Combatant immunity emerged as a de facto norm alien to just war law

Evidence

What had emerged here, very clearly, was the preeminence of a tacit normative principle that was alien to the law of armed conflicts but implicitly regarded as superior to it, namely a sui generis principle of the immunity of imperial combatants. Elshtain went on, “We violated the norm of discrimination in a strange up-ended kind of way by devising a new criterion, it seems: combatant immunity ranked higher as a consideration than did non-combatant immunity for Serbian—or Albanian Kosovar—civilians, with our determination to keep NATO soldiers—in other words, American soldiers—out of harm’s way, we embraced combatant immunity for our own combatants.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 435 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A sui generis principle of imperial-combatant immunity emerged above the law of armed conflict; Dominant powers codified their own practical invulnerability as the overriding war norm; Combattant immunity for one’s own soldiers replaced non-combatant immunity as the top norm. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 435 (+2 more)

Related

• A sui generis principle of imperial-combatant immunity emerged above the law of armed conflict (similarity 0.94)
• Combattant immunity for one’s own soldiers replaced non-combatant immunity as the top norm. (similarity 0.93)
• Dominant powers codified their own practical invulnerability as the overriding war norm (similarity 0.79)
• Israel formally codified combatant-immunity doctrine first developed in the 1990s (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Combattant immunity for one’s own soldiers replaced non-combatant immunity as the top norm. #corroborates (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 435
• The 2005 Kasher-Yadlin article reversed noncombatant and combatant priority in war ethics #contradicts (0.55)
• War’s immunity from murder prosecutions rests on mutual reciprocity #qualifies (0.40)