Outlawed combatants lose all incentive to obey war’s rules

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

But the offensive is also and perhaps above all pushing into the field of legal theory. “Warfare without risk,” in which the drone is probably the most effective instrument, critically undermines the meta-legal principles that underpin the right to kill in war. Against a background of fundamental destabilization such as this, formulas for redefining a sovereign power over life and death are being introduced. The aim is to accommodate the right to “targeted assassination” even if, in the process, the rights typically associated with being in armed conflict go up in smoke. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 128 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Risk-free warfare erodes the legal principles justifying the right to kill in war. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 128; Law that excludes adversaries from fighting fails to restrain their violence — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 1040

Related

• Laws of war should grant equal right to fight, not equal arms (similarity 0.90)
• Law that excludes adversaries from fighting fails to restrain their violence (similarity 0.89)
• Risk-free warfare erodes the legal principles justifying the right to kill in war. (similarity 0.88)
• Law should equalize the right to fight, not the weapons themselves. (similarity 0.86)
• Just-cause theorists grant only the just warrior the right to kill (similarity 0.84)
• Accepted zero-risk killing would collapse just war theory (similarity 0.82)
• Unilateral drone killing makes the legal right to kill merely formal. (similarity 0.82)
• Humanitarian law must leave both sides equal chances to fight. (similarity 0.82)
• Legal immunity for wartime killing presupposes that the right to kill is mutual. (similarity 0.81)
• Drone warfare leaves the mutual right to kill formally intact but substantively empty. (similarity 0.81)
• Repeated anti-arms laws from 1781 to 1828 failed to disarm Sicilians through the 1880s (similarity 0.81)
• Some advocates propose a new legal regime of unconstrained lethal self-defense (similarity 0.81)
• Legal exclusion of both sides removed contentious issues from practical politics (similarity 0.80)
• Modern jus in bello rests on combatants’ equal right to kill, not on punishment (similarity 0.80)
• Drone warfare creates a new configuration that is neither war nor peace (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Law that excludes adversaries from fighting fails to restrain their violence #corroborates (0.85) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 1040
• Risk-free warfare erodes the legal principles justifying the right to kill in war. #expands (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 128