In Lawmaking under Pressure, Giovanni Mantilla analyzes the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict. Until well into the twentieth century, states allowed atrocious violence as an acceptable product of internal conflict. Why have states created international laws to control internal armed conflict? Why did states compromise their national security by accepting these international humanitarian constraints? Why did they create these rules at improbable moments, as European empires cracked, freedom fighters emerged, and fears of communist rebellion spread? Mantilla explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s.

By the 1949 Diplomatic Conference that revised the Geneva Conventions, most countries supported legislation committing states and rebels to humane principles of wartime behavior and to the avoidance of abhorrent atrocities, including torture and the murder of non-combatants. However, for decades, states had long refused to codify similar regulations concerning violence within their own borders. Diplomatic conferences in Geneva twice channeled humanitarian attitudes alongside Cold War and decolonization politics, even compelling reluctant European empires Britain and France to accept them. Lawmaking under Pressure documents the tense politics behind the making of humanitarian laws that have become touchstones of the contemporary international normative order.

Mantilla not only explains the pressures that resulted in constraints on national sovereignty but also uncovers the fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict.

Giovanni Mantilla is a university lecturer at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Christ's College. Follow him on X @giofabman.

The analysis is well researched and well written and accurate in its main points.

In Lawmaking under Pressure, Mantilla deftly combines international relations theory with legal and diplomatic history to explain the processes of social pressure through which a collection of states and nongovernmental organizations broadened IHL to internal conflicts, despite the opposition of major states. Mantilla raises numerous questions for future research [and in] a time when some worry that US influence is waning, such questions portend noteworthy, practical insights.

Lawmaking Under Pressure is a stimulating and original contribution to the historical scholarship on IHL. With an ease of writing and robustness of insight it is sure to be of lasting interest to students of international law.

Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.

Mantilla examines the process by which constraints on national sovereignty eventually came about in the context of the 'fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict'.

Lawmaking Under Pressure is an incredibly detailed and insightful account of the history of non-international armed conflict. Giovanni Mantilla has certainly produced a book that will be mandatory reading.

Giovanni Mantilla has written what will likely become a landmark history of the evolution of the Geneva Conventions. [L]ike all good works of political science, Lawmaking Under Pressure is as important for the gaps it leaves open as for the questions it resolves.

Dr. Hans Blix, Leader of the Swedish diplomatic team at the Geneva Conferences in the 1970s:

Giovanni Mantilla has written a fascinating book. His remarkable tracing of diplomatic negotiations in Geneva and capitals shows how reluctant many governments were to accept international rules for internal conflicts and how important social pressure was for changing their positions. As most armed conflicts nowadays are internal, while most attention has been devoted to rules on international warfare, this book by Giovanni Mantilla is as pioneering as it is welcome.

Michael Barnett, The George Washington University, author of The Empire of Humanity:

Mantilla's Lawmaking Under Pressure is a major contribution to our understanding of the evolution of international humanitarian law and the worlds of possibility. States had little incentive to want to create legal change that would permit international interference to contain and regulate internal conflict. Based on meticulous historical and archival work, Mantilla uncovers how this unexpected outcome occurred not because of coercion or creative legal arguments, but rather because of social pressure that even the most powerful found too much to withstand.

Ward Thomas, College of the Holy Cross, author of The Ethics of Destruction:

Lawmaking under Pressure is exceptionally robust work that takes empirics and theory seriously. Giovanni Mantilla draws on archival sources to support his argument in a way I have rarely encountered in the discipline. It is also gracefully written.

Helen M. Kinsella, University of Wisconsin, Madison, author of The Image before the Weapon:

Lawmaking under Pressure is a highly original, utterly fascinating book. Giovanni Mantilla demonstrates through rich, hitherto unpublished and unplumbed, archival research the social politics of the development of international humanitarian law and, in so doing, expands our understanding of international law, international relations, and relations of power.