Browsing by Autor "Pablo Kalmanovitz"

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Early Modern Sources of the Regular War Tradition
(Oxford University Press, 2015) Pablo Kalmanovitz
Abstract The concept of regular war, like that of just war, belongs to a long-standing intellectual tradition of conceptual articulation, legitimization, and contestation. The defining concern of this tradition has been to institutionalize juridical and conventional means of regulating and limiting the use of armed force. This chapter examines the early modern and Enlightenment accounts of Hugo Grotius, Christian Wolff, and Emer Vattel. In contrast to later legal positivist accounts, these accounts were very keen to provide ethical foundations for their eminently juridical projects. The chapter focusses on the defence of the principle of belligerent equality, which constitutes a central contrast between the regular and just war approaches. Epistemic, prudential, and security-based arguments in defence of the principle are reconstructed and their contemporary relevance assessed.
Entre el deber de protección y la necesidad militar: oscilaciones del discurso humanitario en Colombia, 1991-2016
(Universidad de Los Andes, 2018) Pablo Kalmanovitz
This article reconstructs two periods in the process of implementation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) by the Colombian armed forces. In the first period (1991-2006), the armed forces were alien and even hostile to both IHL and International Human Rights Law (IHRL), to the point of seeing a “judicial war” in the action of both civilian courts supervising IHL compliance and of civil society organizations that publicly denounced breaches of law. In the second period (2006-2016), the armed forces began to progressively appropriate IHL. The article reconstructs the history of this shift and shows that one of its main causes lies in the permissive and exculpatory character of IHL. Indeed, when the armed forces appealed to the legal principle of military necessity and other principles of IHL, they sought to limit the reach of civilian oversight over military operations. The article concludes by highlighting some problematic aspects of a prevalent interpretation of the relationship between IHL and IHRL as complementary and “convergent” regimes. Contrary to that interpretation, the history of IHL implementation in Colombia illustrates clearly the contrasts and differences between IHL and IHRL.
Judgment, liability and the risks of riskless warfare
(Cambridge University Press, 1920) Pablo Kalmanovitz
Critics of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) claim that they are both inherently unethical and unlawful under current international humanitarian law (IHL). They are unethical, it is said, because they necessarily preclude making any agent fairly accountable for the wrongful effects of AWS, and because allowing machines to make life or death decisions seriously undermines human dignity: only moral beings should make such decisions and only after careful moral deliberation, for which they could be held accountable. AWS are inherently unlawful, critics say, because they cannot possibly comply with the core IHL principles of discrimination and proportionality.
On the Rights of Warlords: Legitimate Authority and Basic Protection in War-Torn Societies
(Cambridge University Press, 2016) Robert Blair; Pablo Kalmanovitz
This article examines the legitimacy of the use of force by armed nonstate actors resisting the imposition of state rule over territories they control. We focus on the rights of warlords: subnational strongmen who seek autonomy within geographically demarcated territories, but not secession or control of the state itself. We argue that behind the resistance to state-building lies a twofold question of legitimate authority: the authority of states to consolidate power within their own internationally recognized borders and the authority of warlords to resist that expansion, by force if necessary, when it threatens social order and the protection of basic rights. This article draws on just war theory to develop a set of conditions under which such resistance may be justified, explores the argument's practical implications for state-building under the tutelage of third parties (e.g., the United Nations), and demonstrates its empirical relevance through an application to Afghanistan.