The publication of the long-awaited Chilcot Report on Britain’s role in the Iraq War last week produced a flurry of activity, with journalists desperately skimming through the 2.6m words within the three hours they were allocated prior to full publication. Perhaps not...
The expectation that civilians should be protected from the worst excesses of war is traditionally viewed as a moral or legal restraint, moderating the kind of violence that can be inflicted on the...
The controversy surrounding the coalition airstrike in Kunduz continues to rumble on this week after military investigators drove an armoured personnel carrier into a hospital’s front gate. A...
Last month’s announcement that a Royal Air Force drone was used to kill two British citizens in Syria has reignited debates about the legality of targeted killings, but there is always a danger that...
By some strange twist of fate I happened to watch the Kill Team, a documentary about the infamous US platoon that intentionally murdered innocent Afghan men while on tour. When, in 2010 the military charged five members of the platoon, the case drew international attention due to the graphic nature of the killings, evidence that the men mutilated the bodies and kept parts as trophies, and indications that the killings were part of a wider trend of 'faking' combat situations in order for soldiers to 'get a kill.' While the premeditated killing of Afghan...
Blue moon, you targeted me standing alone...Yesterday Charli wrote a post on whether or not those opposed to the use of drones should use the concept of “atrocity law” instead of “war crimes” or human rights violations.I wonder if others who generally oppose "targeted killings" think the concept of "atrocity law" might be a more useful way of framing this problem publicly than talking about "war crimes" or "human rights" specifically - concepts that by their nature draw the listener's attention to a legal regime that only partially bears on the activity in question and invites contrasting...
One of the few items recently that has caused me to emerge from my nothing-but-Friday-nerd-blogging temporary hiatus was this article on civilian war deaths by Michael Spagat and his collaborators. I wrote a post with some praise and some questions, and recently received a thoughtful response by email from Michael and his crew in which they further detail the coding methods used in the project. Since the original thread generated some interest, I've decided to post their response here.Civilian Targeting Index Clarificationby Madelyn Hicks, Uih Ran Lee, Ralph Sundberg and Michael SpagatSince...
The New York Times recently posted reports about the U.S. military's trial of soldiers accused of randomly killing civilians in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, “for sport.” Apart from the horrors of the alleged crimes, there is a terrible irony in the stories. This goes beyond the fact that these kinds of incidents are hardly news. They are completely predictable in any war, even among the best-trained and most disciplined armies—let alone those in which governmental and military leaders provide signals that make incidents like Abu Ghraib possible. The irony also goes beyond the...
In an earlier post on the lessons of the Afghan War Diaries, I pointed out an unfortunate legal fact: that civilian harms aren't necessarily evidence of war crimes. But I also argued, as I long have, that such "unintentional" civilian casualties are unacceptably high. Today, I have an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune that goes a bit further, suggesting a number of ways that the rules of war themselves could and should be updated to hold governments more accountable for civilian harms even when they're unintended. ... Such rules would need to be worked out by states, but...
Blogging will be light over the next few days as I'm traveling to conduct focus groups with global civil servants drawn from the network of organizations working broadly in the area of human security, to figure out why some issues resonate and others fall through the cracks in these networks. Before I disappear, I thought I'd draw readers' attention to a new human security campaign just taking off, to get your hunches as to whether it has what it takes to gain traction on the global agenda.The Oxford Research Group has launched a Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict (RCAC) Project, that is...
This is an important question from a legal and humanitarian perspective. In legal terms, targeting civilians is a war crime. Accidentally killing or maiming them in the pursuit of legitimate military objectives is, well, just too bad. So in judging government's records of compliance with the law, one needs to measure the difference. There are policy ramifications to such measurements as well. Over time, atrocities against civilians seem to be falling. But at the same time, some governments seem more complacent than ever about accidental deaths. The assumption behind the wiggle room in the...
On the last day of class in "Rules of War," I ask my students what kinds of things are needed to strengthen the regime governing the conduct of war. They come up with all kinds of nifty ideas, and then I ask them what they'll personally do to move the world in that direction. For awhile they struggle to come up with anything more concrete than "raise awareness," but after awhile they will say things like, "run for office," or "join the State Department," or "go to work for Doctors Without Borders." They rarely say they'll join the military and work from within to uphold the spirit of the...