El tiempo como arma en los conflictos

Legal and Politico-Strategic Review Andrés Miguel Cosialls Ubach, “Time as a Weapon in Contemporary Conflicts”, CODESEL Bulletin (Cadre of Defense and Security Law), Vol. 2, No. 7, February 2026 This article offers an original and conceptually demanding re-interpretation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) by identifying time—and more specifically delay—as a structurally under-theorized yet increasingly decisive instrument of violence in contemporary armed conflicts. Its central thesis is that modern warfare has learned to operate within the formal margins of IHL by shifting coercion away from overt denial or destruction toward the administration of temporal regimes that render protection materially ineffective while remaining formally lawful. From a legal-doctrinal perspective, the article convincingly demonstrates that IHL has historically been constructed as a law of material limits—regulating weapons, targets, conduct, and protected persons—while treating time merely as an ethical intuition rather than as an autonomous legal category. The repeated use of open-textured temporal clauses such as “without delay,” “as soon as possible,” or “when circumstances permit” reflects an assumption that urgency is self-evident and that delay is exceptional. The author shows how this assumption has become untenable in contemporary conflicts, where delay is no longer accidental but systematically engineered. A major contribution of the article lies in its systematic analysis of how delay operates across different protective regimes of IHL. In the context of wounded and sick persons, time is shown to function as a physiological boundary between survival and death. Assistance delivered outside the window of medical effectiveness is legally permitted yet materially void. The author persuasively argues that, in such cases, delay constitutes a form of harm in itself, transforming protection into a purely declaratory norm divorced from its life-preserving function. The treatment of prisoners of war and detained persons further expands this logic. Here, delay becomes a tool of psychological disorientation and degradation rather than immediate physical harm. The prolonged postponement of registration, communication, evacuation, or medical care erodes the legal personality of the detainee without necessarily triggering any single, easily identifiable violation. The article exposes the profound difficulty IHL faces in addressing cumulative harm produced by temporal manipulation rather than discrete abusive acts. Perhaps the most striking analysis concerns civilian populations and objects indispensable to survival, particularly in relation to starvation and humanitarian access. The article demonstrates how the classical prohibition of starvation as a method of warfare—anchored in destruction and blockade—fails to capture contemporary practices of temporalized deprivation. Food, water, and medical supplies are not denied outright but are delivered too late, too intermittently, or in insufficient volumes to reverse physiological degradation. The result is starvation by postponement, a phenomenon functionally equivalent to prohibited methods yet juridically elusive. From a politico-strategic standpoint, the article situates these practices within the broader logic of hybrid and administrative warfare, where control is exercised through governance, procedure, and scheduling rather than brute force. Humanitarian corridors, evacuations, and relief operations are formally authorized but temporally structured to coincide with exhaustion, collapse, or forced displacement. Protection becomes performative; compliance is observed, while harm accumulates in the interval between permission and effectiveness. The discussion of military necessity and proportionality is particularly sophisticated. The author shows how necessity has migrated from an exceptional justification to a permanent framework for managing humanitarian time. This transformation silently inverts proportionality analysis: harm is no longer concentrated in space or intensity but distributed over duration. The article thus calls for a reconceptualization of proportionality in temporal terms, focusing on cumulative and foreseeable effects rather than isolated decisions. Equally important is the article’s contribution to evidentiary and accountability standards. By shifting the focus from singular acts to verifiable temporal regimes, the author proposes a methodology grounded in patterns, indicators, and interdisciplinary evidence drawn from medicine, nutrition, and humanitarian logistics. This approach aligns with existing developments in IHL concerning indiscriminate attacks and structural disproportionality, extending them coherently into the temporal domain. Overall, this article constitutes a major doctrinal intervention in contemporary humanitarian law and conflict studies. It exposes a critical vulnerability in the legal architecture of protection and offers a rigorous conceptual framework for understanding delay as a method of warfare. By insisting that law must protect not only access but also timely effectiveness, the article re-anchors IHL in its fundamental purpose: the preservation of human life under conditions of extreme vulnerability. It is a work of high relevance for scholars, military legal advisers, humanitarian practitioners, and international accountability mechanisms.