International Review of the Red Cross: humanitarian debate: law, policy, action / International Committee of the Red Cross.

The impurity of war / François-Bernard Huyghe. Timelines, borderlines and conflicts: The historical evolution of the legal divide between international and non-international armed conflicts / Rogier Bartels. Typology of armed conflicts in international humanitarian law: legal concepts and actual situations / Sylvain Vité Asymmetrical war and the notion of armed conflict – An attempt at a conceptualization / Andreas Paulus and Mindia Vashakmadze. Armed violence in fragile states: Low-intensity conflicts, spillover conflicts, and sporadic law enforcement operations by third parties / Robin Geiss. Classifying the conflict: A soldier's dilemma / Andrew Carswell. The absorption of grave breaches into war crimes law / Marko Divac Öberg.

This edition focuses on legal classification of armed conflict, which is critical in determining the obligations that arise for parties to a conflict. Qualifying a situation as an armed conflict to which international humanitarian law applies is an essential but delicate matter, considered to be the Achilles' heel of this legal regime. As conflicts increasingly involve non-state entities and have transnational dimensions, they also challenge the distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts. The current edition considers whether and how today's warfare fits into traditional legal categories, in order to determine which law protects the victims of these situations.