Search: battlefield robots
08 Jul Guest Post: Henderson & Cavanagh on Self-Defense & The Privilege of Combatancy
...him for murder committed on the battlefield. All of this suggests that the modern classification scheme has lost the richness of these older conceptual categories. And we might have been too hasty in concluding that rebels can never enjoy the privilege of combatancy. In some situations it may be logically coherent to extend the privilege of combatancy to them during some non-international armed conflicts – and at the same time prosecute them for treason and other loyalty-based offenses if they have violated a pertinent duty or oath to their sovereign....19 Apr Kony 2012: IHL 2.0: Is There a Role for Social Media in Monitoring and Enforcement?
...and it can facilitate greater scrutiny of the battlefield. Due to its scale and the ability to easily and exponentially reproduce information (as we saw with the massive viewership of the Kony2012 video), social media is useful for quickly and efficiently publicizing events and information which can be used to generate public interest, to bolster advocacy campaigns, and to educate about the law. One emerging social media tool increasingly used during armed conflict and promoted as a new way to “enforce” violations of IHL is “crisis mapping”. It is interesting...
21 Jan GCIII Commentary: Prisoners of War Remittances–Financial Challenges of Sanctions and Conversion Rates
[Chanel Chauvet earned her Master of Laws in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. She also holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Georgia School of Law. This is a post in our joint blog symposium with ICRC’s Humanitarian Law & Policy Blog exploring the new ICRC Commentary on the Third Geneva Convention ( GCIII Commentary ).] This post will explore the challenges of armed conflict that extend beyond the battlefield and into detention camps for many prisoners...
18 Dec The War on Drugs is not a War (Part I): Foreign Military Interventions Against Drug Cartels
[Dr Chiara Redaelli is a research fellow at the University of Geneva, IHL and ICL expert with the International Development Law Organization Ukraine Office and co-editor in chief of the on the Use of Force and International Law] From Drug Boats to Battlefields? The United States’ Case for Using Force against Cartels Since early September 2025, the United States has carried out a series of lethal strikes against suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, publicly framed as a campaign against so-called “narco-terrorists.” The operations, announced by the Trump...12 Jul Ken Anderson on The Hamdan Buzz
...artificial distinction that simply does not exist on the battlefield. Analytically, on the one hand, far from a civil war between a government and nonstate actors within the territory of a state, the Afghanistan war is the invasion of the territory of a state by another state – the cuts against calling it an armed conflict “not of an international character.” On the other hand, if you conceive of the war against Al Qaeda as a conflict separate from the conflict against Afghanistan, then because Al Qaeda is a nonstate...
18 Dec The War on Drugs is not a War (Part II): Classification Challenges
[Dr Chiara Redaelli is a research fellow at the University of Geneva, IHL and ICL expert with the International Development Law Organization Ukraine Office and co-editor in chief of the on the Use of Force and International Law] From Drug Boats to Battlefields? The United States’ Classification of the “War on Drugs” In September 2025, the Trump administration began describing U.S. counter-narcotics operations in explicitly military terms. Lethal strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific were framed as defensive actions against organized cartels posing an ongoing threat...
15 Oct Is it Cake? On Boobytrapped Pagers, IHL and Scenario-based Thinking
...soldiers in the field here, as they operate far away from civilians and under time pressure. But note the contrast with modifying several thousand pagers into explosive devices: instead of being prepared ad hoc, on the battlefield and under time pressure, the pager operation was geographically and temporally far removed from the actual fighting, with ample time to consider what objects to use, how they would be spread and the potential impact on civilians. It thus much more closely resembles mass production akin to what the Soviets supposedly did in...08 Jul Guest Post: Military Members Claiming Self-Defence During Armed Conflict–Often Misguided and Unhelpful
...application on the battlefield than is generally understood. First, self-defence does not apply when a person is responding to a lawful act (eg, I cannot claim self-defence as a legal basis of for my use of force against a police officer who is exercising a lawful arrest). Second, and as a corollary to the first point, self-defence does not arise when military members are otherwise authorised by law to use force against another person. Where a State is engaged in an international armed conflict, a combatant is entitled to the...