Search: crossing lines
25 Feb Drones as Strategic Airpower and the Light Cavalry?
...with sophisticated surveillance gear but also missiles, act as the lightest of light cavalry. They probe, surveil, and engage in pinprick attacks, behind enemy lines, far beyond one’s own lines. When the CIA engages in targeted killing against some Al Qaeda operative in Somalia, from a strategic perspective, it is a combat raiding strategy by very light cavalry indeed. But it is so far beyond one’s own lines, as it were, that from a legal standpoint, I would place it beyond the legal “armed conflict” altogether and treat this combat...
06 Mar Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere: The Epistemic Turn in Doctoral Education
...public quality to practical knowledge as we use it to progress defined social purposes: information transmission, problem-solving, career progression, innovation, and future-building figure high in our priorities. It also possesses a private character as we employ it to improve professional practice and industrial activities in service of individual and corporate interests. Despite the purported division between universities and the real world, researchers produce knowledge destined for assembly lines and boardrooms as well. Most influential of all the forms is knowledge as identity. The knowledge we internalise is intimate, comparable to...
15 Feb Spirituality and Duress: Local Culture Beliefs at the International Criminal Court
...rendition of figure 3. It illustrates the extent to which meaning produced in testimony can be altered through ignoring its wider interactional context: Once the Judge obtains the answer that later reappears as part of ‘the pattern’ (lines 12-14), he returns the floor to the defence counsel. The latter in turn invites the witness to recontextualize his previous answers, by asking two targeted questions about the time frame of his belief (lines 17-18 and 20-21). In the answer (only partially reproduced here), the witness responds with a biographical account that...
14 Dec Drug Boats, Drone Strikes and the Dangers of Avoiding Mirrors
...rules-based, accountable warfare. It is an early example of the very erosion of norms that many civil society groups, legal scholars, and human rights experts warned would follow from an overly elastic interpretation of both domestic and international law. The lesson here is not that the Obama and Trump administrations are identical. Let me be clear: they are not. But it is essential to acknowledge that once legal lines are blurred, future administrations, especially those less committed to being governed by the rule of law, will simply drive straight through...
02 Mar (Ir-)Responsible by Design? Corporate Guardrails and the Governance of Military AI
...to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control” leaves room for flexible and open interpretations of these “red lines”. . While Anthropic were clearer and firmer in their stance, OpenAI seem to be taking a more strategic stance; publicly posturing themselves as upholding safety, legal and ethical “red lines” while ensuring there is opportunity to exploit the military “gray zones” the DoD claim they cannot avoid. The fact that OpenAI suggests it was able to secure the guardrails that Anthropic was...
03 Oct Trump vs. International Law: Reflections on the “Scorecard,” Transnational Legal Process and the Paris Agreement
...give one example, the normative idea of transnational legal process would suggest that the travel ban should have been litigated as an international human rights issue. In practice, however, the litigation had to be rooted in the Establishment Clause and administrative law arguments to prevail in the lower courts (and even these arguments, dismayingly, did not win a majority of the Supreme Court). Professor Koh gives a good description of this litigation, but he does not address the tension between his transnational legal process frame and the lines on which...