El combatiente invisible: la disolución del sujeto bélico en el Derecho Internacional Humanitario

Legal and Politico-Strategic Review Andrés Miguel Cosialls Ubach, “The Invisible Combatant: The Dissolution of the Belligerent Subject in International Humanitarian Law”, CODESEL Bulletin (Cadre of Defense and Security Law), Vol. 2, No. 7, February 2026 This article constitutes a dense and conceptually ambitious contribution to contemporary debates on the transformation of warfare and the resulting structural crisis of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Its central thesis is that the emergence of the “invisible combatant” does not merely pose a problem of doctrinal adaptation, but rather exposes an erosion of the anthropological foundations upon which the law of armed conflict was historically constructed. From the outset, the author frames the invisible combatant as a symptom of a deeper systemic mutation. Classical IHL categories—combatant, civilian, direct participation in hostilities, military objective, prisoner of war, neutrality—were conceived for a form of warfare organized around visible bodies, spatially delimited battlefields, and reciprocal vulnerability. In that paradigm, violence was juridically intelligible because it was embodied, localized, and reversible: the combatant who killed could, in principle, be killed or captured. The article convincingly argues that this anthropological economy no longer corresponds to the operational reality of contemporary conflict. The legal analysis unfolds through a carefully constructed functional anatomy of modern warfare. The author demonstrates how lethality is now distributed across technical, cognitive, and infrastructural chains, separating observation, decision, authorization, design, and execution. The result is a form of belligerency exercised without physical presence in the theatre of operations, without exposure to reciprocal risk, and without realistic capturability. The “invisible combatant” is therefore not an anomalous figure, but the typical subject produced by networked warfare. A major doctrinal contribution of the article lies in its systematic examination of the different functional incarnations of invisibility: the remote operator of lethal platforms, the targeting and intelligence fusion analyst, the military artificial intelligence engineer, and the providers of ISR capabilities. In each case, the author shows that participation in hostilities is material, causal, and decisive, yet detached from the spatial and existential conditions presupposed by classical IHL. Particularly incisive is the analysis of how violence increasingly takes the form of cognitive acts (classification, inference, prioritization) and design decisions (algorithmic architectures, thresholds, data sets) rather than embodied confrontation. From a legal-theoretical perspective, the article identifies three possible responses within IHL: a maximalist extension of belligerency that risks militarizing vast sectors of civilian life; a rigid preservation of classical categories that renders decisive contributions to lethality legally invisible; and a deeper reconfiguration of IHL toward functional regimes of belligerency focused on chains of lethal production rather than individual status alone. The author clearly favors the third path, not as a means of expanding the battlefield, but as an attempt to preserve the original humanizing purpose of IHL under radically altered conditions. One of the article’s most original insights concerns the collapse of capturability as a silent pillar of humanitarian law. The analysis demonstrates that the category of prisoner of war is not a humanitarian add-on, but a structural alternative to death that presupposes physical accessibility of the enemy. The invisible combatant—particularly in its cognitive and infrastructural forms—cannot be captured within the conflict’s legal geography. As a result, violence loses its reversibility and becomes structurally unilateral, undermining the civilizational logic that once distinguished war from extermination. Strategically, the article situates these developments within a broader transformation of war into a technical administration of death, exercised from spaces formally coded as civilian and often located in third States. This has destabilizing implications not only for IHL, but also for neutrality, escalation control, and the perception of civilian immunity by affected populations. The erosion of the visible enemy risks reintegrating the entire social and technological fabric of the attacker into the symbolic space of war. Overall, this contribution stands out as a theoretically rigorous and normatively challenging study. It does not propose superficial legal fixes, but instead forces the reader to confront the possibility that IHL must either reconfigure its anthropological premises or accept a growing zone of legally unintelligible violence. The article is of exceptional value for scholars and practitioners concerned with the future of humanitarian law, the ethics of remote and algorithmic warfare, and the resilience of the rules-based order in an era of distributed lethality.