Irregular Forces, Irregular Enforcement: Making Peace Agreements in Non-International Armed Conflicts Durable

"The legal status of NIAC peace agreements is a matter that remains unresolved. While it is clear that AOGs may attain international legal personality in some contexts, authoritative sources of interpretation have not reached a consensus with respect to their capacity to create contracts. In Part I, this Article reviewed the controversy over AOG treaty-making power and the split within the courts on the issue. In Part II, it illustrated the many different areas of international law under which AOGs are held to possess legal personality, suggesting that they could be able to accede to binding treaties.

Part III showed that even if AOGs cannot ordinarily enter into treaties of their own right, there are other theories that support enforcing certain agreements that they sign. Finally, Part IV recounted some of the strategies that NIAC parties have innovated to bootstrap their pacts into binding documents. How these efforts are evaluated in the future will have implications that range from the odds of compliance with NIAC peace agreements to the nature of statehood in international law." (Conclusion, p. 266)