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Armed Conflict At The Threshold, Deborah Pearlstein

Articles

Seventeen years into the United States’ engagement in what America has controversially understood as a global, non-international armed conflict against a shifting set of terrorist groups, a growing array of scholars has called for a reassessment of the significance of the “armed conflict” classification under international humanitarian law (IHL). The existence of an “armed conflict” has long been understood as a proxy on/off switch of inescapable importance. When an “armed conflict” exists, lethal targeting—without regard to particular self-defensive need or immediacy of threat—is permitted as a first resort. When an “armed conflict” does not exist, it is not. Challenging the …