Lama Abdelaziz
Our perception of what “warfare looks like” has historically been dominated by visuals of physical terrain, a defined battlefront, and the innate presence of a soldier on the ground. Images that fueled the formation of the Geneva Conventions in 1949. However, as the world finds itself now deep into the third decade of the 21st century, the nature and face of war has transformed into spaces far removed from ground troops and physical fronts.
Instead, war now takes the form of undetectable brawls of cyberwarfare, where the remote and precise decisions of an autonomous drone-is pushing the fabric of traditional, written international law to its limit. The struggle is not so much about technology, but rather the significant legal, moral imperative and question concerning our definition of human accountability for war in an environment where the ‘human’ is rapidly moving further away from the ‘field’.
International Humanitarian Law is constructed upon three core tenets: distinction, proportionality, and military necessity. Essentially, it requires that individuals who wage war be unable to strike at any target at any time, and that they must apply this alongside including distinction between soldier and civilian and ensuring that the target in question indeed provides a military advantage.
In the modern context, these obligations become nearly impossible to abide by. As it is now a responsibility that the flip of a circuit breaker that can simultaneously disrupt military communications and cut off life-supporting medical equipment at an urban hospital.
This rise of what is known as the “grey zone” of hybrid warfare by way of state and non-state actors under the threshold of open conflict now poses serious questions and concerns of easy evasion of responsibility and difficult attribution and accountability under international law.
This new conception also begs difficult questions regarding concepts of agency in warfare, which is the rise of autonomous systems. For example; the increasing use of lethal autonomous weapons systems now represents quite clearly perhaps the most agonising predicament we currently find ourselves contemplating, that being ‘when an algorithm identifies and terminates a target based on the patterns of the data supplied to it and it commits a “war crime” with its resultant action, where does accountability lie? Is it the author of the code; is it the commander who “sent the machine”, or is it the “machine” itself?’ Under extant international legal constructs, of course, criminal accountability for war falls in human hands.
By turning the fatal decisions over to a process, we risk a growing ‘accountability gap’ where our legal structure itself becomes an endangered product of the rule of law. We are evolving to the state where war is just an algorithm of sorts and as such, there is no other check or inhibition to total destruction beyond the ability to program our algorithms.
Such evidence is far from merely theoretical at present time. In the conflict now plaguing Ukraine, for example, we find the disturbing and curious mixture of 19th-century trenches and 21st-century online surveillance, which includes the weaponisation of ubiquitous cell phone apps and civilian internet, for the purpose of monitoring troops, and the skies are populated with the now ever-present threat of enemy drones.
Additionally, our increasingly casual outsourcing of private warfighting functions to contractors and proxy actors, which further anonymises the costs of conflict for many western governments and allows states to use proxy actors rather than risk the political cost and scrutiny required in using their own national armed forces, signifying a system-wide transition toward a less accountable form of global conflict.
Addressing these complex challenges means we should not just react but must enforce legal instruments that address the implications of cyber-warfare and autonomous weapons, among other issues. That is not to argue against technological innovation, but rather that we not do so with a disregard for human accountability in the context of modern warfare. States should not allow ‘gray zones’, technological frontiers, or automated weaponries to expand beyond the scope of international law.
Ultimately, the war changing doesn’t make our laws outdated. The law continues to make it imperative that what happens in times of war does not undermine human dignities and protections. The real fight going forward is the one we are waging against technological advancements creating an increasingly wide vacancy between the ground and computer worlds.
Lama Abdelaziz is an Egyptian student currently pursuing a BSc in Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). As a young policy researcher and intern at PolicyEast, her academic interests are focused on global governance, international law, climate change, and regional power dynamics.
