Posted on 10 October 2012
From the Napoleonic Wars to present-day civil war in Syria, a new seminar at the EUI is examining the changing shape of conflict and how this can be governed by international law.
The ‘Old wars in new bottles? Asymmetric warfare & challenges to international humanitarian law’ seminar by new EUI professor Nehal Bhuta launched on 2 October, bringing together multidisciplinary researchers and fellows.
Asymmetric warfare broadly applies to clashes between two parties greatly differing in power, such as a government and an armed group. While such conflicts have played out since the 19th century, one of Bhuta’s key concerns is the way such a term has gained the power to change politics and law in recent years:
“The concept of asymmetric warfare as it’s being used today involves promotion of a particular vision of what just or unjust war looks like,” affecting what is deemed legal conduct.
Justifying new tactics
One example of where this narrative plays out is the US’s ‘War on Terror’ launched after the September 11 attacks by the country’s then president George W Bush. He spoke of transnational threats to global peace and security in order to justify a number of tactics questionable under international law, such as enhanced interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition and drone attacks.
The latter will be a talking point of the seminar, as the EU has so far struggled to formulate a common policy on the tactic which uses unmanned aircraft to target suspected militants. “I think this is one of the ways in which we can see that the use of the term asymmetric warfare has achieved a very sharp edge in as much as it’s used both to justify and rationalise this practice that the Americans are engaged in,” Bhuta says.
“The US is not claiming to go to war with Yemen or Pakistan [where these strikes take place]; it’s claiming nonetheless to attack specific threats to its security within these territories. That’s a claim which is not obviously legal, but it involves a stretching of the legal categories in a way which may transform them,” he adds.
A question of legitimacy
While the conflict may be very different, the oral tactics employed by the government in Syria bear strong resemblance to that of the US: “The language of the Syrian state is the language of criminals and terrorists. The implication there is that not only are these [opposition] actors which do not have any legitimacy in the political sense but also actors to which you should not accord the status of combatants, of legitimate fighters. This has been a dimension of the polemical use of the concepts throughout different times in history.”
However, whereas the EU has been quiet on the issue of US drones, last month the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, said the union was “absolutely united in that Assad has to go” following the 18-month crackdown on opposition groups.
While both governments have engaged in forms of asymmetric warfare and used the same rhetorical justifications, the political response has differed hugely. In neither instance has international humanitarian law intervened to great success, suggesting that the current legal framework is ill-equipped to deal with such new forms of warfare.
The seminar participants will evaluate these and other cases, including Spanish resistance to Napoleon and recent counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, in order to assess the adequacy of current regulation.
“It’s really about surveying the material and the arguments and trying to resolve how we should act as lawyers and as scholars in response to them,” he says. “How should we situate ourselves and how should we respond to some of these claims – should we be determined to promote certain perspectives towards our own governments, encouraging them to say one thing and not the other?”
To answer these questions the participants will go beyond the carefully-crafted political speeches to engage in the contemporary legal debate as events unfold.
(Text by Rosie Scammell)