The Review has chosen to open this edition with an interview with General Abdoulaye Kaka as a representative of State practice in counterterrorism detention. The journal chose to focus on Niger as a State that is affected by an ongoing armed conflict and which arrests, detains and tries suspected members of a non-State armed group under its domestic legal system.

General Abdoulaye Kaka has been working as Head of Niger's Central Counterterrorism Agency (Service Central de Lutte Contre le Terrorisme) since 2014. He previously worked for the judicial police in Niger as head of the anti-gang section before opening the first office of the judicial police in Zinder. General Kaka worked for the United Nations (UN) police forces in Ivory Coast between 2006 and 2012, when he became the Commander-in-Chief of the Niger UN police forces.

In his current role as Head of the Central Counterterrorism Agency, General Kaka oversees detention operations throughout the country, many of which involve suspected members of the group that calls itself Islamic State's West Africa Province (ISWAP), also known as Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad or, as it is most widely known under its former name, Boko Haram.

Niger has suffered the effects of the ongoing conflict between ISWAP and State forces in the Lake Chad region, resulting in casualties, arrests and repeated displacement among civilians. The government of Niger contributes troops to the Multinational Joint Task Force, which conducts operations against the group. At the same time, the government arrests and detains suspected members of ISWAP as part of its counterterrorism efforts. These detention operations are coordinated by the Central Counterterrorism Agency. Established in 2011, the Central Counterterrorism Agency, successor to the counterterrorism section of the judicial police, is made up of representatives from the three primary law enforcement organizations in the country – the national police, the national guard and the gendarmerie – and is principally responsible for counterterrorism investigations in Niger.

In Niger, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) helps people affected by conflict in the south-east or fleeing fighting in north-east Nigeria. With the Niger Red Cross, the ICRC delivers aid, treats the wounded, provides water and supports farmers. The ICRC also monitors compliance with international humanitarian law, visits detainees and helps them to maintain contact with their families.

The ICRC visits people held by the authorities in at least five places of detention in Niger. After the visits, the ICRC shares its findings on the treatment and living conditions of the detainees confidentially with the authorities and urges them to take steps to address concerns. The ICRC also helps bolster prison management capacities and health services for detainees through technical and material support, and round-table discussions on these topics. The ICRC helps detainees, particularly minors, maintain contact with their families. At the request of foreign detainees, the ICRC informs their families or consular representatives of their detention. Lastly, the ICRC covers transportation costs for security detainees returning home after their release.

Ambassador Ong Keng Yong is the Executive Deputy Chairman of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Concurrently, he is Ambassador-at-Large at the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, non-resident High Commissioner to Pakistan and non-resident Ambassador to Iran. He also serves as Chairman of the Singapore International Foundation. Mr Ong served as Secretary-General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, based in Jakarta, Indonesia, from January 2003 to January 2008. In this interview, the Ambassador reflects on some issues of particular concern with regard to war and security at sea in the region of Southeast and East Asia.

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum has a unique collection of prisoners’ objects – items made by conflict-related detainees and given to International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegates who, in keeping with the ICRC's mandate under the Geneva Conventions, were visiting the prisons.

Since their publication in the 1950s and 1980s respectively, the Commentaries on the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 have become a major reference for the application and interpretation of those treaties. The International Committee of the Red Cross, together with a team of renowned experts, is currently updating these Commentaries in order to document developments and provide up-to-date interpretations of the treaty texts. Following a brief overview of the methodology and process of the update as well as a historical background to the Second Geneva Convention, this article addresses the scope of applicability of the Convention, the type of vessels it protects (in particular hospital ships and coastal rescue craft), and its relationship with other sources of international humanitarian law and international law conferring protection to persons in distress at sea. It also outlines differences and commonalities between the First and the Second Conventions, including how these have been reflected in the updated Commentary on the Second Convention. Finally, the article highlights certain substantive obligations under the Convention and how the updated Commentary addresses some of the interpretive questions they raise.

The Review has chosen to open this issue with the voices of residents of Aleppo, Syria. Fighting in the city of Aleppo has stopped since the last opposition fighters were evacuated from the eastern areas of the city in December 2016 as part of a deal, but war continues in the rest of Syria, including in large parts of Aleppo governorate. This section is meant to frame the academic discussion to follow in light of the realities faced by those who live in cities at war.

The stories below were told to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Aleppo on 6 and 8 February 2017. These people agreed to share their experience with the ICRC so that others may understand what their lives are like. Although they have suffered much, they still have hope for the future. In order to protect them and their families, only their first names will be used.

Contemporary warfare is increasingly waged in urban settings and is often characterized by asymmetry between the parties. This trend is only likely to continue in light of a more and more urbanized world. It is compounded by the fact that belligerents often avoid facing their enemies in the open, intermingling instead with the civilian population, putting civilian lives and infrastructure at risk.

Eyal Weizman is an architect and academic who has spent much of his career writing and thinking about the interaction of violence and the built environment. He has worked extensively on the ways in which war is fought in built-up areas and on how architecture can design an environment that is either more or less conducive to urban warfare. Most recently, he has been developing the new field of forensic architecture, which aims to research incidents that unfold in urban areas, examine the architectural aspects involved and draw patterns from those stories. In this interview, Professor Weizman shares some of his reflections on war in cities with the Review.

This article charts the rapid rise in the use of imprisonment in recent decades before considering some of the most pressing issues of concern in the use of imprisonment today. First among these is prison overcrowding, which continues to blight the record of many countries in their treatment of prisoners. To illustrate the potentially dire consequences of overcrowding – a problem common to many other countries and regions – an account is given of a recent visit to a prison in El Salvador. The article then provides an overview of the relevant regional and international standards on the treatment of prisoners, referring also to the role of judicial bodies in ensuring implementation.

While most law on the conduct of hostilities has been heavily scrutinized in recent years, the law dealing with armed conflict at sea has been largely ignored. This is not surprising. There have been few naval conflicts since 1945, and those that have occurred have been limited in scale; none has involved combat between major maritime powers. Nevertheless, navies have tripled in number since then, and today there are growing tensions between significant naval powers. There is a risk of conflict at sea. Conditions have changed since 1945, but the law has not developed in that time. Elements of it, especially that regulating economic warfare at sea, seem outdated and it is not clear that the law is well placed to regulate so-called “hybrid” warfare at sea. It seems timely to review the law, to confirm that which is appropriate and to develop that which is not. Perhaps a new edition of the San Remo Manual would be timely.

This article argues that, despite an ongoing global revolution in urban demography, most Western military research into urbanization is narrowly focused and remains disengaged from the interdisciplinary expertise of urban studies. Because so many cities are sui generis in terms of their governance, architectural design and demographic composition, the art of war must seek closer interaction with the science of cities. In the coming years, in order to control armed violence and reduce casualties across an urbanizing world, military analysts must seek greater cooperation with urban specialists. The common aim must be to develop an urban-oriented strand of strategic studies that is firmly based on a sophisticated understanding of the ecology of cities. Such a cooperative approach will assist in the development of military methods of operating in cities using appropriate rules of engagement that embrace international humanitarian law.

Family members of incarcerated people are often faced with financial, social and emotional costs related to the imprisonment of their loved ones. These costs can be conceptualized as investments both in the sustenance of personal relationships and in a greater social good in the form of assisting with the reintegration of former prisoners. In this article, we draw upon data from a mixed-methods study to elucidate the costs of detention on families of prisoners. We demonstrate that financial, social and emotional costs associated with imprisonment of a family member are interrelated and often compound each other, indicating the importance of addressing them in a holistic framework.

Incidents at sea between warships and military aircraft often involve more than provocative actions – they may be aggressive and can sometimes result in death and destruction. In view of the low threshold of a resort to armed force by one State against another that would bring an international armed conflict into existence, it is rather difficult to determine whether incidents at sea remain below that threshold. Similar, albeit less difficult problems arise with regard to forceful measures taken by States against foreign merchant vessels. Here it is important to clearly distinguish between law enforcement at sea and the exercise of belligerent rights.

This article reviews the factors that determine the impact of explosive weapons on urban services in space and time, with a focus on drinking water services. The evidence comes from published and unpublished research and records, as well as experience restoring or maintaining such services. Urban services are seen as interconnected, and each composed of interdependent components of people, consumables and hardware. Elements that make up the components are labelled “upstream”, “midstream” and “downstream”, to reflect their location and hierarchy in the production and delivery of any urban service. The impact of explosive weapons is broken into the direct effects on any of the components of a service, and the reverberating effects on up- and or downstream components of the same service, or on other services. The effects are most commonly observed in service infrastructure, and determined chiefly by the extent of the damage to the functionality of any component. The spatial extent of the impact is found to be determined primarily by the hierarchy of the component suffering the direct impact, with attacks on upstream components being the furthest-reaching. The duration of the impact is determined primarily by the pre-explosion “baseline resilience” of the service, itself a function of system redundancies and emergency preparedness and response. The analysis suggests that the impact is more reasonably foreseeable than may commonly be thought, in the sense that the direct effects of explosives are well known and that the most important infrastructure is generally identifiable. It follows that proportionality assessments which involve urban services would benefit from (i) the direct and consistent engagement of specialized engineers within the targeting cell, and (ii) greater familiarity of the weapons controller with services, infrastructure and systems in urban areas.

Amidst the violent upheavals of the end of empire and the Cold War, international organizations developed a basic framework for holding State and non-State armed groups to account for their actions when taking prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) placed itself at the very centre of these developments, making detention visiting a cornerstone of its work. Nowhere was this growing preoccupation with the problem of protecting detainees more evident than apartheid South Africa, where the ICRC undertook more detention visits than in almost any other African country. During these visits the ICRC was drawn into an internationalized human rights dispute that severely tested its leadership and demonstrated the troubled rapport between humanitarianism and human rights. The problems seen in apartheid South Africa reflect today's dilemmas of how to protect political detainees in situations of extreme violence. We can look to the past to find solutions for today's political detainees − or “security detainees” as they are now more commonly called.

Although there are areas of uncertainty and overlap, authorizations for maritime law enforcement operations are beholden to a different regime from that which governs the conduct of armed conflict at sea. This article seeks to briefly describe five regularly employed authorizations for maritime law enforcement operations at sea: flag State consent, agreed pre-authorization, coastal State jurisdiction, UN Security Council resolutions, and the right of visit.

The rising pressures of urbanization in fragile and conflict-affected countries have increased concerns about the vulnerability of cities to armed threats. Changes in the character of armed conflict during the twenty-first century and its effects on cities in the developing world have exposed gaps in the planning and practice of peace and security, which retain a “nation-State bias” that circumvents local perspectives and agencies. Whereas full-scale use of military power in cities remains as destructive today as it has ever been, international organizations such as the United Nations have called for changed approaches to State tactics in urban areas. Mechanisms designed to prevent conflict or to help countries transition back to peace are particularly key if massive human and economic damages are to be avoided in a world of increasingly dense cities. Another key concern is the vulnerability of developing-world cities to low-intensity, if protracted, forms of violence by non-State actors, particularly in post-conflict contexts. Conflict prevention and peace transitions in cities (including mainstream international tools such as peacekeeping, stability and reconstruction aid) are affected by specifically urban pressures linked to rising populations, migration, ethnic tensions, institutional deterioration and the weakening of urban services. Therefore, the physical and social characteristics of cities interact with military and developmental policies in unique ways. An understanding of key local actors, services and institutions affecting urban drivers of armed conflict – an urban strategic environment – can help practitioners and strategists to craft comprehensive policies.

Visiting an overcrowded prison is a journey into the private life of each person deprived of his or her freedom, into the community of the detainees and of the staff working in such a place. Using the senses of sight, hearing, smell and touch, combined with empathy and time for observation, helps ICRC delegates to explore vulnerabilities, discover how detainees and staff cope, and grasp the intricate complexity of such a prison system. Beyond what is left of human dignity in these places of detention, when coping mechanisms become survival mechanisms, the suffering shows that overcrowding is wrong. It follows that if overcrowding is “nobody's fault”, it is the responsibility of every individual and every institution of the criminal justice system to create solutions.