Search: battlefield robots
25 Jun Wanted: Best-Selling Novelist Who Needs Advice on International Law
...Hague conventions. Putting aside the fact that most of them had never read any of those treaties, the key fact that they all missed was that America’s Islamist enemies were not a party to these agreements. What’s more, the conventions strictly forbade combatants from hiding and attacking from within civilian populations. Lawful combatants were also required to appear on the battlefield wearing something, whether a uniform or even just an armband, identifying them as combatants — overgrown bears and high-water pants didn’t count. The long and short of it was...21 Jan International Law as Behavior Symposium: An Agenda
...equipped to answer some international law questions than others. Rationalist accounts may be better equipped to make general predictions about “states” than to explain specific individual decisions. Anthropology, on the other hand, may be able to explain those individual decisions, but with its emphasis on deep description, may not yield many generalizable hypotheses. Controlled experiments will be easier to carry out in some contexts than others: it is easier, for example, to test the opinions of the general public than that of experts in negotiation or on the battlefield. Public...06 May Foreign Volunteers or Foreign Fighters? The Emerging Legal Framework Governing Foreign Fighters
...but joining ISIS (or al-Nusra) as reprehensible. This lack of regularity undermines existing policies, as it gives the impression that the distinction is based on ideology, which is a dangerous precedent to set. This development is especially alarming given that the Western-backed coalition (including Russia’s) objectives may not align with those of the YPG’s in the long-run. Kurdish territorial ambitions in a fragmented Iraq and Syria are likely to increase – not diminish – with battlefield success, pitting them against the US, Turkey, Russia, and Iran once the guns fall...18 May Counting the Dead in Darfur
The NY Times ran this piece this morning on the challenge of coming up with estimates of the total dead as a result of the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. The problem is common in the face of mass humanitarian disasters: how to estimate death tolls in a place with no birth or death certificates or accurate census data, where complete villages have been destroyed, and where the size and conditions on the battlefield are such that actual counting of bodies is next to impossible. Moreover, survivors are...10 Nov The High Price of the “Slow-Motion Berlin Airlift”
...January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning. That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil. It’s still funded as an open-ended battlefield necessity, although the last prisoner arrived in March 2008. But it functions more like a gated community in an American suburb than a forward-operating base in one of Afghanistan’s...12 Jun “Specific Direction” is Indefensible: A Response to Heller on Complicity
...the “specific direction” standard bulldozes over. In broaching the question of necessity, courts would discriminate between: (a) providing Syrian rebel groups with weapons (knowing that they will lead to some international crimes) in order to prevent bloodletting of civilians on a massive scale; and (b) furnishing the same weapons (knowing that they will lead to some international crimes) in order to trial cutting edge military technologies in a battlefield setting. Clearly, the rationale for the assistance matters enormously in ascribing moral and criminal responsibility, but the new “specific direction” standard...23 Oct Naomi Watts to Play Landmines Nobel Prize Winner Jody Williams in Movie
...princess would. But what do I know? I once thought that a really great TV comedy in the 1990s would be an American military surgeon assigned (in order to get much needed expertise, this being the pre Iraq 1990s) to a roving team of those plucky, happy go lucky, hard partying Swiss doctors out dealing with landmine and other battlefield injuries across the world: sounded pretty funny to me but, if one needed confirmation that it was not, it sounded pretty funny to my friends at the ICRC, too. Jody,...25 Jul The Honeymoon is Over for Paul Kagame
...of weapons and soldiers through Rwandan territory”, and recruited Rwandan youths, demobilised ex-combatants and Congolese refugees as M23 fighters. It also offers evidence of “direct Rwandan Defence Forces (RDF) interventions into Congolese territory to reinforce M23” and “support to several other armed groups”. “RDF operational units are periodically reinforcing the M23 on the battlefield against the Congolese army,” it said. Many M23 members formerly served in another Rwandan-backed militia, the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), which was responsible along with other militias for widespread atrocities over...01 Apr Guest Post: Goodman Responds to Heller on Capture v. Kill
...are attacked (including with lethal force) should not amount to gratuitous injury or suffering. I contend that the right to use armed force is limited to the objective of rendering individuals hors de combat (taken out of battle) or, in the collective sense, to defeating enemy forces. Parties have a right to kill enemy combatants during hostilities, but that right is constrained when killing is manifestly unnecessary to removing an individual from the battlefield. In some circumstances, it will thus be unlawful to use lethal force when a fighter could...
01 Nov Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Representation of Ethical and Moral Dilemmas of Drone Warfare on Screen – An Analysis of ‘Good Kill’ and ‘Eye in The Sky’
...of whether the second strike was necessary. Law and Justice, But Existing Tropes What is presented to the audience are, on the face of it, brief questions. What is the acceptable use of force and potential collateral damage when war happens at a distance from the battlefield? Both films can be classed not only as war films, but also as law and justice films which ask the audience what they would do as they watch events unfold through a screen in the same way the characters do. Yet while the...