This book examines and analyses the increasingly complex question of how to identify civilians who participate in hostilities. Civilians are, under the law of armed conflict (also known as international humanitarian law or IHL), immune from targeting for as long as they refrain from taking direct part in hostilities. Once civilians take direct part, they can be targeted. Significant changes have occurred in the conduct of armed conflict over the past twenty-five years which have increasingly placed civilians in traditionally military roles, for instance, with the employment of civilians in the ... More

This book examines and analyses the increasingly complex question of how to identify civilians who participate in hostilities. Civilians are, under the law of armed conflict (also known as international humanitarian law or IHL), immune from targeting for as long as they refrain from taking direct part in hostilities. Once civilians take direct part, they can be targeted. Significant changes have occurred in the conduct of armed conflict over the past twenty-five years which have increasingly placed civilians in traditionally military roles, for instance, with the employment of civilians in the execution of drone strikes, the practice of ‘targeted killing’ of suspected terrorists, the use of private military and security contractors in combat zones, the intermingling of high-level criminal activities, such as drug trafficking, alongside more conventional armed conflicts and the emergence of computer network attacks—colloquially known as cyber war—as a method of armed conflict. Together, these factors have made the process of distinguishing between civilians and persons taking direct part in the hostilities exceptionally difficult. This book examines the history of civilian participation in armed conflict, and how the law has responded to such participation. This book undertakes a detailed examination of attempts to define the parameters of ‘direct participation in hostilities’ and examines how developments in the conduct of armed conflicts over the last quarter-century have put increasing pressures on the foundational principle of IHL: the principle of distinction and the dichotomy of immune civilian/targetable combatant that is the core of the law of armed conflict.