Chapter

Drone warfare and international humanitarian law : the US, the ICRC, and the contest over the global legal order

Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi

Drones and global order : implications of remote warfare for international society

Abingdon : Routledge, 2022

p. 156-172

English

This chapter analyzes the competing legal interpretations over targeted killing provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United States. Both approximate the ontology of world and international society that, in broad terms, emphasize transnational advocacy networks and states as the principal agents of global affairs. Both present countervailing visions of what the global legal order is and how drone warfare ought to be governed. America's use of drone warfare is not merely about exercising military power. Rather, drone warfare is integral to a broader shaping of global order that preserves maximum strategic flexibility for powerful states, but especially the US. The ICRC contends that drone warfare subjects the global legal order, already fraught with troubling inconsistencies, to further humanitarian stress that threatens global order generally. First, this chapters explains what the stakes are in the debates over drone warfare: the very meaning of IHL itself. Second, it adopts a textual analysis method to compare and contrast the competing visions of the ICRC and US on each fundamental principle of IHL, including distinction, military necessity, proportionality and humanity.

• Drones and global order : implications of remote warfare for international society / ed. by Paul Lushenko, Srinjoy Bose, and William Maley