Giovanni Villani, in his chronicle, reports that, in 1117, Pisa and Florence formed a military alliance. Pisa asked for protection against Lucca, while their troops were busy in Mallorca besieging a Saracen stronghold (Figure 4.1).1 The safeguard from Lucca meant a Florentine military presence right at the doorstep of their neighbors, the problematic nature of which did not escape the attention of the author. Villani explains at length the measures taken by the Florentine army to avoid any potential attack on women in Pisa while their men were away.

Mercenaries are controversial components of contemporary warfare but became common as decolonization and the Cold War intersected to cause conflict in the Global South. Under Fidel Castro, Cuba understood mercenaries as the products of capitalism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, using the term to describe a range of intermediates that acted on behalf of the United States and other Western nations. This global projection of counterrevolutionary force legitimized Cuba’s own deployments and revolutionary fights to combat these threats. Both of these opposing forces consisted of foreign militants fighting alongside rebels or for governments, but they had different motivations and relationships to allied movements or states. The chapter examines Cuban theorizing about mercenarism and the revolutionary fighter, ranging from the events at Playa Girón to the deployment of Cuban troops to Angola in the 1970s. At the same time, Cuba championed an expansive legal definition of mercenarism that sought – ultimately unsuccessfully – to incorporate its Tricontinental critique of Western intervention into international law.

Chapter 6 relates the individual status of the “players” on an armed conflict battlefield. It is the second question students should answer (after the conflict’s status) because the players’ status determines their rights and legal duties in the conflict. Civilians and combatants predominate, of course, but there are numerous subcategories for both: prisoners of war, retainees, militia, persons accompanying the armed forces, levée en masse fighters, spies, and mercenaries. Each category is explained and placed in relation to the other players. What if a civilian captured with weapons claims noncombatant status? LOAC provides for an informal tribunal. How is the familiar “farmer-by-day-fighter-by-night” dealt with? Who is an “unprivileged belligerent” and are they the same as an “unlawful combatant”? What status for a civilian who directly participates in hostilities and what are their battlefield rights, if any? Who is a “protected person” and what makes them such? These statuses and more are considered, along with their positions vis-à-vis the combatants who engage in combat with them.