The Use of Force against Individuals in War under International Law: A Social-Ontological Approach

Is it legal to kill, or capture and confine, a person in war? Is it relevant or wise to ask this question in the reality of war? What does this question actually mean in the labyrinth of overlapping international legal norms?

This book answers these challenges to the meaning, relevance, and wisdom of speaking about the 'legality' of the use of force against individuals in war by re-invigorating the connection between legal thought and the social world. Weaving together law, social theories, and actual practices, the book presents an interdisciplinary study that distinguishes between six concepts of 'legality' under public international law that generate tensions among different legal norms on the use of force against individuals in war and identifies the limits to the use of legal techniques to address these tensions.

Highlighting the limits to legal techniques in addressing the phenomenon of fragmentation serves not as an abnegation of the law itself but an invitation to a deeper level of its engagement through the prism of social ontology. The book theorises that human agents in war are always 'decentred' by social structures. Every use of force against individuals in war results from an interaction between agency and structures that are analytically distinct and potentially susceptible to regulation by different legal norms. Through theoretical exploration and empirical illustration with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it argues that the convergence of legal norms regulating the use of force against individuals in war leads to a more fundamental problem of the conflation of ontologies.