The 21st-Century Belligerent's Trilemma

Dill, Janina

doi:10.1093/ejil/chv005

Cited by 34 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The studies of Dill, Kinsella, and Slim provide good examples of the way in which wartime actors are judged, classified as either perpetrators or victims of the law, and thereby deemed to be either unworthy or deserving of our protection. 12 Jo and Bryant, Slim, and Stanton offer arguments for why perpetrators kill or refrain from killing, and how the law plays a part in their strategic assessments. 13 Other scholars outline how affected populations and survivors of war engage with the law to cope with inflicted brutality, such as exposing alternative sites of rights promotion besides the law, 14 or exploring the meaning of domestic and international legal practices among refugee populations.…”

Section: Militaries As Protectors Of Civilians and The Role Of The La...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A duty to protect? Legal consciousness among military officers in armed conflict

Holen

2023

Journal of Law and Society

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Military personnel participating in international operations are often deployed to areas where armed groups inflict violence on civilians. In such instances, soldiers must decide how to respond, effectively becoming executors of the law. This article draws on legal consciousness theory and 33 interviews with Norwegian military officers to explore what soldiers perceive as the ‘law’ and how they make sense of legality in determining what constitutes a just response. It finds that officers are conscious of three sources of legality – a mission mandate, a senior commanding officer, and a personal obligation to humanity – which they stand before, engage with, and struggle against, respectively. In actively drawing on these ideas about justice, the officers create and reproduce order in violent contexts. This article adds to theoretical debates about the different ways in which people invoke the law in difficult circumstances. It contributes empirically to an understanding of why authorized militaries behave inconsistently when encountering violence against civilians.

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Section: Militaries As Protectors Of Civilians and The Role Of The La...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A duty to protect? Legal consciousness among military officers in armed conflict

Holen

2023

Journal of Law and Society

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“…See also Corn & Corn (2011), Dill & Schubiger (2021), Luban (2011), Renic (2020), and Schmitt (2012. On the related discussions of balancing these values in strategic-level military policy, see Dill (2015) and Zambernardi (2010). balance civilian protection with other priorities in war.…”

Section: Moral Foundations Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The moral foundations of restraint: Partisanship, military training, and norms of civilian protection

Bell

Gift

Monten

2022

Journal of Peace Research

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How does partisan identification shape the attitudes of US military officers toward the protection of civilians in war? Drawing on unique cross-cohort surveys of soon-to-be commissioned officers in 12 Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) training battalions, we find that Democratic-leaning cadets generally prioritize norms of civilian protection more than Republican-leaning cadets when confronted with competing values of military advantage and force protection as part of a ‘combatant’s trilemma’. This gap remains partially resilient after sustained exposure to military training and socialization, including in the norms of restraint embodied by principles of combat ethics and the law of war. We attribute these partisan differences to insights from Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), which suggests that the moral values of Democrats and Republicans guide their views toward the individual use of force in combat. Our findings have important implications for comprehending the impact of political ideology and military training and socialization on attitudes regarding restraint toward civilians in war. Given the widely recognized conservative composition of the US military’s membership, these findings may help to further inform understanding of US military operations and the underlying causes of US adherence to – or violation of – the laws of armed conflict.

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“…Creation of these facts is, however, already incompatible with the laws of war. As Dill (2015b: 90) has tellingly pointed out, there is an explicit ‘sequencing’ in Geneva’s Additional Protocol I that ‘commands belligerents to sharply distinguish between ultimate goals (political or other) and intermediate goals (military)’. The law has traction only insofar as this sequencing is observed.…”

Section: The Dominant Diagnosis Of the State Of The Laws Of Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crisis in the laws of war? Beyond compliance and effectiveness

Clark

Kaempf

Reus-Smit

et al. 2017

European Journal of International Relations

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How can we tell what state the laws of war are in today, and whether they face exceptional pressures? Standard accounts of the condition of this body of law focus on problems of compliance and effectiveness. In particular, there is a dominant international legal diagnosis that most non-compliance is accounted for by the prevalence of non-state belligerents in irregular or asymmetric conflicts. We propose that any such diagnosis is partial at best. A focus on compliance and effectiveness tells us nothing about the reasons for actor behaviour, or about its impact on the regime. We advance a different conceptual framework, exploring the complex connections between compliance, effectiveness and legitimacy. We propose an alternative diagnostic model that places legitimacy at the heart of the analysis, treating it as causal, not simply symptomatic. This highlights when violations result in legitimacy costs for the individual actor, as opposed to reaching a tipping point when violations cumulatively impose legitimacy costs on the regime itself. We argue for the need to move beyond discussions framed by compliance and effectiveness, and towards the forms, reasons and reception of non-compliant behaviour, as this provides a truly social measure of the state of the law. In order to illustrate this, we examine three distinct types of challengers — Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the US and Russia — and present them as, respectively, revisionist, rejectionist and denialist threats to the regime. Unusually, the laws of war today face challenges on all three fronts simultaneously.

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The 21st-Century Belligerent's Trilemma

Cited by 34 publications

References 0 publications

A duty to protect? Legal consciousness among military officers in armed conflict

A duty to protect? Legal consciousness among military officers in armed conflict

The moral foundations of restraint: Partisanship, military training, and norms of civilian protection

Crisis in the laws of war? Beyond compliance and effectiveness

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