Armed Conflict

Just Security’s expert authors provide analysis on the legal, policy, and strategic dimensions of armed conflict, including the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war, counterterrorism operations, conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, and other armed conflicts across the globe, with a focus on international humanitarian law, war crimes and accountability, mitigating and remedying civilian harm, and the humanitarian impacts of warfare.

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3,294 Articles
Just Security

The United States Cannot be at War With an Ideology

Testifying to the House Armed Services Committee this morning on the state of the Special Operations Command, Admiral William McRaven said that now that core al Qaeda has been…
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European Parliament Passes Resolution on Drones, Targeted Killings, and Fully Autonomous Weapons

In a landslide vote (534 to 49), the European Parliament has passed a Resolution on drones, targeted killings, and fully autonomous weapons. Stay tuned for a post from one of the…
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State Practice and the Use of Force: Iran Invokes the “Unwilling or Unable” Test against its Neighbors

Can the United States send armed forces into another state to deal with a national security threat from a militant group when the host state is “unwilling or unable” to contain…
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Secrecy, Nonacknowledgement, and Yemen

Ryan posted last week about varying accounts of who was killed in an attack on an apparent wedding party in rural Yemen on December 12, 2013.  A Human Rights Watch report quotes…
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Missing Transparency: Is the US Response to Reported Drone Attack on Wedding Party Self-Defeating?

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a fact-intensive report based on the group’s investigations into a US drone strike that allegedly hit a wedding party in Yemen…
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A Rejoinder from Jenks and Corn re U.S. SIGINT Based Targeting

There is probably no area of greater consensus between us and Professors Goodman and Jinks (their post) than the recognition that the law of armed conflict should and must be responsive…
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Military Targeting Based on Cellphone Location

A recent news story by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill details the use of NSA signals intelligence (SIGINT) – including cellphone and SIM card data – to locate and kill…
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Eyes Wide Shut: Scahill and Greenwald’s Flawed Critique of U.S. SIGINT Based Targeting

[Editor’s Note: Stay tuned later today for a post by Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks responding to the guest post by Chris Jenks and Geoffrey Corn.] In The NSA’s Secret Role in…
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The al Iraqi Case and the Future of Military Commissions

This morning’s New York Times features a story by Charlie Savage about yesterday’s addition of a conspiracy charge to the pending military commission proceeding at…
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10 Things the United States has done right in Supporting a Peace Process: Lesson for the Middle East

In the recent flurry of attention to U.S. sponsored peace talks in the Middle East and Syria the critics have been plentiful. Much ink has been split on the preponderance of lost…
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Which Policies Apply to the Killing of U.S. Citizens in Pakistan?

Yesterday, the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, and the LA Times reported on debates within the U.S. government about “whether to authorize a lethal strike…
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The True Significance of Judge Tatel’s Opinion in the Force-Feeding Appeal

As Wells already flagged over at Lawfare, the D.C. Circuit decided Aamer v. Obama this morning — the effort by some of the Guantánamo detainees to challenge the force-feeding…
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