Preface

This book will appeal to diverse audiences. First, and most evidently, the target audience for this book is those with an interest in International Humanitarian Law (IHL), including practitioners, government officials, academic researchers, and students studying this field of law. For those within militaries, this book offers critical insights into how they treat their combatants as well as helpful cultural understandings of diverse actors on the battlefield at a time when militaries’ adversaries and partners are ever evolving. In a similar vein, for humanitarian professionals and international legal practitioners, this work offers tools to deconstruct complex phenomena and understand actors with whom they engage, encouraging them to reflect on who is considered a victim worthy of protection during the conduct of hostilities. It is my hope that the book will resonate with researchers in international law from diverse geographies and cultures, given that it studies conflicts in multiple contexts. Its critical and plural lens toward IHL invites legal scholars, especially those who are critically leaning, to envision a normative framework for warfare that challenges key assumptions of international law, offering new critical and culturally informed frames for unpacking notions such as agency. For IHL scholars belonging to a more positivist tradition of law, what it offers is an opportunity to reflect on the silences of their discipline and their positionality in relation to its practices.