Armed Conflict • International Law
Law of Armed Conflict/IHL
1,649 Articles
No Asking and No Telling – A Quick Thought on Stephen Preston’s Speech at ASIL
As Marty Lederman and Jennifer Daskel have already noted, the Department of Defense’s General Counsel Stephen Preston gave an extensive and lengthy keynote speech on Friday last at…
Whatever became of the Votel transparency proposal concerning drone strikes in Yemen?
The Open Society Justice Initiative yesterday released a report alleging that nine U.S. drone strikes in Yemen between May 2012 and April 2014 each resulted in civilian casualties,…
Defeating ISIS in Iraq: We Cannot Fight Evil With Evil
News of the “liberation” of Tikrit, the city nearby the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, from occupation by ISIS militants two weeks ago was a welcome advance in the war to destroy…
The Unreal Secrecy About Drone Killings
Last year, after concluding that many passages in the document “no longer merited secrecy,” the Second Circuit published a redacted version of the Justice Department’s July…
Guest Post: To Ban New Weapons or Regulate Their Use?
In January, I highlighted the apparent anomaly of international law’s ban on laser weapons that are “specifically designed … to cause permanent blindness” while permitting…
A Reply to Janina Dill: Common Ground
We firmly agree with Prof. Janina Dill that a broader societal understanding of civilian harm during wartime and how civilians view that harm is an important aspect of understanding…
“Proportionate” Collateral Damage and Why We Should Care About What Civilians Think
In their recent blog post “Surveying Proportionality: Whither the Reasonable Military Commander?” Laurie Blank, Geoffrey S. Corn, and Eric Jensen level three criticisms against…
Surveying Proportionality: Whither the Reasonable Commander?
At least two surveys gathering information about “public perceptions” of proportionality and collateral damage are making their way around the international arena by way of…
Perfidy, ambush, snipers, and the COLE bombing (al Nashiri) case
Thanks to Rogier Bartels and Kevin Heller for their fascinating debate here and at Opinio Juris on whether the alleged Israeli/U.S. car-bomb operation operation that killed Hezbollah’s…
No, Disguising Military Equipment As Civilian Objects to Help Kill Isn’t Perfidy
I read with great interest my friend Rogier Bartels’ long post arguing that it is perfidious to use a bomb planted in a civilian car to kill an enemy soldier. As Rogier notes,…
Killing With Military Equipment Disguised as Civilian Objects is Perfidy, Part II
On Friday, I concluded that modifying a civilian-looking vehicle into a military object to attack an adversary could indeed amount to perfidy during an international armed conflict.…
Preparing for Cyber War: A Clarion Call
This post is the latest installment of our “Monday Reflections” feature, in which a different Just Security editor examines the big stories from the previous week or looks…