From jus in bello to jus post bellum: when do non-international armed conflicts end?

This paper discusses how to identify the moment when the law dealing with situations of armed conflict (jus in bello or international humanitarian law) ceases to apply and makes way for the law governing the period after the conflict ends. Neither the end of non-international armed conflicts nor the end of the temporal scope of international humanitarian law is defined in treaty law. At the same time, the case law and literature largely ignore this issue. It is proposed in this paper to use the criteria and identifying factors for the lower threshold at the start of non-international armed conflicts, to determine when such conflicts end and when international humanitarian law no longer applies. The author describes the challenges in using these criteria and factors, and sets out a modified framework that can serve to identify when the fighting between the parties to the conflict drops below the threshold of intensity and organisation and when it thus ceases to be a non-international armed conflict.