The present chapter starts out with the birth, in the 1860s, of two ‘branches’ of the law of armed conflict: the law of The Hague (Section 2.1) and the law of Geneva (Section 2.2).

Just about a century after those early beginnings, in the 1960s and 1970s, the United Nations began to take an active interest in the promotion and development of the law of armed conflict, under the heading ‘human rights in armed conflict’. Apart from enabling the General Assembly to incorporate the subject under a previously existing agenda item, this marked the increasingly important relationship between the law of armed conflict and human rights law. This ‘current of New York’ is the subject of Section 2.3.