Civilian Targets Research Articles

TERRORISTS OR LEGITIMATE INSURGENTS? THE TALIBAN STATUS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

The term terrorism is not subject to a universally accepted definition. However, it is generally used to describe the use of violence against civilian targets to spread fear and distress and thereby achieve ideological and/or political objectives. Specific acts of terrorism, whether national or international, have been proscribed by respective laws. The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan after Kabul’s collapse in August 2021 has raised an important question: are the Taliban different from other terrorist organizations (e.g., al Qaeda, ISIS)? This debate is significant because the groups share ideological similarities and execution practices; and at present, the Taliban face challenges of both intent and capability vis-à-vis ceasing acts of terror and ending ties with other terrorist organizations. This paper argues that the lack of a universally agreed definition of terrorism may not affect the investigation and prosecution of the Taliban’s terrorist offenses. In this regard, this paper critically appraises three factors—accountability, ties with terrorist organizations, and the inclusion of Taliban members’ names in the global sanctions regime. It also demonstrates why the international community is obligated to take both legal and ‘non-legal’ actions against the Taliban to avoid the normalization of terrorism.

Fighting with words: humanitarian security and the changing role of law in contemporary armed conflict.

Violence against humanitarians is a commonplace phenomenon in contemporary armed conflict. This paper examines how the manipulation of international legal principles for political or military purposes, a practice known as 'lawfare', impacts humanitarian security in conflict-affected areas. Drawing on a case study of the Syrian conflict (2011-), it finds that lawfare has been used to legitimate systematic civilian targeting by pro-government forces and to delegitimise the delivery of aid to opposition-held areas of the country. Efforts to use legal measures to promote civilian welfare-by way of sanctions or demands for cross-border humanitarian access-have been taken as evidence of Western attempts to politicise humanitarian considerations and international law. In practice, this has meant increased security risks for aid workers and impunity for those implicated in the violence. The paper concludes by calling for more critical research on lawfare and politicisation of international law as part and parcel of civilian protection in conflict-affected areas.

Arming Hospital Ships of the Future: Hybrid Wars Require a Major Change.

It is time to provide heavier defense systems to U.S. Navy hospital ships. They serve vital functions in both the military and emergency management spaces. They provide medical support for combat operations and can also convey the empathy and generosity of the American people when used in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief response. Hospital ships are often key to success in scenarios that require the international deployment of resources and medical expertise. Hospital ships serve a dual purpose and hence are subject to regulations that do not address all wartime mission requirements and necessary defensive capabilities. The current U.S. Navy's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions regarding the visibility, lack of defensive capabilities, and inability to use encrypted communications needlessly endangers medical platforms and personnel in the modern environment. The authors (including senior author F.M.B.-a recognized (International Health Law expert) reviewed relevant literature and have evaluated the policies of belligerent parties in past and current conflicts. These increasingly appear to target civilian infrastructure including medical facilities and may increase the risk to hospital ships. This demonstrable current hybrid warfare appears to include purposeful attacks on health care facilities and as such hospital ships should have additional defensive measures. Hybrid warfare and its focus on civilian infrastructure and health care targets are highly visible in the acts of both state and non-state actors and may encourage others to purposefully target health care facilities and personnel. Evidence of this is seen in the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, where since the invasion a year ago 1,218 Ukrainian health facilities have been damaged, including 540 damaged hospitals, 173 of which were totally destroyed and turned into "piles of stones." In today's conflicted global environment, the clear identification of hospital ships leaving them relatively undefended and denying encrypted communication is the folly of a bygone era. Hospital ships may be targeted because they are brightly lit soft targets that can deliver a large payoff by their destruction. It is time to adapt to the global reality and move on from the tradition of painting hospital ships white, adorning them with red crosses, keeping them unarmed, maintaining open communications, and illuminating them at night. The increasing threats from hybrid warfare and unprincipled adversaries to medical platforms and providers of health care demonstrate that hospital ships must be capable of self-defense. The U.S. Navy is designing new platforms for medical missions and the debate, no matter how uncomfortable, must now occur among major decision-makers to make them more tactical and defensible.

Locking Down Violence: The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact on Non-State Actor Violence

Although the effects of non-state actor violence on public health outcomes are well known, the effects of public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic on non-state actor violence are not. Lockdown measures, widely used to stop the spread of disease in crises, we argue, are likely to reduce non-state actor violence, especially in urban and non-base areas. These measures deplete actors’ resources, reduce the number of high-value civilian targets, and make it logistically more difficult to conduct attacks. Using the example of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and taking advantage of the exogenous nature of COVID-19 lockdowns, we find that curfews and travel bans significantly reduce violence, especially in populated and non-base areas. These effects are most likely due to short-term changes in ISIS’s targets and logistics rather than its resources. These findings provide important insights into the security aspects of public health crises and offer novel findings into the general effectiveness of two common counterinsurgency tools.

“The Patient but Deadly Struggle”: Decomposition and the Danger of Catastrophic Terrorism as a Method of Political Warfare against the State of Israel

This article describes “decomposition” as a tactic of political warfare against the State of Israel. According to Stefan T. Possony, a recognized authority on Cold War strategy, the purpose of decomposition is to weaken an enemy by undermining the “integrating elements of society,” which, in a democracy, are fearlessness and resoluteness. Several means of weakening a society are: exploiting social cleavages and encouraging defeatism, thus making it vulnerable to a military attack. Decomposition as a tactic of warfare has its roots in Asian traditions. Members of the General Staff of Imperial Russia studied the methods of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and, over time, the lessons of this research became part of the doctrine of the Red Army and its modern successors. There are clear indications that the methods of decomposition and the culture of defeatism have found support in contemporary Israeli society. During the domestic crisis of 2023, the opponents of the legally elected government endeavored to undermine its legitimacy at home and abroad, as well as its defense system which depends on the voluntary mobilization of reserves. Broadcasting a message of weakness and vulnerability is dangerous because it may be interpreted as an invitation for an aggressor. Under such circumstances, Hamas invaded the Western Negev and carried out a barbaric massacre on October 7, 2023. This act of Catastrophic Terror was a transforming event. In 1998, members of the team who identified and described the dangers of Catastrophic Terror anticipated the attack on the World Trade Center which took place on September 11, 2001. One of its consequences was the publication of the 9/11 Commission Report. The mandate of this commission was to investigate the “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.” This elegant division of the subject could serve as a model for Israel. The present study deals mainly with the circumstances and the domestic political controversy which preceded the events of October 7, 2023. Gathering and studying the actual facts is a task for future researchers. It is clear that the members of the 9/11 Commission knew that they were dealing with a deadly new threat and described it accurately in the preface to their report: We learned about an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal. The enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress of political grievances, but its hostility toward us and our values is limitless. Its purpose is to rid the world of religious and political pluralism, the plebiscite, and equal rights for women. It makes no distinction between military and civilian targets. Collateral damage is not in its lexicon. This observation applies to present-day Israel and the free world.

Maritime Radar Target Detection in Sea Clutter Based on CNN With Dual-Perspective Attention

Radar-based maritime target detection plays an important role in ocean monitoring. Considering the practical application, pulse-compression radar is widely used in terms of civilian offshore surface target detection. The existence of sea clutter will greatly interfere the detection performance of pulse-compression radar. This leads to the low detection performance of traditional algorithms like constant false alarm rate (CFAR). Deep learning methods have made strides in many fields recently, such as natural language processing and speech recognition. Inspired by this idea, we propose a maritime radar target detection method in sea clutter based on convolution neural network (CNN) and dual-perspective attention (DPA). The proposed method first encodes the radar echo in high-dimensional space and then extracts the correlation features from the global and local perspectives through the attention mechanism. We deployed the X-band pulse-compression radar on the coast of Hainan, China, and collected a lot of measured data. Experimental results demonstrate that the detection performance of our method outperforms the traditional CFAR methods and the latest deep learning-based methods. In the measured dataset, our proposed method can reach a detection probability of 93.59% under a false alarm rate (FAR) of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1e-3$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , reaching the practical application level.

We are stronger and better together

I learned during twenty years in RECOOP HST Association that sharing ideas, plans and actions make a human network naturally productive. Also, I believed throughout these years that honesty is a key component of a healthy relationship. Not only because honesty helps us avoid harmful breaches of trust, but because it allows us to build creative collaborative research organizations. Nonetheless, in the last two years, we were challenged with a vast scale of crises. First, the COVID-19 pandemic and second, beginning February 24, 2022, the brutal Russian aggression against Ukraine have impacted everybody’s life causing significant concern and insecurity across the globe. Economic instability, disturbed work routines and disrupted family lives have caused higher risks of physical and mental disorders [1, 2]. Socially isolated people often feel lonely or depressed. Constantly lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection and are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Loneliness also interferes with an entire range of everyday functions such as sleep patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning [3-6]. At the time the pandemic calmed, the Russian barbaric aggression and bombardment of civilian targets exposed large populations to physical aggression, which grants more damage over time as many Ukrainians are losing human condition. Are we losing humanity also? Humans are good or bad, or predators also capable of great kindness. Humanity symbolizes human love and sympathy toward each other. Human qualities include honesty, integrity, courage, self-awareness and dedication. These qualities define who we are as human beings. In this troubled time, we must look for the good in people and strengthen the care for others. Gandhi taught us, “The power of humanity is the strength of individual commitment and the force of collective action.” When RECOOP HST Association does something to help in Ukraine, all of us gain a sense of being valuable, helpful and worthwhile. Gandhi’s words remind us, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” The human misery caused by Russia’s attacks only strengthen Ukrainians’ extraordinary spirit and their dedication to protect their family, culture and homeland. Putin is scrambled by the strength of Ukraine and getting more aggressive. His actions prove, like Gandhi wrote, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” And we are stronger and better together. Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, blood pressure, COVID-19, dementia, pandemic, physical and mental disorders, research organizations

Incentives for investments in defensive technology: An economic analysis of the Safety Act

Civilian targets of terrorist or criminal attacks (e.g., sport stadiums, chemical or nuclear industry; infrastructure such as ports or pipelines) are often owned by the private agents who choose how to guard against potential attacks. This creates an important externality problem, as some of the benefits of better protection accrue to other private agents who would suffer from an attack. We analyze a model in which a social planner wants to provide incentives for the deployment of defensive technologies. Our results show that some features of the Safety Act, enacted after the 2001 terror attacks, are probably counterproductive.

Hybrid warfare and public health: Conflicts in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh raise the alarm

Hybrid warfare strategies include weaponization of healthcare, the use of non-conventional weapons, and strategic displacement of civilian populations via direct targeting, sexual violence, disinformation campaigns, and disruption of essential services such as water, food, gas, and access to health services. All these actions harm public health. The current war in Ukraine and the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh war between Azerbaijan and Armenia serve as vivid examples of the novel and devastating public health effects of hybrid warfare targeting civilians. The lessons learned from these conflicts should serve as a warning and a call to action. Politicians and public health officials should advocate for a comprehensive rethinking of previous measures to counteract the impacts of hybrid warfare. Concerted efforts and strategies to mitigate these impacts on public health at every phase are essential. De-escalation of conflicts should be facilitated, and civilian health should be prioritized by the global community by instituting a more punitive and comprehensive schema to both deter war and step-up penalties for the tactics of hybrid warfare. Failure to do so will undoubtedly result in this scenario being played out with greater frequency globally, erasing the public health wins of the previous century.

When Are Female Suicide Bombings More Likely? The Case of Boko Haram

Abstract This research delineates the conditions more conducive to the use of female suicide bombings through a detailed analysis of attacks carried out by Boko Haram. Using a novel dataset of 473 suicide attacks, the study finds that females are more likely to be deployed against non-religious civilian targets. Further, fragmentation of the group increases the likelihood of more female suicide bombers as different factions seek to outbid one another. Third, the expectation of extensive and favorable coverage in non-local (Western) media sources increases the odds of female suicide attacks.

Network Competition and Civilian Targeting during Civil Conflict

AbstractBuilding on recent developments in the literature, this article addresses a prominent research question in the study of civil conflict: what explains violence against civilians? We use a novel computational model to investigate the strategic incentives for victimization in a network setting; one that incorporates civilians’ strategic behavior. We argue that conflicts with high network competition—where conflict between any two actors is more likely—lead to higher rates of civilian victimization, irrespective of the conflict's overall intensity or total number of actors. We test our theory in a cross-national setting using event data to generate measures of both conflict intensity and network density. Empirical analysis supports our model's finding that conflict systems with high levels of network competition are associated with a higher level of violence against the civilian population.

Your space or mine? Competition, control, and the spatial profile of militant violence against civilians

While some militant groups consistently target civilians, others only resort to violence in specific locations and points in time. Existing research typically treats civilian targeting as a static feature of conflict systems at either the country or group level. This offers little explanation for variation in the patterns of violence across time and space. I develop an explanation for why militant groups target civilians at specific places and times based on how groups are likely to respond to local political and security conditions. I argue that violence against civilians serves as a function of response for militant groups – violence depends on both the control of territory and subnational competition from other non-state actors. The likelihood of civilian targeting is higher in locations where groups control territory and face competition, as groups seek to display dominance and punish defectors. The likelihood of civilian targeting is high in locations where groups face competition. However, this violence is unlikely to be as high as where groups also control territory, accounting for the need to reach out to civilians for support. The analysis of georeferenced event data on civilian targeting by militant groups across sub-Saharan Africa (1997–2013) and an illustrative case study on Boko Haram in Nigeria and Cameroon find robust support for my argument.

What Restrains Military from Targeting Civilians in Civil Wars?

ABSTRACT What explains the role of restraints on military for limiting victimisation of civilians? We find that a higher number of officers trained on counterinsurgency are associated with a lower number of civilians killed by government forces in civil wars. We also find that the number of civilians killed by government forces reduces as the degree of military involvement in politics reduces, and as the judiciary becomes independent. These results suggest that if the goal is to curb indiscriminate civilian killings, better training in counterinsurgency, the existence of judicial checks, and lowering military influence in politics are practical policy tools.

Targeting and Public Opinion: An Experimental Analysis in Ukraine

How does targeting in armed conflict affect public opinion in conflict zones? Armed actors choose between targeting militaries and civilians, further choosing whether to target civilians discriminately or indiscriminately. Existing work suggests these choices have important implications for conflict dynamics, in part by influencing public opinion, yet the causal effects of these choices on individual attitudes have not been clearly established. We conduct a survey experiment in the Donbas region of Ukraine, an area that has witnessed years of protracted fighting. We find that reports of civilian targeting robustly reduce approval of both the government and separatist forces. However, we find that the effects of discriminate civilian targeting are not statistically distinguishable from those of indiscriminate civilian targeting. Finally, we find that our respondents generally preferred a restrained, rather than reciprocal, response from actors in this armed conflict. We explain the implications of our findings for theories of wartime violence.

Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War

ABSTRACT Recent studies find that the presence of foreign fighters in a rebel organization may increase levels of anti-civilian violence in civil war. But why? Evidence from some cases indicates that foreign fighters may be used intentionally by local rebel commanders to carry out abusive operations against noncombatants. Other cases, however, suggest that foreign fighters possess greater capacity for independent agency in war, stepping outside the chain of command to inflict harm against local noncombatants. We argue that variation in a rebel group’s command structure—specifically, their degree of centralization—offers a point of leverage with which to adjudicate between the generalizability of these competing explanations. We investigate this issue with an analysis of sixty-nine rebel groups active between 1989 and 2015. We find that the effect of foreign fighters on civilian targeting is conditional: foreign fighters are associated with greater levels of anti-civilian violence only when active in groups with centralized command structures. This study contributes to the nascent literature on foreign fighters, offering insight into how these actors step into the command structures of rebel organizations. This study also demonstrates that the abuse of civilians in conflict can be explained effectively based on the characteristics of armed parties.

On the Use of Guerrillas in Defense of Stateless Territory

Rothbard (1999) argues that morality and utility require a guerrilla defense of libertarian societies, an assessment shared by many libertarian thinkers. This paper reviews the literature on guerrilla warfare to consider whether guerrilla forces alone, wielding small arms and light weapons, could successfully defend anarcho-capitalist territory. Despite the romance that surrounds them, the expert consensus is that guerrilla wars are fought only out of necessity by relatively weak powers. They are protracted wars of attrition fought on one’s own territory and as such are highly destructive of the defending homelands. If the enemy does not distinguish between military and civilian targets, as is likely to be the case in a war with anarchist citizen-soldiers, defeat is almost assured. Guerrillas are most effective as complements to regular forces rather than as substitutes, and a strictly guerrilla defense should be employed only as a last resort in the event of a collapse of the regular army or an inability to raise an army.

DEVELOPING ALTERNATIVES: CITIZENS PERSPECTIVES ON CAUSES AND THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THE 2003 CONFLICT IN DARFUR

This manuscript provides an alternative examination of the causes and the ramifications of the conflict in Darfur. The findings reveled the causes of the conflict to be religion, racial segregation, resources, geographical factors, the influx of weapons etc. and the ramifications are Genocide/Killing, Starvation, Rape, Fear and insecurity, Destruction of Property etc. The parties involved are Government forces, Janjaweed, USA, China Libya, Egypt etc. A purposive sampling technique was used to select 26 respondentswhich include, Diplomats, Civil Servants, Students and refugees. The instrument used for data collection was a semi-structured interview guide. It was conducted within the framework of ‘identity politics. The recommendation to the Sudanese Government is that the government has the following role to play: Protection of the civilian population by the Sudanese government. This can be done by: Publishing and disseminating orders eliminating the targeting of inhabitants, properties and indiscriminate attacks,and enforcement of orders prohibiting the targeting of civilians and civilian property and indiscriminate attacks. Publicise and enforce a policy that embraces zero tolerance for violence against women. Enforcement of UN/ AU Resolutions: The Security Council veto on invasive military flights must be enforced. The AU and NATO should agree on enforcement processes to be applied if Khartoum violates the injunction in United Nation Security Council Resolution 1591 and National Reconciliation: There should be reconciliation that comprises of prosecution of perpetrators of atrocities, the safe return of villagers to their villages and violence compensation.

The “Evolution” of Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) in the Light of Technical Development

In today’s conflicts of war, the various bombings, which are perpetrated against military or civilian targets, have been directed against members of the regular armies considered to be “occupying”, as well as against the locals who collaborated with them or assisted them. In the military, such acts are mentioned as an element of asymmetric warfare, and on various interpretations, they are sometimes classified as a terrorist acts. In case of “peaceful” countries, it can only be interpreted according to the latter concept, which can be aimed at a specific person, political orientation, intimidation, revenge or other criminal activity. The explosive devices used fall into the so-called “home-made” category in terms of their design. The assassin’s primary purpose is to achieve a devastating effect. In this article I deal primarily with improvised explosive devices appearing in so-called “civilian” life.

Cyber risks to Ukrainian and other health systems

Cyber risks to Ukrainian and other health systems

Committed sponsors: external support overtness and civilian targeting in civil wars

Does the overtness of external support to rebels affect civilian targeting in civil wars? Conflict studies increasingly scrutinize how insurgent sponsorships shape rebels’ behavior. However, the influence of external sponsors’ decisions to publicly acknowledge or deny their support on rebel conduct is largely neglected. This article introduces a new dataset on the overtness of external support to rebels in civil wars between 1989 and 2018. It then assesses whether the overtness of support is correlated with insurgents’ propensity to target civilians. I hypothesize that overtly supported rebels are less likely to target civilians than covertly supported rebels. This hypothesis stems from how supply-side factors—the way state sponsors expectedly act after having allocated their support—impact insurgents’ structure of incentives around relations with non-combatants. Statistical analyses yield strong support for my hypothesis. Moreover, further analyses show that support overtness influences civilian targeting independently from sponsors’ characteristics, such as political regimes or foreign aid reliance. Thus, in addition to the type of material aid insurgents receive, variation in whether support is covert or overt shapes how rebels treat civilians.