Between military experience, international law and the public
When international conflicts are in the news, postdoc Kenneth Øhlenschlæger Buhl is often called on as an expert. At SDU, he researches and teaches international law.
At the Department of Law at SDU, Kenneth Øhlenschlæger Buhl works with armed conflicts and the legal framework that surrounds them. What are states allowed to do? When is an action legal? And where is the line between the use of military force and violation of international law?
He is one of the experts called on by the media to explicate issues regarding international law.
This includes the current tensions between the United States and Iran: the Danish media outlets TV 2, Berlingske and Information have used him in their coverage of issues relating to international law in the conflict and the tensions around the Strait of Hormuz.
The task is to find the essence of the case and make the legal issues understandable without getting lost in the details.
– I try to go right to the core of the issues and make them easy to understand. Of course, a lot of detailed law gets lost in this, but the details are not always useful to people. When you’re communicating to a general audience, you need to be able to quickly determine the most important element in a case and what to pay attention to, he explains.
Between Danish Defence and Academia
Before he became a postdoc at SDU, Kenneth Øhlenschlæger Buhl had a long career in the Danish Defence. His 40 years of active service include serving as a naval officer, lieutenant commander, military legal adviser and military analyst at the Royal Danish Defence College. Today, this background forms the basis of his work with international law, lecturing, and assessing international conflicts.
The combination of defence and academia is part of his own background.
He explains that both the Danish Defence and academia are rooted in his family history. His father was an officer in the Danish Air Force, his maternal grandfather was a member of the Danish resistance movement; on the academic side, his family includes Ole Øhlenschlæger Madsen, professor of economics, and Olaf Pedersen, historian of science, both from Aarhus University. Olaf Pedersen also helped to build the Steno Museum.
This dual orientation remains visible in his professional profile. On the one hand, he researches and teaches international law at the University. On the other hand, he has experience from a context in which law is closely involved in operational decisions and in the framework under which they are made.
From the Navy to international law
His path to international law was not determined from the beginning. As a young officer, he envisioned a future in the Navy, but after the end of the Cold War he began to consider a different direction. He took a leave of absence without pay and began studying law.
The specialisation did not occur until later on.
– It came quite late in my law studies, but at some point I decided to become a military legal adviser, and then it followed naturally that I focused more and more on international law.
This is how the two tracks that define his work today intersected. The military one and the legal one. He did not leave the experiences of active service behind; instead, they became part of the way he researches and teaches.
– I decided to let my background as a naval officer and military legal adviser inspire the way I teach and do research.
The law becomes tangible in practice
A common theme in his description of his work as a military legal adviser is that the law has a direct bearing on the possibilities of action.
– For a military legal adviser, law can often become very tangible. It sets some very specific limits on what we can and what we can’t do.
This experience has given him insight into why international law matters in practice. It does not eliminate conflicts, but it helps to define mandates, legitimise actions and make it visible when actors are moving into legal grey areas.
This became particularly evident during the years in which Danish forces participated in international missions: law was of great importance with regard to how tasks were understood and solved.
Legal frameworks and specific considerations would sometimes pull in different directions. Kenneth Øhlenschlæger Buhl mentions one case in which water was sent to civilians in a crisis area, even though it was outside the mandate.
Teaching is the core
Although the public most often encounters him as an expert in the media, teaching is central to his work. Research constitutes the foundation of his teaching, whereas dissemination in the media is important but of secondary importance.
In his lectures, he draws on current issues in the news. When international conflicts are in the public eye, he incorporates them into his teaching to examine what issues of international law are at stake. In this way, international law becomes not only a matter of rules and paragraphs, but also of concrete incidents, assessments and dilemmas.
– I want to give my students an understanding of how international law works. The students must experience the subject as alive and present, even if they will not have to work specifically with international law later on.
– It’s all connected, but teaching takes precedence over everything. Research is a prerequisite for teaching, and after that comes the dissemination.
And at a time in which international conflicts are fast becoming the subject of hard fronts, strong assertions and great uncertainty, dissemination is an important task: not to make the world simpler than it is, but to make it more comprehensible.
