Assessing Claims of a New Doctrine of Pre-Emptive War under the Doctrine of Sources
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After examining state practice and opinio juris on the preemptive use of force in the last few years, I conclude that the prohibition of preemptive war where there is no armed attack or an instant, overwhelming threat has not changed. Under customary international law, this prohibition of preemptive use of force is a customary international law norm of extremely high normativity and as such state practice inconsistent confirms the norm particularly in the absence of evidence of its widespread and representative repudiation. Second, under the doctrine of sources, state practice inconsistent with a norm of customary international law or persistent dissension from it, does not establish a new norm but is instead regarded a violation of the norm. Third, even assuming that persistent objectors to the prohibition of preemptive use of force in the absence of an armed attack or instant, overwhelming threats, regard themselves as having created a new rule binding to themselves, under the doctrine of sources a small number of states cannot within a limited time frame create a new rule without 'a very widespread and representative participation' in the practice. Finally, a small number of states cannot create a new rule of customary international law where there is practice which conflicts with the rule or where there are protests to the new rule. This is particularly so with respect to a rule relating to the prohibition of the use of force which is a 'conspicuous example of a rule of international law having the character of jus cogens' with respect to which practice inconsistent with it would be regarded as a violation of the norm rather than as establishing a new norm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".