Law that excludes adversaries from fighting fails to restrain their violence

Evidence

For Chaumont, it is a matter, not of bringing about an anachronistic return to a chivalric ideal but, on the contrary, of an attempt to integrate the parameters of contemporary asymmetrical conflicts within the law on armed conflicts, and to do so in a realistic way. His central preoccupation is the following: combatants deprived by law of any legitimate possibility of fighting no longer have any pressing reason to conform with the principles of a law that itself excepts them from any role except that of targets to be hit. Chaumont’s concern is pragmatic: if the aim of the law on armed conflict is to encourage the parties involved to moderate their violence and, in particular, to regulate non-conventional violence, one must not, in order to include them in the law, impose upon them rules the immediate consequence of which is to exclude them from it. What are at stake are the pragmatic conditions for the effectiveness of the law in its capacity as an instrument designed to regulate armed violence in this age of asymmetrical conflicts. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 1040

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Humanitarian law must grant asymmetrical parties equal chances to fight.; Outlawed combatants lose all incentive to obey war’s rules; Laws of war should grant equal right to fight, not equal arms (+8 more)

Related

• Outlawed combatants lose all incentive to obey war’s rules (similarity 0.89)
• Law should equalize the right to fight, not the weapons themselves. (similarity 0.86)
• Laws of war should grant equal right to fight, not equal arms (similarity 0.85)
• Humanitarian law must leave both sides equal chances to fight. (similarity 0.83)
• Repeated anti-arms laws from 1781 to 1828 failed to disarm Sicilians through the 1880s (similarity 0.83)
• Legal exclusion of both sides removed contentious issues from practical politics (similarity 0.83)
• Humanitarian law must grant asymmetrical parties equal chances to fight. (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Laws alone failed to discipline recruits; isolation and scheduling were required #corroborates (0.75)