The Protagonism of the USSR and Socialist States in the Revision of International Humanitarian Law (IHL)

Dr. Giovanni Mantilla
Lecturer
Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS)
University of Cambridge
Fellow, Christ’s College Cambridge


The USSR and Socialist states played a crucial and still largely underappreciated role in the re-negotiation of international humanitarian law in 1949 and 1977. Drawing on new multi-archival research, I demonstrate that support by the Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc states was essential to the negotiation of key legal achievements with regard to non-traditional conflict forms and actors, including rules on internal conflicts, national liberation war, and irregular fighters. They exerted influence chiefly through concerted action to create or side with majority coalitions alongside neutral Western or Third World countries, forcing their principal Western foes to accept rules they found undesirable. Yet Soviet-Western interactions in the re-making of IHL were not simply confrontational. In the 1970s, as Cold War hostilities cooled, East and West engaged in partial backdoor cooperativeness, leading to critical features of the Additional Protocols I and II, including rules for the protection of civilians and IHL oversight. 

Keywords: laws of war; international humanitarian law; Socialism; Cold War; decolonization; Geneva Conventions; Additional Protocols; ICRC

Introduction
The Soviet Union (USSR) and the Socialist Bloc played a crucial and still largely unrecognized role in the remaking of international humanitarian law (IHL) after World War II.  Drawing on the archives of the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US), France, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), I demonstrate that Soviet influence was essential to advance IHL in some key areas and often against the wishes of some leading Western states. In particular, the USSR and the Socialist Bloc were pivotal supporters of the creation of legal rules for internal armed conflict, national liberation, and the protection of irregular fighters, both in 1949 and in the 1970s. Socialist endorsement of humanitarian legalism for internal armed conflict and conflicts of self-determination, among other contributions, may initially seem surprising but in historical context are not. After all, in IHL-making as in many other areas of international institution-building, Socialist influence was part and parcel of the central international political transformations and struggles of the postwar period. First, the Cold War ideological competition for global predominance and legitimacy. Second, the endorsement of socialist revolution via the legitimation of forms of ‘irregular’ warfare. Third, and related, the re-birth of the Third World through decolonization as a vessel to further propel socialism globally and outmaneuver the leadership of the liberal-democratic West. While IHL historiography specifically has not been wholly blind to Socialist influence, only rarely have scholars analyzed it explicitly as a productive (and not always obstructive) of key developments in the law. Since little research exists that studies the politics of IHL negotiations with the benefit of historical hindsight and the use of archival sources, a certain image remains of the Soviet Union and its allies as consistently inimical to IHL, vis-à-vis a more progressive and humanitarian liberal West.
In contrast, this article argues that the Socialist Bloc was vital to the negotiation of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 and again -- though often less remarked -- during the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions in the 1970s. I posit that one essential means through which the Socialist Bloc exerted its influence in the revision of IHL in the 1940s and 1970s was its concerted, strategic action to create or side with majority coalitions alongside neutral Western or Third World countries, with the goal of forcing its principal Western foes to accept rules they found unpalatable. This is of course not to say that Socialist participation was invariably ‘progressive’ in its intent or its effects, as that varied across issues. My claims are only that Socialist protagonism is crucial to understand the process and important outcomes of IHL-making in 1949 and the 1970s, and that such protagonism was often deployed via Socialist-induced or supported majority pressure amid diplomatic negotiations.
Soviet Bloc influence in the re-making of IHL was not simply in confrontation with the West, however. As Cold War hostilities cooled in the era of détente in the 1970s, Soviet behavior toward IHL-making shifted from antagonism to partial backdoor cooperativeness during the negotiation of the Additional Protocols. By 1975, the US and the USSR found ways to act together to arrive at mutually-agreed legal compromises which simultaneously did not threaten their military interest and overcame the demands of the majorities at the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts (CDDH). This dynamic led to the adoption in the 1970s of the critical articles relating to the protection of civilians from hostilities, and the strengthening of the oversight machinery of IHL through a new International Fact-Finding Commission, among others. Overall, Soviet and socialist influence decisively shaped the postwar contours of IHL to a degree rarely acknowledged. This article makes these connections visible and explicit, hoping to ignite new historiographical interest in the diverse origins of humanitarian law.

The Diplomatic Conference of 1949: ‘A Happy Hunting Ground of Soviet Obstructionism’?
The USSR did not participate in the travaux préparatoires of the postwar initiative to revise existing IHL beginning in 1945-46 due to hostility toward the ICRC. A few Soviet allied states from occupied Eastern Europe (such as Poland) came to the preparatory conferences of governments experts and of the Red Cross movement, in 1947 and 1948 respectively. Their most noteworthy acts there involved sponsoring resolutions encouraging world peace, nuclear disarmament, and the legal prohibition of the use of weapons of mass destruction due to their effects on civilians. They brought back such initiatives to the 1949 ‘Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of International Conventions for the Protection of War Victims’, causing uproar among leading Western powers.
The USSR did not confirm attendance to the 1949 Diplomatic Conference until about two weeks before it opened. Sudden news of Soviet participation alongside seven ‘satellites’ produced immediate anxiety among Western states. While Western observers expected the Soviet Bloc to lack preparation and to politicize the proceedings, the first week or so of the Conference proved them wrong, however, as Soviet delegates were not only well-informed but also acted as productive interlocutors. Yet, as British negotiators presciently intuited in private, the ‘honeymoon’ would not last.
To the shock of many Western diplomats in 1949, yet consistent with the Soviet Union’s early Cold War foreign policy goal of lambasting the West amid the rising ideological competition for global supremacy, half-way through the Conference the Soviet delegation threw its weight behind the received drafts of the Conventions (the so-called ‘Stockholm drafts’, from a preparatory Conference in 1948) which reflected the wishes of the ICRC across most areas of protection. On occasion, Soviet proposals went even farther in a humanitarian direction than the Stockholm texts (or ICRC itself) had dared go. Crucially, the Soviet ‘open’ attitude contrasted with Western caution and conservatism (especially British) regarding various important modifications to existing IHL, such as the extension of Prisoner of War (POW) protection to armed resistors or ‘partisans’ or the inclusion of internal conflicts within the Conventions.
Privately, Western powers quickly decoded the Soviet strategy: to embarrass the West (particularly the US and colonial powers Britain and France) whenever it was politically expedient to do so by endorsing a more humane legalism. ‘From [Soviet] utterances so far, [we] conclude they plan [to] assume [the] role of great humanitarians and possibly endeavor to embarrass those who oppose [the] working drafts on practical and legal grounds’, mused an American telegram early into the Conference. The French and British delegations privately expressed a similar concern that Soviet conference behavior was calibrated to score political and legal points against the West by supporting the adoption of onerous substantive commitments in some areas yet without compromising their narrow preferences in others, especially their opposition to stronger external oversight/enforcement of the Conventions or against guaranteeing of POW protection to alleged war criminals. Overall, despite some instances of private cooperativeness and overlapping interest, the Soviet public approach toward the leading Western powers in the 1949 Conference was primarily confrontational.
The most contentious revisions to IHL in 1949 related to the Third Convention on POWs and to the creation of a new treaty to protect civilians that eventually became the Fourth Convention. As shown below, bitter battles emerged between a ‘progressive’ Socialist Bloc and conservative Western leaders regarding the extension of POW status and protection to so-called ‘partisans’, i.e. members of organized resistance groups fighting against foreign occupation, or the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks and use of uncontrollable weapons (read: weapons of mass destruction) against civilians. Finally, on issues transversal to all four Conventions, East and West quarreled harshly about the extension of the new law to internal armed conflict, the codification of violations against the Conventions, and, as noted, the strength of external monitoring and enforcement.  

 Partisans
The controversy around partisans pitted those states that had endured occupation during WWII against those that had not. Because Nazi occupation had befallen both Western and socialist states, those opposing the protection of partisans faced a vocal, morally-empowered coalition. Among the skeptics, the British were particularly adamant that ‘guerrillas in international conflict’ should not be afforded special humanitarian consideration except under very strict conditions, per the rationale that today’s occupied power could become tomorrow’s occupying force, and no occupying force likes a legally-protected resistor. Yet for France and the Eastern European countries whose partisans had suffered gruesome repression in Nazi hands, the heroic martyrdom of resistance groups should simply not go unnoticed. They expressed their views openly, receiving essential Soviet support (Socialist support of irregular warfare, as we shall see, became a theme that continued into the 1970s, with national liberation conflicts.)
Both the US and the UK resented the allegedly ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ attitude of their traumatized, war-fearing continental peers. A 1947 U.S. secret report criticized the formerly occupied countries, acidly noting that ‘[r]elatively speaking, next time they wanted to be sitting on satin cushions and fed peaches and cream’. Yet these Western leading states lacked the strength of moral argument, and more importantly, of numbers. The Soviets, and with them the entire Socialist Bloc openly echoed the demands of the formerly Nazi-occupied countries on the issue of partisans. Per British accounts, the Soviet delegation ‘was prepared to go to any length to secure protection for the irregular combatant’.
Given the forceful majority enabled by a Socialist-heavy coalition of states, the British and the Americans had to settle for a compromise. The revised Third Convention was thence revised to feature protections for resistance movements in international conflict (labeled ‘militias or volunteer corps’ in Article 4) without the requirement that they should exercise territorial control, as the Anglo-Americans wished. The Soviet Union was crucial for securing this revision by reaffirming fractures within the West and siding with friendly nations with shared historical experiences and traumas.

Non-International Armed Conflicts
A similar dynamic emerged regarding other breakthrough legal innovations at the Conference, such as the extension of IHL to internal conflicts. This change was long overdue, having been on the agenda of the ICRC since the 1920s after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. By 1949, following a pattern of ‘troubles’ and repression in the 1930s, but especially after the cruelty of Spanish Civil War, there was a felt momentum that humanitarian law could not ignore inhumane conduct amid internal conflict. 
Yet humanitarian momentum did not mean easy consensus among states. On this issue it was the Western empires Britain and France that opposed this legal change on the grounds of national sovereignty, fearing an encouragement of rebellion at home and especially in their colonies. Indeed, by 1949 it was obvious to them that the tide of decolonization might grow stronger and sweep the old Empires awash. Less skeptical, the US endorsed a cautious position, tying humanitarian considerations to ‘objective’ conditions (such as rebel control of territory) and to state discretion. 
In Conference, however, the conservative view advanced by the U.K. and France did not wield a majority. Small and medium Western European and Latin American powers such as Monaco, Switzerland, Mexico, and Norway supported the ‘humanization’ of internal war. More to the point here, Socialist states, and most forcefully the USSR, sided with this supportive coalition, verbally castigating the major Western powers that fancied themselves liberal-democratic while seeking to block legal changes widely perceived as necessary.
Socialist support and Soviet leadership deeply embarrassed the European empires, especially the British, forcing a move to compromise. Curiously, however, the Soviets’ preferred text, designed to apply the entirety of the Conventions to internal conflict, including measures to protect civilians from the dangers of warfare not yet adopted (and eventually rejected) in Conference did not wield a majority either. Instead, a ‘tailored’ article legalizing the application of the principles of the Conventions, plus a robust list of specific prohibitions and protective measures, was adopted in a compromise of the diverse positions. Famously, the negative definition of internal conflict simply as ‘conflict not of an international character’ was brought back into the adopted rule, now known as Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions, due to the drafting prowess of the British and French delegations, concealing their interest in enshrining an ambiguous scope of application that might allow them to prevent the application of IHL in their colonial conflicts.
The British post-Conference report summed up the Soviet delegation’s behavior at the 1949 Conference:
From the outset it entered the arena clad in a white sheet and posturing as the champion of the ‘humanitarians…’ [It] professed to be animated by the sole desire to protect the unfortunate victims of war and to hamper the aggressive designs of the ‘Imperialist Powers.’ Such an attitude fitted in well with the genuine Soviet desire to give every protection to the assassin, the spy and the saboteur, since it became apparent as the Conference proceeded that it was precisely this type of irregular warfare… which the Soviet Union expected to be able to wage with impunity… Only as the Conference proceeded did the hollowness of the Soviet pretensions become apparent…

In the end, British lamentations that the Geneva Conventions of 1949 had become the ‘happy hunting ground of the Soviet obstructionists’, vividly embodied a frustration with a productive, and to some extent progressive Socialist and Soviet influence. Indeed, behavior that for the British counted as ‘obstructionism’ in fact worked to inject crucial political dynamism into the negotiations, furthering divides within a West that was far from monolithic, and channeling them toward important legal achievements (which curiously not always conformed to strict Socialist desires, as with Common Article 3 on internal conflicts).  Overall, in the process of pressuring major Western powers to concede, compromise, and sometimes lose, the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc were fundamental in reconstructing IHL in 1949.

Foes, then Friends: Making the Additional Protocols of 1977
The years following the adoption of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 featured the rise of the Cold War, the intensification of ideological competition between East and West, and the decolonization from the European empires. In political terms, most vulnerable were the Western powers boasting liberal values, yet increasingly involved in far-flung and usually brutal counterinsurgency campaigns. Dutch, French, and British atrocities in Africa and Asia, and later US intervention in Indo-China, placed major Western powers at a disadvantage in the global battle for ‘hearts and minds’. Socialist states wasted no time pillorying the West in public forums, aided by and contributing to the moral anti-colonial chorus sung by an expanding cohort of newly-independent states. International organizations and conferences, especially those with universal participation such as the United Nations’ General Assembly (UNGA), became effective platforms for the promotion of the right to self-determination, amid a broader onslaught against imperialism, and for human rights and non-exploitative development. 
New historiographies of international law and diplomacy have begun to document the deep influence and effectiveness of a re-born Third World in the remaking of received rules and institutions. The Socialist Bloc and the USSR shrewdly understood that, no matter their own imperial and repressive practices at home, the moral crusade of the decolonized stood to hugely benefit them amid the continued Cold War competition. IHL was no exception, and as the 1960s wore on, it too became a fertile terrain of normative claims-making for a Third World decrying unequal legal treatment for those fighting for self-determination (‘freedom fighters’) and deploring Western barbarity, especially the use of aerial bombardment and napalm upon civilians. In this context, the Socialist Bloc and the USSR saw great political opportunity, and although as shown below their specific attitudes varied across issues and evolved as détente with the US congealed, the emerging process of reaffirming and revising IHL began with an unenthusiastic West on the defensive, and an empowered Third World-led and Socialist-supported majority at the United Nations (UN).
Starting in 1968 at the now seminal First International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran and the UNGA that same year, but quickly moving back to the traditional aegis of the ICRC, debate about modifying IHL opened anew. Meetings of experts and Red Cross/Crescent Societies formally began in 1971 in a series of events hosted by the ICRC. Inter-departmental Committees were created by some of the major powers, including US, UK, France, and West Germany, to prepare their negotiating positions. Bilateral and mini-lateral coordination began in 1971, with the US and Britain forming an especially close relationship, and NATO states convening periodically beginning in 1972.
Initially, as featured in early UN reports, the central concerns were the regulation of wars for self-determination and increased protection for non-state POWs within those conflicts, the protection of the civilian population from the dangers of warfare in international and internal conflict, and the improvement of IHL enforcement. Over the years of travaux préparatoires, pressure mounted, especially from the Third World, to include additional topics, notably the prohibition of ‘indiscriminate’ means and methods of warfare.
In private, Western states complained about the ‘lack of realism’ or practicability of these and other ideas promoted within ICRC-steered debates by Third World and Socialist states. In public, however, officials were instructed to show empathy toward the process of revisions and not to be obstructionist. Yet given steep disagreements among states groupings, the preparatory process did not forecast swift, sober negotiations. A minute of the ICRC’s Legal Commission revealed their awareness of the politicized process:
Non-international armed conflicts only preoccupy the West. The protection of the civilian population is the particular interest of the East and the Scandinavians. The representatives of the third world believe that certain rules can be applied only by technologically-advanced countries… the ICRC will have to explain the sound justification for the proposals it puts forward and to try to craft more concise definitions. 
Despite initial public quarreling and opposed viewpoints on important areas, the 1970s negotiation process eventually demonstrated a more complicated attitude by the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc toward IHL revisions, as compared with 1949.  On the one hand, the Soviet Bloc decidedly supported the Third World majority pressing for the adoption of the controversial provisions dealing with liberation war and freedom fighters, aggravating most Western states and especially colonial powers Britain and France. On the other hand, in contrast, and despite contrary earlier attitudes, the Soviet Bloc engaged in crucial and thus far largely unacknowledged cooperation with the US in the making of the other innovations within the First Additional Protocol, including the rules protecting civilians from the danger of hostilities, and the design of the International Fact-Finding Commission, and the regulation of conventional weapons. 

2.1. The Socialist Coalition and Wars of National Liberation 
Although conflicts of liberation or self-determination from the European empires may well have been covered by Common Article 3 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, in practice they were not. Never were the empires willing to admit that anti-colonial violence rose to the level of ‘armed conflict’, considering it no more than ‘terrorism’ or ‘disturbance’, to be met mercilessly. Conversely, armed groups struggling to achieve independence firmly believed that their use of violence was obviously not merely ‘internal’. For so-called ‘freedom fighters’ and the new states supporting them, theirs was an international moral crusade meriting the protection of the body of IHL regulating conflicts between states, modified to include special considerations.
Debates and normative developments within the UN gave increasing credence to the demands of the decolonized states, both past and imminent. Critical resolutions were adopted in 1960 and 1973 denouncing colonialism and granting legitimacy and enhanced status to anti-colonial ‘combatants’, adding to a mounting record of ‘UN law’ on the subject. Yet IHL presented special legal challenges for the incorporation of ‘national liberation’ as such, insofar as its doctrine and rules were said to be indifferent to the political motives of the parties to conflict, which were conceived as ‘equal’ before the law. To argue and legislate otherwise, many Western experts claimed, would directly imperil the impartiality of the law, and thus its integrity and likelihood of application. 
Yet to an empowered Third World coalition of states, this argument amounted to little more than status-quo-preserving legalese. In their view, it was precisely because the parties to a war of national liberation were unequal in their capacity to inflict and resist harm (with a marked advantage to the Empires) that IHL should abandon or at least bend the legal fiction of belligerent equality, and confer special treatment to those valiantly struggling for independence. To the chagrin of the West, these Third World preoccupations became an integral part of discussions about IHL revisions and since they held majority support in the UN and other international bodies, were never dislodged from debate. While endorsement came from several sources, the Socialist Bloc embraced them consistently. The ICRC, impartial as it strove to be, sympathized with the need to enhance humanitarian protection across all forms of conflict, but declined to forcefully affiliate itself with the Third World view. From 1969 through 1974, state delegations fiercely debated the terms and merits of explicitly including language on ‘national liberation’ and the consideration of ‘freedom-fighters’ as POWs, failing to reach a consensus. Unable to make the call, but responsible for submitting the working drafts of the Protocols to the Diplomatic Conference, the ICRC decided to leave the tough decisions to the participating states, marking the proposed language on national liberation with an asterisk to the opening article of the First Protocol. As shown next, this serious controversy was ultimately only ‘resolved’ by a show of voting force, and the ‘solution’ itself unfortunately proved to be of strictly political, not legal or practical value. 
The First Session of the CDDH opened formally on February 20 year, gathering 125 state delegations and 30 observer international organizations (a striking growth compared to the 1949 Conference, in which 59 state delegations and 5 observer states participated). What the Swiss hosts and the ICRC had hoped would be single- or two-session Conference eventually ballooned into four meetings of several weeks, lasting from 1974-1977 and collectively adding up to over 8 years of work (if one counts the travaux préparatoires). 
While any reasonable observer might have expected the issue of national liberation to be foremost on the agenda, no participant anticipated the level of tension it stirred in 1974. In practice, most of the five-week long First Session was spent in harsh diplomatic battles relating to the inclusion of self-determination in the First Protocol, governing international armed conflict. On the one hand, procedural wrangling (including on whether to admit delegations of national liberation movements at the Conference and with what status and role) occupied the first two weeks. Once that was settled, the textual incorporation of national liberation war -- long feared by the West -- emerged immediately, producing a sort of diplomatic revolution. Several amendments featuring language of varied explosiveness were presented in Committee, three of which relied Socialist-country sponsorship (see Appendix).
After some behind-the-scenes negotiation, a merger proposal (option #3 in Table 1 in the Appendix) was submitted to a roll-call vote in Committee, and with 70 supporters to 21, and 13 abstentions, it was adopted (see Appendix). As the evidence shows, Socialist states were either proponents of specific language or key coalition members alongside Third World states in a vote that decisively ‘upgraded’ conflicts for self-determination to the status of international conflict, against the wishes of most Western states. It is likely that, absent Socialist support, this Third World coalition may not have had enough votes to secure a super-majority, thus allowing the opposing Western countries to form a ‘blocking third’. This pattern of Socialist support for the legal legitimation of self-determination repeated itself as the amended Article 1 of the First Protocol was considered and voted on in Plenary (see Appendix), except that in the final vote Western states opted to abstain, not vote against, hoping to thereby save face and avoid public opprobrium.
The related issue of whether to grant POW treatment to members of national liberation movements arose in the Third (1976) and Fourth (1977) Sessions of the Diplomatic Conference. Interestingly, unlike the controversial amendment to Article 1, this question did not meet the united opposition of the major Western powers. In a departure from France, the UK, and West Germany, the US delegation led by George H. Aldrich negotiated language behind-the-scenes with key representatives of the opposing coalition (an interesting mix: Norway, Algeria, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Palestine Liberation Organization). The American goal was to secure the broadest terms of humanitarian legal protection possible, not so much to protect the freedom fighter, but to prevent legal loopholes exploitable -- as they had been by the North Vietnamese – by enemy forces to deny American POWs protection. 
Allegedly in liaison with the ICRC, Aldrich thus drew upon the legal formulas through which US in Vietnam (and the French in Algeria before it) had allowed for the application of POW treatment (and in the American case, status,) to most detained ‘irregulars,’ so long as they had been carrying arms openly before and during military engagements. The US delegate then used this template as basis for a compromise text that set out the conditions under which combatants could receive POW status and offered ‘POW-like’ treatment to anyone who was captured while carrying arms openly.
Despite US brokerage, fellow major Western states never warmed to this compromise language (as their final explanations of vote made it evident). Nevertheless, the Draft Article 42 on POWs (later re-numbered Article 44) of the First Protocol was the subject of roll-call vote in Committee. With 66 votes to 2 and 18 abstentions, the controversial on POWs of the First Protocol was adopted with Socialist states supporting it in unison, while most leading Western powers (save for the US and France) abstained (see roll-call vote in Appendix). Just over a month later, following a similar Plenary vote (see Appendix) the controversial POW article passed its final test. Socialist support thus proved essential to secure their adoption both in Committee and Plenary, lending a critical numerical and political hand to an empowered Third World coalition.

2.2. Soviet-US Cooperation 
One need not rehearse here the ebb and flow of US and Soviet rapprochement in the years of détente, yet the complex links between Cold War tensions and the making of international law (beyond nuclear weapons) in the late 1960s and 1970s still beg for careful historical research. Although its influence on the revision of IHL has been scarcely noticed, détente was in fact crucial to understand various legal outcomes embedded within the First Additional Protocol. As noted earlier, the initial years of the Protocols’ negotiation exhibited traditional East-West public rivalry. The Socialist Bloc enthusiastically participated in debates and endorsed resolutions (within the UN and elsewhere) castigating Western illiberal conduct and atrocity at home and especially abroad. Toward the end of the 1960s, this meant concretely a continued denunciation of European colonialism, racism, occupation, and apartheid, and perhaps most pointedly in the Cold War context, a critique of American involvement and war conduct in Vietnam. The Socialist Bloc thus supported resolutions on all these issues, not wasting opportunities to castigate Western hypocrisy. Yet since the beginning matters existed in which East-West convergence, especially US-Soviet Union, was apparent. The most important doubtless was the refusal to discuss the prohibition and regulation of nuclear and conventional weapons in the context of IHL revisions. Their shared view was that such topics did not fit the mandate of the UN or the ICRC, and should rather be discussed in the appropriate (read: great-power dominated) forums, such as the UN Commission on Disarmament. The US and the USSR would eventually succeed in (more or less clearly) dislodging nuclear weapons issues from IHL negotiations, but discussion on conventional weapons continued until the late 1970s, resulting in a series of treaty instruments adopted in the 1980.
Beyond weapons regulation, if there was convergence early on, it was not apparent. As noted, the Socialist Bloc stood firmly on the side of Third World anti-colonialism, at least in general terms. But the specifics of this support shifted as soon as it became more evident, especially to the Soviets, that successful Third World demands too might hamper their military interest in areas such as the regulation of combat practices, or the creation of IHL oversight machinery.

2.2.1.The Protection of Civilians from the Dangers of Warfare
By the late 1960s, it was clear to most observers that IHL lacked robust limits on combatants’ conduct of hostilities. The Hague Conventions (from 1899 and 1907) enjoined combatants to attack only each other and to spare civilians and civilian property, yet states long understood this as a general injunction, not as precise guidance. And while the Geneva Conventions of 1949 had codified some rules (the creation of protected zones, for instance) for certain types of civilians (those enduring occupation or living in enemy territory), they had left the deployment of violence largely unregulated. Enhanced restrictions on states’ combat practices, much like the regulation of various weapons, thus remained the ‘next frontier’ in IHL development. The decolonized Third World understood this through painful lived experience, and by 1970, American conduct of war in Vietnam only gave their demands greater urgency. Socialist countries agreed, whether out of conviction or out of Cold War propaganda value, and from the outset they aligned themselves with a controversial view: that attacks on civilians should be prohibited not matter what, and that violations of this prohibition should be made war crimes. Some Socialist states such as Romania even supported the idea that means and methods of war, which might cause ‘unnecessary suffering’ or have indiscriminate effects, should be prohibited. In British words, the aim of certain states such as Hungary and Yugoslavia was ‘quite simply, to make the rules so difficult that war would be virtually impossible’.
These positions invoked intense quarreling before and during the 1974-1977 Diplomatic Conference. Although they reserved their position on weapons throughout, the Soviets did not initially oppose the Third World and fellow Socialist states’ proposal to unconditionally prohibit attacks on civilians. Echoing the experience of the 1949 Geneva Convention negotiations, in 1971-72 British delegates reported that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc were together happy to pose as the ‘champions of a scale of protection for the civilian population,’ reportedly losing ‘few opportunities for attacking the Americans for ‘callous militarism’.’ 
As may be inferred, Western states felt differently. Indeed, they had long fought to avoid any specific restrictions on targeting and bombardment, and notwithstanding persistent ICRC (and increasingly for some of them, domestic civil society) efforts to persuade or pressure them, their view remained unchanged: that to agree to more than general principles on these matters was to engage in pointless humanitarian legalism, and that to expect states to outlaw or even seriously restrict war-efficient combat practices was a sort of malicious pipe dream.
The process of IHL revisions altered this scenario, since having accepted to participate in it, the major Western states could not but engage the arguments of opposing states. And to their frustration, theirs was by 1970 a minority view, and a rather unpopular one inside the conference and in the eyes of global public opinion (or so they intuited). Soon, therefore, US and UK delegates were forced to rethink their position with the Americans additionally motivated by their experience in Vietnam and the public uproar caused by reckless atrocities in My Lai and elsewhere, Their new working position, endorsed by the UK, and more grudgingly by France, West Germany, and a few other fellow NATO members, was that absolute prohibitions were a no-go, but ‘flexible’ rules, that is, rules that acknowledged a general regard for civilians and that compelled states to exercise precaution before attack to the extent that was feasible, to distinguish between civilians and combatants -- vowing not to attack or harm civilians deliberately -- and which followed the precept of proportionality, weighing the anticipated military advantage against the risk of harming civilians.
As the italicized words above indicate, the Anglo-American delegates threw their weight upon the promotion of rules that simultaneously professed allegiance to the general principle of civilian protection while containing within them a measure of military discretion and indeterminacy. This was a shrewd way to square the legal and diplomatic circle, tending both to growing humanitarian pressure for improved law and to the requirements of military necessity. Yet the Third World states were not persuaded and they continued to press for absolute prohibitions as did certain Socialist states, including Romania and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Both denounced the Western position, essentially, as a means to dress up neo-colonial militarism in legal-humanitarian garb.
Curiously, however, and probably after realizing that steep humanitarian constraints on civilian targeting would also impact their military practices, the Soviet position began to differ from that of fellow Socialist states. That is, if in the early travaux years Soviet delegates had been happy to score political points against their Western counterparts through the endorsement of blanket humanitarian prohibitions, it appears that the show of force of the Third World supermajority during the First Session (1974), and the apparent firmness (or to some, intransigence) with which it clung to its positions, raised alarms within the Soviet delegation regarding the actual desirability of ‘radical’ rules in other realms, including civilian protection. These fractures within the Socialist Bloc during IHL negotiations reflect the active efforts of particular countries at the time, especially Romania and Albania (and of course Yugoslavia) to pursue foreign policies that distinguished them from the Soviet Union and positioned them as superior champions of non-European anti-colonialism.
Consistent with the era of détente, by late 1974 Soviet delegates began reaching out to their American counterparts and proposing bilateral meetings to coordinate their views. Although detailed records of the US-USSR meetings remain unavailable to my knowledge, it is clear that both states sought first to agree on terms acceptable to both – presumably a convenient balance between military utility and humanitarianism reflecting a flexible or ‘best efforts’ approach, -- and then to coordinate with their respective allies in private in order to defuse opposition at the Conference, hoping to secure adoption of their preferred language without much modification. 
Interestingly though scarcely remarked upon by IHL historians, Head American delegate George Aldrich admitted to this cooperative dynamic in a published article from 1977. According to Aldrich:
At the second session of the Conference in 1975, many votes were taken but with a difference. Most of the fundamental disagreements were first worked out through negotiated compromises [between the US and USSR.] In particular, careful and successful efforts were made by the United States and the Soviet Union to ensure that any provisions adopted were acceptable to both of them and their allies.
A further step key to the success of the US-USSR strategy, was the steering role played by the American Head delegate, George Aldrich, as Rapporteur of the Committee (III) within which the draft articles on the protection of civilians were debated. In particular, American leadership of a Working Group tasked with reconciling proposals on these articles was essential for drafting compromise language that, while safeguarding the interests of the US/Western group and USSR, could be also accepted by Third World majorities in Committee and Plenary. 
Unfortunately, the only record available of the proceedings of the US-led Working Group is the American Rapporteur’s own account of the debates. Without naming specific states, these reports document in relative detail the difficulties faced within the Working Group to hash out the various texts, noting sometimes awkward constructions (Art. 48 on the protection of objects indispensable to the civilian population) or ambiguous qualifications or aspirational language (‘feasible precautions’ in Art. 50 about protection from attacks, or ‘to the maximum extent feasible,’ in Art. 51). Yet in most cases agreement upon acceptable texts was reached within the Working Group, unsurprisingly in a manner consistent with the American flexible ‘best efforts’, non-prohibitive approach. 
In a final step, when the texts were up for final public consideration and approval in Committee and Plenary, the US and USSR Head Delegates worked in tandem: the Americans introduced the draft texts, the Soviets expressed agreement. And whenever amendments arose, both sides made statements urging others not to disturb the hard-won compromises attained. It was thus thanks to this curious careful shepherding in the hands of the Americans and the Soviets that the toughest articles in the First Protocol dealing with the regulation of combat practice survived the contentious 1970s negotiations and became enshrined in Additional Protocol I.

2.2.2. Further US-USSR Cooperation
In the quote cited above, Aldrich refers (in plural) to how US-Soviet compromises paved the way to solving the ‘fundamental disagreements’ of the Diplomatic Conference after 1975. Further research in US and Russian archives must continue to untangle with precision the exact extent of great power collaboration, yet there are at least three other important areas in which its incidence is suggested by available archival and public evidence.
First, archival evidence suggests that in the 1970s neither the Americans nor the Soviets desired the creation of a new formal oversight body for IHL. This is unsurprising for the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, which had consistently argued against external mechanisms of IHL monitoring and enforcement. It is perhaps more surprising for the Americans, whose position had long been that the weaknesses of IHL lay not with a lack of rules, but with the absence of strong compliance machinery. Yet, likely due to the backlash following atrocity in Vietnam and to the strengthening of IHL rules through the Protocols’ negotiation process, by the closing years of the Conference, American delegates seemed to have lost their early enthusiasm. (A third reason may have been a historical distrust of Soviet conduct, given the latter’s swift proclivity to label American violations of IHL war crimes). When it came time to negotiate the terms of the oversight body, eventually labeled an ‘International Fact-Finding Commission’, the US and the East Germans (who were most active on this issue among Socialist states) collaborated in public and likely also in private to make the Commission’s jurisdiction and operation conditional upon states’ explicit voluntary acceptance, thereby severely hampering its powers.
Second, as noted earlier, both the US and the Soviet delegations shared a lack of enthusiasm for weapons regulation in the frame of IHL. Interestingly, this was an issue in which the Socialist Bloc was divided, with certain governments (again Romania, but also Yugoslavia and Albania) vouching for strict prohibitions or limitations upon a range of weapons deemed to cause unnecessary suffering or to be indiscriminate. Hard though they tried, and doubtless owing to majority pressure and persistent leadership (notably Swedish and Mexican) on the weapons issue, both Americans and Soviets were forced to engage in the debate during the Conference (through a dedicated ad-hoc Committee) and alongside it in a series of parallel weapons-specific meetings. Available archival evidence suggests a shared interest between the West and the Soviets in entertaining public debate merely to save face, yet no real desire to see meaningful regulation emerge dealing with conventional (let alone nuclear) weapons. Per a British memo from 1975: 
It seems to me that [our] basic approaches to this subject are indeed similar. We are both concerned to give some sort of positive response to international humanitarian pressure; on the other hand, we wish to resist unrealistic prohibitions… Our objective should be both to reassure them [that they agreed on substance]… and at the same time to try to persuade them to make a more credible effort to share their thinking with the international weapons community; it puts the West in an invidious position if we are left to be the only ones to deploy research-based arguments against the Swedes etc. Yet if we were to give up on this for lack of matching Russian effort, both the Russians and ourselves might well expect to suffer under an increased weight of international opinion.
Available evidence thus strongly points to a convergence of interest and a desire to coordinate between the superpowers on the issue of conventional weapons regulation. And although the extent of such collaboration (and whether and how it actually occurred) remains unclear, the weaknesses of the final treaty outcome, the Conventional Weapons Convention (1980), at least hints at their effectiveness.

2.3. Other matters of Socialist Bloc interest
For reasons of space and focus, this article has not sought to cover the entire range of concerns, either those promoted or those opposed, by Socialist states in the negotiation of the 1974-1977 negotiations. Yet before closing it seems important to at least mention a few other areas in which the USSR and various Socialist countries held keen interest, and to what results.
First, the Protecting Powers system. Since 1929, the Geneva Conventions relied on a system of third-state oversight: the voluntary, mutual designation of other states to act as ‘Protecting Powers’ (PP) tasked with the task of ‘scrutinizing’ belligerents’ application of the Geneva Conventions. Although aspirations for a stronger PP system existed in 1949, the early Cold War context blocked further advancement, with the Soviet Union showing no willingness to accept external supervision. Due to its voluntariness, the PP system designed in 1949 unsurprisingly failed to operate except in isolated occasions. And although in the 1970s a number of countries (among them Scandinavian and Western European states and a few leaders from the Third World, such as Pakistan) set out to fix this by introducing clear procedures of appointment which made the PP system (seemingly) automatic, the result was equally desultory as state consent lurked behind the text as an implicit condition of application. As in 1949, the fiercest opponents of a stronger PP system in 1977 were Socialist states. Their arguments were conservative, simple and powerful: Politically, the national sovereignty of the warring state was at stake, and could not be overrun by automatic designation. Second, even if automatic designation of a PP were accepted, in practical terms the effectiveness and safety of the PP depended on the acceptance of the warring parties. Thus, it made no sense for black-letter law to allow for apparent automaticity absent underlying state consent. In the end, the skeptical position shared by Socialist states, including the Soviet Union, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine, triumphed despite the fact that the adopted language gestured clearly toward an automatic PP system. 
Similar opposition by Socialist states emerged regarding the Second Protocol, dealing with non-international conflict. In a notable reversal of the attitude shown in 1949, by the 1970s Socialist states harbored no interest in expanding the rules of IHL for internal conflict through  Additional Protocol II. In particular, they decried the violation of the principle of sovereign non-intervention, which they claimed would ensue from increased legal scrutiny into internal conflicts, in the hands of the ICRC or invasive third states. In this they coalesced with African, Asian, Middle Eastern and other Third World states, many of which faced internal instability and rebellions of their own in the aftermath of decolonization, to whom they did not wish to attribute additional humanitarian guarantees. Socialist states were vocal in their distaste for a Second Protocol that lacked strict conditions of application (e.g. rebel control of territory, a high level of rebel organization, and rebel ability to respect IHL) and which entitled the ICRC to operate in the territory of states fighting internal war. Socialist states surely would have voted to sink the working draft of the Second Protocol in the Plenary vote had a modest, much shorter compromise treaty not been brokered by moderate leaders of the Third World and Western coalitions. Thus, an Additional Protocol II regulating non-international conflict did emerge, yet it fell far short of the original wishes of the ICRC, and not posing a threat to the unsupportive coalition of states, especially of Third World and Socialist provenance, due to its high threshold of application.

Conclusion
The USSR and the Socialist states, often in unison and sometimes divided, played a critical role in the postwar history of IHL-making, not only in 1949 but also, as emphasized here, in the complex negotiation of the Additional Protocols in the 1970s. Cold War and decolonization politics served as the crucial historical conditions that enabled the effective influence deployed by Socialist states, either creating or adding to existing public humanitarian pressures in Conference, eventually resulting in the adoption of landmark rules of IHL that would not otherwise have emerged given Western opposition. These achievements include notably the protection under IHL of partisans and other resistance groups, the extension of the Geneva Conventions to internal conflicts, and the enshrining of self-determination war as international conflicts. Socialist states’ humanitarian sincerity notwithstanding, East-West ideological competition remains an underappreciated political engine of IHL-making. 
Yet the story of Socialist influence, as shown, also goes beyond competitive politics. Given a convergence of ‘hard’ military interest, and under the conducive context of détente, the superpowers found a way to cooperate and deflate initiatives embodying a ‘radical’ humanitarian legalism, shaping them into ‘acceptable’ (watered down) form. The origins of cooperation in this case are murky and require further research, yet it is clear that it took place and that it decisively marked essential aspects of the Protocols, some of which have now become critical international rules, especially the protections for civilians from the dangers of hostilities.
The dual finding of East-West (and Third World) competition and collaboration attests to the evident complexity of international politics more generally. The new historiography of international institutions and diplomacy, in IHL as in other fields, should continue to resist easy categorization, to enrich and correct received narratives via deeper multi-national archival research, thereby helping to qualify stylized (‘realist’, ‘liberal’ or ‘critical’) theories about the making and makers of international law. And although debates about the ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive’ nature of this or that legal innovation are not always easily resolved, new historical work should at any rate decisively dispel the image of international law as the simple creation or imposition of one state grouping over another, explaining it instead as an intensely contested political co-construction in an increasingly plural international society.

Literature Cited
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Aldrich, George H. ‘Establishing Legal Norms Through Multilateral Negotiation: The Laws of War’. Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 9(1) (1977), 8–16.
———. ‘New Life for the Laws of War’. American Journal of International Law 75(4) (1981), 764–783.
———. ‘Prospects for United States Ratification of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions’. American Journal of International Law 85(1) (1991), 1–20.
———. ‘Some Reflections on the Origins of the 1977 Geneva Protocols’, in Studies and Essays on International Humanitarian Law and Red Cross Principles in Honour of Jean Pictet, ed. Christophe Swinarski (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1984).
———. ‘The Laws of War on Land’. American Journal of International Law 94, no. 1 (2000): 42–63.
Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Bedjaoui, Mohammed. Law and the Algerian Revolution (Brussels: International Associations of Democratic Lawyers, 1961).
Berridge, G. R. Embassies in Armed Conflict (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012).
Best, Geoffrey. War and Law since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Bugnion, François. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protection of War Victims (Oxford: Macmillan Education, 2003).
Burke, Roland. Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Ciobanu, Dan. ‘The Attitude of the Socialist Countries’, in The New Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict, ed. Antonio Cassese, 399–444 (Napoli: Editoriale scientifica, 1979).
Cottrell, M. Patrick. ‘Legitimacy and Institutional Replacement: The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Emergence of the Mine Ban Treaty’. International Organization 63(2) (2009), 217.
Forsythe, David P. ‘Legal Regulation of Internal Conflicts: The 1977 Protocol on Non-International Armed Conflicts’. American Journal of International Law 72(2) (1978), 272–95.
———. The Politics of Prisoner Abuse: The United States and Enemy Prisoners After 9/11. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
———. ‘Who Guards the Guardians: Third Parties and the Law of Armed Conflict’. American Journal of International Law 70(1) (1976), 41–61.
Gaiduk, Ilya. Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945-1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
Hirsch, Francine. ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order’. American Historical Review 113(3) (2008), 701–730.
ICRC. Conférence d’Experts Gouvernementaux Pour l’étude Des Conventions Protégeant Les Victimes de La Guerre, Genève, 14-16 Avril 1947, Procès-Verbaux, Assemblées Plénières, Vol. I (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1947).
———. Seventeenth International Red Cross Conference, Stockholm. (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1948).
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Kinsella, Helen M. The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
Klose, Fabian. Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
Levie, Howard S., ed. Protection of War Victims: Protocol 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, Volume 1 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1979).
———, ed. Protection of War Victims: Protocol 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, Volume 2. (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1980).
M. Kinsella, Helen. ‘Superfluous Injury and Unnecessary Suffering: National Liberation and the Laws of War’. Political Power and Social Theory 32 (2017), 205–231.
Mantilla, Giovanni. ‘Forum Isolation: Social Opprobrium and the Origins of the International Law of Internal Conflict’. International Organization 72(2) (2018), 317–49.
———. ‘The Origins and Evolution of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols’, in Do the Geneva Conventions Matter?, eds. Matthew Evangelista and Nina Tannenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 35–68.
———. ‘Under (Social) Pressure: The Historical Regulation of Internal Armed Conflicts through International Law’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2013).
Mazower, Mark. ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950’. The Historical Journal 47(2) (2004), 379–398.
Morgan, Edwina. ‘The Protection of “Irregular” Combatants: An Enduring Challenge for Humanitarian Action’ (MAS Thesis, Geneva Center for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action, 2011).
Pictet, Jean S. ‘The Need to Restore the Laws and Customs Relating to Armed Conflicts’. International Review of the Red Cross 102 (September) (1969), 459–483.
Roberts, Christopher N. J. The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
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Toman, Jiri. ‘L’Union Soviétique et Le Droit Des Conflits Armés’ (PhD. Dissertation, Graduate Institute of International Studies, 1981).
 For accounts of Soviet influence in the creation of various important postwar legal innovations, see: Mazower, Mark. ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950’. The Historical Journal 47(2)(2004), 379–398; Hirsch, Francine. ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order’. American Historical Review 113(3)(2008), 701–730.
 For excellent recent work that emphasizes the role of decolonization and Third World in the emergence and negotiation of international human rights instruments while also noting the importance of Cold War dynamics, see: Burke, Roland. Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Jensen, Steven L. B., The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization and the Reconstruction of Global Values (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
 A few works stand out that directly or indirectly highlight the importance of Socialist influence in IHL-making: Best, Geoffrey. War and Law since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ciobanu, Dan. 'The Attitude of the Socialist Countries', in The New Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict, ed. Antonio Cassese (Napoli: Editoriale scientifica, 1979), 399–444; Kinsella, Helen M. The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Kinsella, Helen M. 'Superfluous Injury and Unnecessary Suffering: National Liberation and the Laws of War'. Political Power and Social Theory 32 (2017), 205–231. For an extended, largely unpublished analysis of Soviet doctrine, the USSR, and IHL, see: Jiri Toman, 'L’Union Soviétique et Le Droit Des Conflits Armés' (PhD. Dissertation, Graduate Institute of International Studies, 1981).
 For a theory of social isolation in the context of IHL negotiations, see: Mantilla, Giovanni. 'Forum Isolation: Social Opprobrium and the Origins of the International Law of Internal Conflict'. International Organization 72(2) (2018), 317-349.
 For greater detail on these negotiations, see: Van Dijk, Boyd. ‘“The Great Humanitarian”: The Soviet Union, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949’. Law and History Review 37(1) (2019).
 ICRC, Conférence d’Experts Gouvernementaux Pour L’étude Des Conventions Protégeant Les Victimes de La Guerre, Genève, 14-16 Avril 1947, Procès-Verbaux (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1947); ICRC, Seventeenth International Red Cross Conference, Stockholm (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1948).
 Robert Craigie, Head Delegate of the United Kingdom Delegation (UKDEL) to the Diplomatic Conference, Despatch (sic) No. 1, May 4, 1949, to Ernest Bevin, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Office, London, file PRO FO 369/4149, 4590, UK TNA.
 Roberts, Christopher N.J. The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 70, 128, 134.
 United States Delegation (USDEL) to Diplomatic Conference on Protection of War Victims, to Division of Protective Services, US Department of State, Incoming Airgram 1289 A-84, May 2, 1949, Central Decimal File 1945– 1949, 514.2 Geneva, RG 59, Box 2388, NACP.
 See: ‘La question de la guerre CIVILE’ sent by M.A. Lamarle, Member of the French Delegation to the Diplomatic Conference in Geneva to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Paris, 28 April 1949, folder '1948 Correspondances Diverses', Cote 4-17, Unions Internationales 161,  Periode 1944-1964, Ministère Des Affaires Etrangères et Europeennes, Archives Diplomatiques de la Courneuve, France. For Britain: Letter from Mr. Reed, Law Officers’s Department, Royal Courts of Justice, London, to C.G. Kimball, Foreign Office, 16th May 1949’, file PRO FO 369/4150, 4885, UK TNA.
 British correspondence in 1949 documents a positive private relationship with the Soviets, yet this seemed limited to specific aspects. 
 As also noted in Ciobanu, ‘The Attitude of the Socialist Countries’, 1979 (n.3), 401.
 Best, War and Law 1994 (n. 3); Mantilla, Giovanni. ‘The Origins and Evolution of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols’, in How the Geneva Conventions Work, eds. Matthew Evangelista and Nina Tannenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017), 35-68.
 Report on the 1947 ICRC Conference, by Albert E. Clattenburg Jr., Chairman of the USDEL to the Meeting of Government Experts, to the Secretary of State, August 26, 1947, Central Decimal File 1945– 1949, 514.2 Geneva, RG 59, Box 2386, NACP.
 UKDEL, Report on the Diplomatic Conference, Geneva, 22nd November, enclosure in file PRO FO 369/4166, K11392, UK TNA.
 Mantilla, Giovanni. 'Under (Social) Pressure: The Historical Regulation of Internal Armed Conflicts through International Law' (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2013), chap. 3.
 Bugnion, François. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protection of War Victims (Oxford: Macmillan Education, 2003), 266–283.
 See the full story behind the making of Common Article 3 in Mantilla, Forum Isolation 2018 (n. 4), 317-349.
 For the text of Common Article 3, see: https://www.icrc.org/en/war-and-law/treaties-customary-law/geneva-conventions 
 Mantilla, Forum Isolation 2018 (n. 4).
 UKDEL, 1949 (n. 15). 
 Ibid.
 Klose, Fabian. Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
 Gaiduk, Ilya. Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945-1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
 For instance see: Burke, Decolonization 2010 (n. 2); Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights 2016 (n. 2); Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
 Suter, Keith. An International Law of Guerilla Warfare: The Global Politics of Law-Making (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984). For recent analyses highlighting and reframing the importance of the 1968 International Human Rights Conference for the trajectory of human rights law, including amid armed conflict, see Burke, Decolonization 2010 (n. 2); Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights 2016 (n. 2).
 Mantilla, ‘Under Social Pressure’ 2013 (n. 19).
 United Nations, General Assembly, Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflicts, Report of the Secretary-General, UN Doc. A/7720, 20 November 1969.
 G.I.A.D. Draper, ‘Note for Foreign Office Meeting on 15 October, 1971: Specific Topics Relating to the Protection of Civilians Against Dangers of Hostilities’, 14th October, 1971, PRO FCO 61/821, folio 19, UK TNA.
 Brief, ‘Item 3: Rules Relative to the Behaviour of Combatants’, prepared by the Ministry of Defence in consultation with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Home Office, for the Conference of Governmental Experts on Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflict, 18th May, 1971, IOC (71) 86, PRO FCO 61/810, folio 160, UK TNA.
 ‘Compte-rendu de la Commission Juridique, Séance du vendredi 16 mars 1973’, ICRC-B AG 059-049, ICRC Archives, Geneva. The ICRC did not bend to Western wishes. On some issues, it adopted the language proposed by the Western group, slowly ‘moderating’ some provisions, including those dealing with the civilian population. Yet on the thorniest but unavoidable topics, weapons and ‘freedom fighters,’ it left it up to states to decide their inclusion within the APs.
 Ciobanu, ‘The Attitude of the Socialist Countries’, 1979 (n.3).
 Klose, Human Rights 2013 (n. 23).
 Bedjaoui, Mohammed. Law and the Algerian Revolution (Brussels: International Associations of Democratic Lawyers, 1961); Abi-Saab, Georges. ‘Wars of National Liberation and the Laws of War’, in International Law: A Contemporary Perspective, eds. Richard A. Falk, Friedrich V. Kratochwil, and Saul H. Mendlovitz (Boulder: Westview Press 1985), 410–437.
 Abi-Saab, ‘Wars of National Liberation’, 1985 (n. 34).
 Ciobanu, ‘The Attitude of the Socialist Countries’, 1979 (n.3).
 Abi-Saab, ‘Wars of National Liberation’, 1985 (n. 34).
 Plentiful evidence can be adduced to demonstrate, especially early and consistent Socialist state support for anti-colonial resolutions within and outside the context of IHL debates. Consider the CDDH voting records in the Appendix.
 For the drafts of the Protocols and the full public records of the Conference, see Federal Political Department, Records of the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts, Geneva, 1974-1977, Volumes 1-17 (Bern: FPD, 1978).
 Levie, Howard S., ed. Protection of War Victims: Protocol 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, Volume 1 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1979), 42.
 Mantilla, 'Under (Social) Pressure’ 2013 (n. 19).
 Aldrich, George H. ‘New Life for the Laws of War’. American Journal of International Law 75(4) (1981): 764–783.
 For first-hand corroboration the American delegation’s role in the drafting of this article, see Aldrich, George H.  ‘Some Reflections on the Origins of the 1977 Geneva Protocols’ in Studies and Essays on International Humanitarian Law and Red Cross Principles in Honour of Jean Pictet, ed. Christophe Swinarski (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1984), 1143; Aldrich, George H. ‘Prospects for United States Ratification of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions’. American Journal of International Law 85(1) (1991), 1–20; Aldrich, George H. ‘The Laws of War on Land’. American Journal of International Law 94(1) (2000), 42–63. On the role of the ICRC in persuading the French and the US to treat and/or consider captured rebels as POWs in Algeria and Vietnam respectively, and the importance of these experiences for the drafting of Article 42/44 of the First Protocol, see Morgan, Edwina. ‘The Protection of “Irregular” Combatants: An Enduring Challenge for Humanitarian Action’ (MAS Thesis, Geneva Center for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action, 2011), 49–50, 76–77; Forsythe, David P. The Politics of Prisoner Abuse: The United States and Enemy Prisoners After 9/11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, After 9/11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 19.
 Levie, Howard S. ed. Protection of War Victims: Protocol 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, Volume 2 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1980), 485–486.
 Ciobanu, ‘The Attitude of the Socialist States’, 1979 (n. 3).
 Pictet, Jean S. ‘The Need to Restore the Laws and Customs Relating to Armed Conflicts’. International Review of the Red Cross 102(September) (1969): 459–483.
 UK Delegation, Draft ‘Summary Report of Proceedings of Commission III dealing with Combatants, and Protection of the Civilian Population and Journalists’, Conference of Government Experts on International Humanitarian Law, May – June 1972, PRO FCO 66/422, folio 74, UK TNA.
 Ibid.
 One may refer her to Western opposition to the regulation of combat practices at the 1949 Diplomatic Conference, and their role in the failure of a key ICRC initiative on this subject in the 1950s. Mantilla, ‘Under (Social) Pressure’ 2013 (n. 16). 
 Ciobanu, ‘The Attitude of the Socialist States’, 1979 (n. 3).
 ‘During informal side discussion… Blischenko (USSR) repeatedly urged Bettauer and Anderson of USDEL that it essential that USG and USSR have bilateral consultations in advance of second session. [State] Department agrees that such consultations would be desirable and useful… Inform Soviets that meeting should include both military diplomatic representatives from both sides and would consider matters… such as provisions relating to combatants and civilians… weapons, problems of application of Protocol I to national liberation movements. Suggestions for agenda from Soviets welcome.’ Electronic Telegram, 1974STATE246163, Secretary of State, Washington to US Embassy, Moscow, November 8, 1974, Central Foreign Policy File, 1973-1976, RG 59, NACP.
 ‘USDEL had bilateral consultations on international humanitarian law with USSR. Consultations… showed largely similar positions. Sovs very appreciative of being invited to consultations and of cordial atmosphere. We agreed to consult further as required during Conference’. Electronic Telegram, 1975GENEVA00612, US Mission in Geneva, to Secretary of State, Washington, February 30, 1975, Central Foreign Policy File, 1973-1976, RG 59, NACP.
 Aldrich, George H. ‘Establishing Legal Norms Through Multilateral Negotiation: The Laws of War,’ Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 9(1) (1977), 11.
 Federal Political Department, ‘Records of the Diplomatic Conference’ 1978 (n.  39), Vol. 15, 263-296.
 Ibid.
 Ibid.
 Federal Political Department, ‘Records of the Diplomatic Conference’ 1978 (n.  39), Vol. 14, 299-305. 
 For the final, adopted text of these Articles, see the text of Additional Protocol I: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/vwTreaties1949.xsp  
  Talk of this specific bargain is evident in British archival documents. In a briefing to the Western Group from 1977, American Head Delegate George Aldrich reported on the Soviet attitudes to API. With regard to the Fact-Finding Commission, the USSR was said to be ‘prepared not to oppose provided this Article was optional only’. Report, ‘Western Weaponry Liaison Group Meeting, 22 February: Russian Attitudes on the Protocols’, PRO FCO 58/1127, folio 51, UK TNA. And in an account of the final Plenary vote on the Article, the British delegate explicitly refers to an Eastern European ‘bargain’ with the West, likely led by the US, to maintain support an optional Commission. See: UKDEL, ‘Summary of the Seventh Week, 27 May – 2 June,’ UK Mission in Geneva, to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, PRO FCO 58/1124, folio 152, UK TNA.
 Letter from JG Taylor, UK Delegation to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, to Miss B Richards, Arms Control and Disarmament Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, 1 September 1975, PRO FCO 66/819, folio 128A, UK TNA.
 Cottrell, M. Patrick. ‘Legitimacy and Institutional Replacement: The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Emergence of the Mine Ban Treaty’. International Organization 6(2) (2009), 217.
 Best, War and Law 1994 (n. 3), 142–58.	
 Few exceptions included the India-Pakistani war of 1971. But more recently, see: Berridge, G.R. Embassies in Armed Conflict (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012), 44.
 See Forsythe, David P. ‘Who Guards the Guardians: Third Parties and the Law of Armed Conflict’. American Journal of International Law 70(1) (1976), 41–61.
 Forsythe, David P. ‘Legal Regulation of Internal Conflicts: The 1977 Protocol on Non-International Armed Conflicts’. American Journal of International Law 72(2) (1978), 272–295.
 For more on this issue, see Ciobanu, ‘The Attitude of the Socialist Countries’, 1979 (n. 3); Forsythe, ibid