From the dawn of civilisation to today, war- fare has brought great destruction and terrible human suffering, affecting combatants and civilians, who frequently bear the brunt of war. Families have been torn apart, and entire generations have been damaged, dislocated, and dispirited by loss, violence, and abuse. Al- though armed conflict has been romanticised in heroic stories of liberation and revolution, those who have experienced the reality of war are often terribly troubled and traumatised. Melzer notes “for as much as war is exclusively human, it is also inherently inhumane”.1

There is nothing inevitable about the agony and desperation of victims of war; the in- ternational community has the ability and means to prevent this. A large corpus of In- ternational Humanitarian Law (IHL) has evolved to mitigate human suffering at war. In a world where conflict often spills across national borders, and with novel and uncon- ventional forms of violence, the importance and necessity of this body of law has, perhaps, never been so great. As the face and practice of modern warfare are dramatically transformed by technology, the urge to ensure the protection of civilians becomes ever more pressing. The article begins with the chapter by Lean- dro Pereira Mendes, who presents the main principles and a brief history of the develop- ment of IHL. In the next chapter, Aris Vasil- liou discusses the conflict in Eastern Ukraine regarding potential war crimes committed there by the parties of the conflict. In chapter three, Candela Fernández Gil-Delgado looks closely at the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, fo- cussing on one specific situation: the right of self-determination, self-defence and the use of force. In chapter four, Christian Di Menna discusses the challenges and possible solutions vis-à-vis compliance with the principles and rules of IHL in situations of contemporary armed conflicts.