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Legal asymmetries in asymmetric war

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2014

RYDER McKEOWN
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Abstract

Standard conceptions of the relationship between international law and war in International Relations (IR) mostly oscillate between the sceptical view that law is mostly irrelevant in times of conflict, and the optimistic view that law is a meaningful moral standard that effectively constrains violence. Modern asymmetric conflicts between liberal democratic states and non-state actors such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or Hamas challenge these conceptions, however, as they are at once increasingly legal and extremely violent. Drawing inspiration from IR and International Law (IL) scholarship from multiple theoretical paradigms, this article examines the legal asymmetries before, during, and after asymmetric conflict. Noting that law is at once a useful tool and a strong normative force, it argues that a good understanding of legal asymmetries can supplement existing theories of asymmetric war, continue the dissolution of false dichotomies and open up interesting avenues of research in IR, and help both scholars and policymakers understand how international law influences modern asymmetric conflict against non-state actors.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 117 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2014 

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References

1 Roughly translated as ‘In times of war, the law is silent.’

2 In this article, I will use the acronyms of IR and IL to describe the disciplines of International Relations and International Law, and the lowercase of international relations and international law to describe the actual phenomena and practice.

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7 While much of the scholarship that informs it deals with conflict between states of all regime types, this article's focus is strictly on conflicts between liberal democracies and non-state actors for three main reasons: first, the legal asymmetries I seek to explain are more acute given that international law is created only by states; second, liberal democracies are more likely than other states to wage war legally and be more susceptible to accusations of law-breaking; third, this article specifically seeks to contribute to ongoing policy debates regarding how liberal democracies should fight against non-state actors, and is therefore geared toward these countries and their citizens. Accordingly, in all sections but the first (IR views of international law and asymmetric war) I use the term asymmetric war to apply to wars between liberal democracies and non-state actors. That being said, some of this article's findings may also apply both to asymmetric interstate conflicts and to asymmetric conflicts between autocracies and non-state actors.

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