Written by Annabelle Lukin (Macquarie University) and Rodrigo Araújo e Castro (Macquarie University and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
The Sydney Corpus Lab is pleased to announce a new corpus, the Macquarie Laws of War Corpus, developed to promote research collaborations in the field of international war law.
While corpus linguistics has been a technique in law for some years, it is only recently that work in international law has drawn on such techniques. A great example is a 2017 paper in which Amanda Potts (Cardiff University) and Anne Lise Kjaer (University of Copenhagen) compiled a corpus of the transcripts of the Trials and Appeals Chambers of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the first war crimes tribunal since the post WWII trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo. The corpus consisted of 10.5 million words, across 121 transcripts (English version only).
Our new corpus brings together the texts considered to constitute what is variously referred to as the “laws of war”, the “law of armed conflict” and “international humanitarian law”. The corpus is based on all the texts hosted in the International Committee of the Red Cross’s database of international humanitarian law.
This corpus starts at the 1856 Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law – the first open-ended multilateral treaty to which any state could become a party. The final document is the latest amendment to the Rome Statute (2019), the legal instrument which established the International Criminal Court, the body with responsibility for trying individuals charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression, and genocide.
The corpus naturally includes what are the most famous of such instruments, the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The corpus includes a total of 110 texts, nearly 392K words. Now offered in the standard CQPweb interface, this highly significant body of texts can be easily searched using basic corpus linguistic techniques, such as word frequencies, concordances (see Figure 1) and collocations. The corpus can also be searched by the categories to which these documents are assigned by the International Committee of the Red Cross, such as “victims of armed conflicts”, “methods and means of warfare”, “criminal repression”, etc.
This new corpus will be presented at an upcoming interdisciplinary workshop, hosted by the Sydney Law School and the Sydney Corpus Lab, called “Law, language and warfare”.
To find out more, read our recently published paper where we give examples of how this corpus can be used to understand the powerful role of the laws of war, not only in restraining geopolitical violence, but also in very clear ways enabling and legitimating it.