. Dr. Craig Jones is a Lecturer in Political Geography in the School of Geography, Sociology, and Politics at Newcastle University. He researches the geographies of later modern warfare and is especially interested in the legal and medical materialities of war and conflict in the contemporary Middle East. He blogs at www.thewarspace.com and tweets at @thewarspace.