When the muffled blast of a mortar round echoes in the distance or the thunder of artillery fire erupts, Hassan (a taxi-turned-ambulance driver in war-torn Mogadishu) stares at his mobile phone. ‘Now I pick up my clients from pools of blood in shattered homes. … Most of the calls are about a mortar shell smashing into a populated area.’ … The hardest part begins when he reaches the wounded and has to pick his way through body parts to identify who has a chance of surviving and needs his services the most. Footnote 1(Mustafa Haji Abdinur)
Violence, including armed violence, is ‘a leading worldwide public health problem’.Footnote 2 Among the means of armed violence, use of explosive weapons can be ‘an important cause of death and injury’,Footnote 3 as shown by the quotation above describing life for residents of Mogadishu, Somalia. The impact of explosive weapons use in populated areas is so serious that the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General has repeatedly singled it out as a distinct humanitarian problem: in his 2009 report to the Security Council on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, he expressed increasing concern at the use of explosive weapons in ‘densely populated environments’, which ‘inevitably has an indiscriminate and severe humanitarian impact’.Footnote 4 In 2010, he added that data collected across a range of conflicts revealed
substantial and ongoing civilian suffering caused by explosive weapons when they are used in populated areas. Civilians within the vicinity of an explosion are likely to be killed or injured by the blast and fragmentation effects of such weapons. They may be harmed by the collapse of buildings or suffer as a result of damage to infrastructure that is vital to the well-being of the civilian population, such as hospitals and sanitation systems. The use of explosive weapons also creates unexploded ordnance that persists as a threat to civilians until it is removed.Footnote 5
This article briefly describes characteristics of the harm that the use of explosive weapons in populated areas causes to civilians. The second section critically examines how international humanitarian law (IHL) currently frames this humanitarian concern. The article then presents a novel framework that views explosive weapons as a coherent technological and moral category and attributes a distinct pattern of harm to this technology. This new perspective on the problem of explosive violence has already begun to stimulate some research and reflection within the international humanitarian community. The last section of the article also indicates possible directions for further research and policy initiatives aimed at better understanding and reducing the human cost associated with the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.
At the outset, it is important to clarify some key terminology. By ‘explosive weapons’ we mean weapons that generally consist of a casing with a high-explosive filling and whose destructive effects result mainly from the blast wave and fragmentation produced by detonation.Footnote 6 For example, mortar bombs, artillery shells, aircraft bombs, rocket and missile warheads, cluster submunitions, and many improvised explosive devices (IEDs) fall within this technological category, the boundaries of which are yet to be formally defined in international law and policy.Footnote 7
The main focus of this article is on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. The terms ‘(densely) populated area’ and ‘concentration of civilians’ are well-established legal notions, though there is no single agreed definition and international instruments vary slightly in the formulations they deploy.Footnote 8 In this article, the term ‘populated area’ is used as shorthand to refer to places where civilians are likely to be present in high numbers and where public infrastructure is dense. These include locations where civilians live, work, or travel; places that encompass main streets, bus stations, markets, office buildings, camps sheltering displaced persons, residential compounds, or city neighbourhoods.
The article's main concern regarding humanitarian impacts is the harm to civilians. The term ‘civilian’ is not defined positively in international law (the Geneva Conventions describe civilians by what they are not). Moreover, the degree of involvement and participation of civilians in armed conflict can arguably be ambiguous in terms, for instance, of economic contribution or ideological support. While acknowledging this, we note Slim's point that ‘at the heart of the civilian idea is a moral argument about identity and harmlessness’ that is meant to transcend such ambiguities.Footnote 9 In view of this, states accept a responsibility to protect civilians from violence. This article focuses on situations that legally qualify as ‘armed conflicts’Footnote 10 governed by the rules of IHL,Footnote 11 which confer such protection from the effects of hostilities, including from explosive violence, on the civilian population and individual civilians.Footnote 12 The humanitarian impacts of explosive violence are certainly not limited to such situations, of course. The use of explosive weapons is, for example, a feature of the struggle between powerful drug cartels in Mexico and government forces pitted against them, as well as in crime and internal disturbances in Burundi.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that states generally refrain from explosive weapons use outside armed conflict, and use by non-state actors (including in connection with ‘terrorism’) tends to be criminalized. Explosive violence in such situations is usually perceived as alarming and unacceptable.Footnote 14
The humanitarian problem of explosive weapons’ use in populated areas: why should we worry?
Reports of explosive weapons causing death, injury, and material destruction reach us daily from many places around the world.Footnote 15 A growing body of evidence indicates a consistent pattern of harm to civilians from the use of explosive weapons in places such as towns, cities, and other areas in which civilians congregate.
Explosive violence produces a distinct pattern of death and injury. Survivors of explosive weapons use tend to suffer multiple, complex, and severe wounds from the blast and fragmentation effects, and from being caught in collapsing structures.Footnote 16 The physical and mental trauma can result in a range of debilitating long-term conditions, including lifelong disability, requiring considerable medical and public health resources.Footnote 17 Drawing on findings about armed violence generally, it is reasonable to posit that men have a higher propensity to be directly killed or injured and disabled by explosive violence.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, existing studies suggest that women are significantly at risk from this form of armed violence,Footnote 19 though more research is needed into the demographic characteristics of civilian harm from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. It is reasonable to assume, for instance, that explosive weapon attacks on settlements, for example, disproportionately affect women in societies within which their sphere of action revolves mainly around the home.
In addition, damage to social and economic ‘infrastructure vital to the well-being of the civilian population’Footnote 20 caused by explosive weapons has deleterious effects on civilians. The destruction of transport facilities, markets, power, sanitation, and health infrastructure, as well as housing and shelter, impedes community access to food, clean water, health care, education, and other necessities of life. Even if such infrastructure is not completely disrupted, it may force changes to civilian behaviour that increase their vulnerability to the effects of armed violence. For civilians waiting for food or clean water at aid distribution points, for instance, explosive weapons use can pose mortal peril.Footnote 21 Meanwhile, destruction of education and health infrastructure may also deepen pre-existing gender gaps in these areas. Anecdotal evidence suggests a link between the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and (protracted) displacement,Footnote 22 which again results in particular hardship for women, who are more likely than men to be internally displaced persons (IDPs) or refugees.Footnote 23 Finally, explosive weapons consistently leave behind explosive remnants. These continue to pose a threat to civilians and cause ongoing harm long after use unless dealt with, and have a negative impact on socio-economic development.Footnote 24
A few examples can show how explosive violence is apparent across many different recent and contemporary contexts, and appears to inflict civilian harm on a significant scale. Humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Doctors Without Borders have broadcast public alarm about thousands of war-wounded people – most of them civilians – caught in mortar or artillery fire or in landmine explosions, and suffering blast and fragmentation injuries, requiring treatment at their clinics and hospitals in and around Mogadishu. The ICRC noted that numbers of these dead and war-wounded ‘sharply increased’ in 2010.Footnote 25 In recent years, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has repeatedly identified forms of explosive weapons use as the ‘tactics’ responsible for most recorded civilian deaths, injuries, and major damage.Footnote 26 Large-scale destruction of homes, cultivations, roads, schools, and hospitals occurred in this way in South Lebanon in summer 2006,Footnote 27 as well as along the Gaza StripFootnote 28 and in the Vanni region of Sri Lanka in 2009.Footnote 29 Use of explosive weapons in populated areas in Iraq such as in the Coalition air attacks during the 2003 invasion and widespread subsequent IED use by anti-Coalition forces have resulted in high risk to civilians, including the death and injury of many thousands.Footnote 30
Recent and current conflicts have been distinguished by mismatches of opposing capabilities among belligerents.Footnote 31 This asymmetry can increase the appeal of populated areas as environments in which to launch attacks and then hide among civilians, or environments to dominate because control of the population is a strategic objective.Footnote 32 Yet if explosive weapons are used, the higher the population density or concentration of civilians or civilian objects in a place, the more people and civilian infrastructure are likely to be within the blast and fragmentation radius of an explosion. Despite this, conflicts in Vietnam, Chechnya, Gaza, the West Bank, Afghanistan, and Iraq have all shown that belligerents do operate out of populated areas, including locating military bases and other facilities there, thereby exacerbating the risks to civilians of being affected by hostilities.Footnote 33 Demographic shifts from the countryside to urban environments this century are likely to continue or even exacerbate such phenomena. ‘Because resources, power, and people are concentrated in and around them, cities are by definition vulnerable entities’,Footnote 34 in which the use of explosive weapons not only runs the risk of killing and injuring civilians but also damages physical infrastructure and disrupts essential civilian services.
It will be noted that the preceding paragraph does not draw a distinction between states and non-state armed actors. States often use a discourse of ‘terrorism’, which focuses on the harm and illegitimacy of use of explosive and other weapons by non-state actors. This can detract critical attention from states’ own use of explosive weapons in populated areas, which is also a source of harm. Historically, both states and non-state actors have used explosive weapons in populated areas and continue to do so.
Explosive weapons play an important role in the military doctrines of states, and dependence on such weapons by state armed forces looks set to continue for the foreseeable future (despite research into alternative military technologies), as shown by continued developments in the potency, stability, portability, and precision of explosive weapons. State-led developments in explosive weapons have not necessarily been about creating ‘a bigger bang’ but about achieving greater precision over the delivery of explosive force to target, something that conceivably can lower the threshold for use of these weapons and create additional humanitarian risk to civilians in the vicinity of targets. Such is the central importance of explosive weapons technology to state power that states have generally sought to ensure a monopoly on production, possession, transfer, and use of explosive weapons within their territories.
However, monopolies of states on possession and employment of explosive violence on their territories is increasingly under threat in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The sophistication and destructiveness of IEDs have increased dramatically since the basic early designs of non-state armed actors such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the 1970s, who used basic triggers and agricultural chemicals.Footnote 35 In Iraq, for instance, insurgents obtained military munitions from abandoned or insecure stockpiles following the 2003 invasion by American-led forces, and since then have deployed these in weapons such as car bombs, suicide bomber vests, and buried command-operated artillery or mortar-shell devices detonated in a variety of ways.Footnote 36 Moreover, bombers sometimes belong to networks exchanging explosives knowledge and expertise that are global in reach. States parties to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW Convention) have become so concerned about the diversion of military-type explosive munitions and their components to non-state actors that these have begun to feature in their discussions on responding to the threat of IEDs.Footnote 37 The increasing frequency of use and destructive power of such explosive weapons is of great humanitarian concern.Footnote 38 Yet IEDs are only part of the humanitarian threat that the proliferation of explosive weapons in the hands of non-state actors may cause. Non-state actors such as Lebanon's Hezbollah are now more heavily equipped with ‘officially’ manufactured rockets, missiles, and other explosive weapons than some state militaries. Libyan rebels fighting Quaddafi's regime in 2011 furnished themselves at least in part from captured state arsenals. Islamic militia forces in Mogadishu have deployed heavy military explosive weapons such as artillery, direct-fire cannons, and mortars.
In view of the humanitarian issues described above, there is urgent need to question critically the acceptability of using explosive weapons in populated areas, with a view to changing policy and user practices. Yet the public, the media, and many humanitarian actors tend to treat the pattern of civilian harm from explosive weapons use in armed conflict as ‘normal’ – or at least a ‘fact of life’ – without examining this assumption. In contrast, civilian harm from weapons other than explosive weapons, such as white phosphorus or dense inert metal explosives (DIME), is often the focus of greatest concern, as media coverage of the 2009 conflict in Gaza indicated.Footnote 39 The risks that explosive weapons pose to civilians in populated areas seem to have become part of the background, and thus acceptable. This ‘moral outrage gap’Footnote 40 is also reflected in the dominant legal discourse, which fails to articulate the serious humanitarian problem that the use of explosive weapons in populated areas causes in a manner that adequately contributes to higher standards for civilian protection.
International humanitarian law and the protection of civilians against the use of explosive weapons in populated areas
IHL has traditionally been a key frame of reference for addressing civilian harm from the use of explosive weapons.Footnote 41 The following section briefly surveys the evolution of existing IHL rules on specific types of explosive weapons and some attempts at devising rules to protect civilians in populated areas from bombardments more generally.
From balloon-borne bombs, to blast and fragmentation weapons and cluster munitions
Towards the turn of the twentieth century, the increasing range of land and naval artillery, coupled with the possibility of using aircraft for hostile purposes, enabled attacks on population centres far from the battlefield. This led states at the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899 to prohibit ‘The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended’Footnote 42 and to adopt a declaration that forbade the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons, or by other new methods of a similar nature.Footnote 43 This declaration, though renewed at the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907, was not widely ratified and it was understood that it in any case only applied to non-dirigible balloons and not to motorized aircraft.Footnote 44 Attacks by airplanes were brought into the ambit of Article 25 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, which prohibited ‘attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings’, but again with the important proviso that they be ‘undefended’.Footnote 45 The term ‘undefended’ was interpreted in such a way as effectively to permit the bombardment of civilian settlements that contained any kind of military objective. This position was made explicit in another Convention adopted in 1907, which allowed naval bombardment of military objectives in undefended towns, villages, or dwellings under certain conditions.Footnote 46 These rules proved unable to prevent grave civilian harm from explosive weapons use, including unprecedented aerial attacks, on population centres during World War I.
In the wake of World War I, the drafters of the Hague Rules on Air Warfare (1922/1923) attempted to regulate aerial bombardment. Under the Hague Rules, the bombardment of settlements in the immediate neighbourhood of the operations of land forces would be legitimate, ‘provided that there exists a reasonable presumption that the military concentration is sufficiently important to justify such bombardment, having regard to the danger thus caused to the civilian population’.Footnote 47 However, the Rules were never adopted. As bombardment of cities renewed in the 1930s, and the public expressed its horror at the bombing of towns such as Guernica in 1937, the Assembly of the League of Nations called for urgent regulation of air warfare, based, inter alia, on the principle that: ‘Any attack on legitimate military objectives must be carried out in such a way that civilian populations in the neighbourhood are not bombed through negligence’.Footnote 48 No such rules were adopted before the outbreak of World War II, which was marked by practices that epitomize the notion of ‘indiscriminate attacks’. In particular, the saturation of vast areas, including population centres, with explosive force in so-called ‘strategic’ bombing campaigns had disastrous consequences for civilian populations.Footnote 49
The use of explosive (and other) weapons in and near concentrations of civilians continued to cause grave civilian harm after World War II, for example in South-east Asia.Footnote 50 In the 1970s, government experts meeting in Lucerne (1974) and Lugano (1976) discussed the effects of what they termed ‘blast and fragmentation weapons’. The experts did not define this category of weapons, but considered that, as ‘blast and fragmentation effects were to a varying degree inherent in all explosive devices’, there was no clear separation between blast weapons and fragmentation weapons.Footnote 51 The experts could not agree whether such weapons caused indiscriminate effects or unnecessary suffering within the meaning of what was then Draft Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Additional Protocol I, as adopted in 1977, did however outlaw the practice of area bombardment and other indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks,Footnote 52 but no instrument prohibiting or restricting blast and fragmentation weapons was annexed to the CCW adopted in 1980.Footnote 53
Instead, over the coming decades, states negotiated several instruments to regulate or prohibit specific types of explosive weapons. CCW Protocol II, agreed in 1980, restricts the use of ‘mines, booby-traps and other devices’. This protocol was amended in 1996, but disappointment with the outcome of these negotiations led to an international treaty banning anti-personnel mines in 1997 (the Ottawa Convention). CCW Protocol V, adopted in 2003, imposes obligations on states to remediate the ‘serious post-conflict humanitarian problems’ caused by the remnants of explosive weapons.Footnote 54 The CCW's efforts to negotiate minimum standards in order to ensure ‘mines other than anti-personnel mines’ are detectable for humanitarian reasons failed in 2005, though in late 2011 states parties decided to convene a meeting of experts in 2012 to discuss further the implementation of IHL with regard to these mines.Footnote 55 Cluster munitions were banned by the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, achieved in a process pursued outside the CCW. In the latter forum negotiations of a protocol that aimed to restrict certain cluster munitions continued until November 2011, at which point states accepted that they could not reach agreement on this issue within the CCW. CCW states parties will continue discussions on IEDs in the framework of CCW Amended Protocol II.
This brief survey indicates that humanitarian harm from explosive violence, as such, is not a new phenomenon. It also shows that states are clearly aware of the risks that blast and fragmentation effects of explosive weapons pose to civilians, especially in the context of populated areas, both during and after conflict.Footnote 56 But, even though ‘area bombing’ is illegal today, and many states no longer consider the use of cluster munitions acceptable practice, the use of other explosive weapons – even in densely populated areas – remains a common feature of contemporary armed conflicts. No international treaty prohibits blast and fragmentation weapons or regulates their use through specifically tailored rules. However, as with all means and methods of warfare (and, let us recall, the choice is not unlimited),Footnote 57 explosive weapons use remains subject to the rules on the conduct of hostilities.Footnote 58
Does international humanitarian law adequately protect civilians in populated areas from blast and fragmentation?
There are a number of different types of criticism that could be levelled at the prevailing IHL discourse's handling of issues pertaining to civilian protection from the effects of the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. Some critics have argued that IHL rules suffer a critical deficiency, claiming that ‘the laws of war have been formulated deliberately to privilege military necessity at the cost of humanitarian values’, and do not impose restraint on customary military practices beyond military expedience itself. Instead, the laws of war cloak these practices in a mantle of legitimacy, providing them with ‘a humanitarian cover that helps shield them from criticism’.Footnote 59
Others believe that IHL restrains users of force and humanizes war by balancing military necessity with concerns for humanity. From this perspective, the rules on the conduct of hostilities are ‘to give effect’ to the ‘general protection’ that civilians enjoy ‘against dangers arising from military operations’.Footnote 60 But the consistent pattern of elevated civilian harm associated with the use of explosive weapons in populated areas suggests that IHL as applied in practice does not sufficiently protect civilians from this type of danger.Footnote 61 This pattern of civilian harm also indicates a deeper problem than sporadic violations of the law. Grounds for concern remain about how legal rules on proportionality, distinction, and precautions are implemented, including to what extent these constitute an adequate basis for a solution to the humanitarian problems caused by explosive weapons.
Proportionality: uncertainty and disagreement about the (un)acceptability of incidental civilian harm
The legal prohibition against disproportionate attacksFootnote 62 and the related prohibition against ‘wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity’ are central to the law on the conduct of hostilities. However, these concepts can only ever provide a relative measure of civilian protection. First, the majority view holds that the proportionality rule does not impose an absolute limit on extensive (in contrast to ‘excessive’) civilian harm.Footnote 63 Second, what is to be considered proportionate is in most cases unclear and disputed.Footnote 64 The question how to balance the vague, abstract, and, above all, dissimilar values of expected civilian harm and anticipated military advantage remains.Footnote 65 This means that IHL implicitly accepts an undefined, yet potentially very high level of civilian harm that can be justified by users of force with reference to military necessity.Footnote 66 Similar uncertainties and disagreements surround some precautionary obligations under IHL.Footnote 67 This situation weighs against the emergence of clear common standards about what level of civilian harm is acceptable as an incidental by-product of the use of force.
In practice, proportionality tends to be evaluated on an operational and tactical level, rather than a strategic one, and in relation to discrete acts of violence (attacks). The geographical and temporal scopes of the proportionality assessment, and of the ‘attack’ itself, remain disputed. Focus is usually on the immediate effects of violence, mostly on death and injury, and tends to understate longer-term civilian harm, for example from infrastructure damage vital to the survival of the civilian population.Footnote 68 There seems to be growing recognition that ‘foreseeable’ effects should be factored into the assessment, including, notably, those from unexploded ordnance.Footnote 69 Yet even if certain ‘reverberating’ effects are to be taken into account, IHL does not lend itself to preventing civilian harm, such as might result from a breakdown of the public health system following damage to transport infrastructure and overstraining of medical resources.Footnote 70
Proportionality and precautionary assessments of discrete attacks are also not conducive to recognizing and responding to patterns of civilian harm related to a particular weapon technology. First, such patterns manifest over a longer period of time and across different contexts. Second, while a link between a pattern of harm and a weapon technology can be based on the IHL prohibition of superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, this so-called SirUS rule is not generally applied to civilians.Footnote 71 Because civilians should not be harmed in the first place, it is difficult under IHL to prevent civilian harm on the basis of wounding patterns and qualitative aspects of civilian suffering from a weapon technology.
Distinction: not only a question of accuracy
Users of force, a significant number of legal scholars, and, indeed, humanitarian actors often approach civilian harm caused by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas in terms of the IHL rule of distinctionFootnote 72 and the related prohibition of indiscriminate attacks.Footnote 73 The emphasis is on how ‘precision attacks’, ‘smart’ weapons, and technological innovations can help overcome the challenges posed by ‘inter-mingling’, ‘co-location’, ‘dual-use’, and ‘human shields’ in ‘urban’, ‘asymmetrical’, or ‘new’ warfare scenarios. Much attention is paid to the accurate delivery of explosive weapons to their targets where considerations related to distance occupy centre stage.Footnote 74 In legal terms, this translates into a focus on the prohibition of attacks that ‘are not directed at a specific military objective’ or that ‘employ a method or means of combat which cannot be’ so directed.Footnote 75 In this context, civilian suffering becomes ‘abstracted into the meta-discourse of military planning’.Footnote 76 Users of force are seldom pushed (and rarely seek) to justify incidental civilian harm as a proportionate side effect of an attack. Instead, they tend to argue that civilian harm was non-intentional and resulted from a mistake or an accident. Too often the discussion ends there.
On the relatively rare occasions when claims of accidental civilian harm are scrutinized – for example, in relation to precautionary obligations with regard to weapon choice and the targeting process – discussions do not seem to be grounded in scientific evidence of a weapon's impact on civilians in practice. Largely theoretical considerations dominate the debate as they did, for instance, in the context of anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions until challenged by international campaigns against these weapons based on evidence of their humanitarian effects. Many commentators infer from claims about a weapon's accuracy that its use reduces risk to civilians and civilian harm. High accuracy is desirable if it increases an attacker's ability to avoid, or in any case to minimize, civilian harm, and if its use actually results in less harm. However, the risk of civilian harm cannot be assessed in isolation. It is misleading to call weapons that can be precisely targeted ‘clean weapons’Footnote 77 because this occludes the possibility that accuracy may in practice result ‘in a net increase in potential harm to the civilian population’ by enabling attacks on targets located in urban and other densely populated areas that would not have been attacked with less accurate weaponry.Footnote 78
Moreover, the size of blast and fragmentation zones of certain weapons pose a problem in or near populated areas independently of accurate delivery. Human Rights Watch has, for example, accused Israel of violating the prohibition against indiscriminate attacks by firing ‘155 mm high explosive artillery munitions into densely populated areas of Gaza’ – shells that ‘inflict blast and fragmentation damage up to 300 meters from the point of impact’, noting that the user's internal guidelines forbid targeting them within 350 metres of friendly troops.Footnote 79 Meanwhile the UN Fact Finding Mission on the 2009 Gaza conflict considered that: ‘Mortars are area weapons. They kill or maim whoever is within the impact zone after detonation and they are incapable of distinguishing between combatants and civilians’.Footnote 80 This indicates growing recognition that blast and fragmentation effects are problematic in populated areas from the point of view of civilian protection, even if this concern has not always been consistently articulated in terms of IHL.Footnote 81
Insufficient transparency and redress for victims
IHL does not prescribe steps that have to be taken or procedural safeguards that have to be in place to produce knowledge about the effects of explosive and other weapons on civilians. It does not expect users of force to publicize information about what they base their assessments on, and it does not shift the burden of proof away from those likely to suffer harm onto the proponents of the harmful activity. Instead, secrecy continues to surround the most important decisions affecting the protection of civilians from the effects of hostilities, leaving legal commentators to second-guess military decisions. Understandably, these commentators are at times ‘wary of making judgments regarding military matters, knowing that [they] have insufficient information, and being used to being told exactly that by the military’.Footnote 82
It is in part due to this lack of transparency that civilian losses are often ignored, and that IHL has not proven a good basis for victims and survivors, their families, and their communities to obtain redress for harm done and consolidate respect for their rights.Footnote 83 For one thing, IHL contemplates compensation for harm only if the law has been violated (as explained above, something currently very difficult to ascertain in the majority of cases where civilians suffer harm from explosive violence) and it does not confer an individual right to reparation or other forms of redress.Footnote 84 In addition, in dealing with the consequences of civilian harm, focus is on individual criminal responsibility, which is mostly concerned with the intentional (or reckless) infliction of harm. It would seem, therefore, that current legal debate diverts attention from underlying issues affecting civilian lives and livelihoods, and does not effectively prevent users from ‘externalizing’ the heavy costs of the use of explosive weapons in populated areas onto civilians without providing adequate avenues for redress.Footnote 85
The explosive violence framework
Hitherto, IHL implementation and debates within the discourse it generates have not proven conducive to critical and constructive debate about civilian suffering from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. This is at least partly because the legal discourse itself acts as a barrier to discussion: an ‘absolutist and legalistic attitude to discussion of civilian suffering means that most international discussion of civilian protection is self-censored as non-negotiable’.Footnote 86 Efforts over the last decade to address the humanitarian consequences of explosive remnants of war,Footnote 87 anti-vehicle mines, and cluster munitionsFootnote 88 starkly underlined the shortcomings of existing frameworks such as IHL for fostering critical debate about ways in which systematically to reduce civilian suffering in armed conflict from the use of weapons. In the context of cluster munitions, the notion of banning those weapons that cause unacceptable harm to civilians would become an important benchmark for the so-called Oslo process leading to the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2008. This initiative emerged after enough states concluded that existing IHL rules were not sufficient, proceeding in a manner resembling the international campaign to ban anti-personnel mines more than a decade earlier. As the logical implications of such effects-based framings sank in for some of those following these developments, it would lead to new thinking.Footnote 89 In 2009, the British non-governmental organization (NGO) Landmine Action (now Action on Armed Violence) drew many of these ideas together into a report entitled Explosive Violence: The Problem of Explosive Weapons, which featured a foreword written by the UN's Emergency Relief Coordinator and proposed explosive weapons as a distinct technological and ethical categorization or framework.Footnote 90
Although there were few signs before 2009 that explosive weapons were explicitly treated as a distinct category by researchers or policy-makers, many humanitarian organizations had long been aware of data indicating that blast and fragmentation injuries cause substantial and ongoing human suffering and impose severe developmental costs.Footnote 91 A retrospective cohort study of events involving armed violence, conducted by random selection over a five-year period and published in 2005, showed that ‘a common phenomenon of people using explosives against civilians as a means to express their grievances could be highlighted’. However, the authors also noted that: ‘To our knowledge, this has not been expressed or examined as a discrete policy issue or in public health terms’.Footnote 92 Interest in measuring and monitoring aspects of armed violence was growing, especially regarding civilian casualties in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,Footnote 93 and would reveal explosive weapons such as IEDs and air-delivered munitions as significant causes of death, injury, and infrastructural damage.Footnote 94 But such studies often failed to make a conceptual connection between the characteristics of harm and the use of weapons that produce blast and fragmentation effects. Drawing on a dataset based on English-language media reports of incidents of explosive violence worldwide from April to September 2006, collected in collaboration with the global health charity Medact, Landmine Action's report offered five observations grounded in evidence about characteristics of explosive violence treated as a coherent phenomenon:
– within a short sample period, explosive violence was geographically widespread, but with intensive incidence in a few contexts;
– the incidents of explosive violence generally produced multiple deaths and injuries;
– explosive violence killed and injured significant numbers of people who were not combatants;
– attacks with explosive weapons in populated areas were linked to elevated levels of civilian harm; and
– in attacks in populated areas, civilians made up the great majority of victims.Footnote 95
Landmine Action's report argued that, although there has been no categorical discussion of explosive weapons in international public discourse, policy, or law, states already treat explosive weapons as a distinct category in their own common usage and practice. States tend to limit the use of explosive weapons to the ‘special circumstances’ of armed conflict, often occurring outside their territory among people to whom they are less accountable than their own population. Conversely, states generally abstain from using explosive weapons for purposes of domestic law enforcement and they claim a monopoly over their legal control, excluding them from private ownership.Footnote 96
The explosive violence framework as constructed in Landmine Action's report provides a basis on which critically to question prevailing assumptions about the acceptability of explosive weapons use in populated areas. Why, for instance, do governments not seem to consider their actions accountable – or as accountable – when it comes to protecting the lives of civilians from explosive violence in societies other than their own? In a globalizing, urbanizing age of insurgency and ‘war amongst the people’Footnote 97 it is an important question, and a logical extension of efforts to protect civilians from the hazards of cluster munitions and anti-personnel mines. For that matter, the CCW's protocol on explosive remnants of warFootnote 98 is an existing treaty that goes a long way towards recognizing explosive weapons as a category in need of special controls: why accept special responsibilities regarding the after-effects of explosive weapons but not also recognize the categorical problems with this technology at time of use? Unlike weapons such as firearms, explosive weapons are indiscriminate within their zone of effect, both spatially and temporally, which means that they are prone to impacts on civilians both across the immediate environment and in the longer term if used in populated areas.
Landmine Action's report suggested that several types of effort for building the agenda on explosive weapons present themselves. The first is to build the debate – to raise awareness and increase acceptance of basic concepts such as explosive weapons and populated areas, and to widen recognition that the use of the former in the latter represents a distinct humanitarian and ethical problem in policy discourse. A second step is to build transparency around the use of explosive force in populated areas through better data collection and analysis, not only by NGOs and international organizations but also by states themselves. (It is, after all, tendentious for these users of explosive weapons to argue that they are protecting civilians if they make no effort to demonstrate their claims based on facts.) Historically, such evidence was necessary to ‘shift the burden of proof’ of acceptability on to users, and for new norms on landmines, explosive remnants of war, and cluster munitions to emerge. Third, accountability could be enhanced if states were to publish policy statements regarding when the use of explosive weapons is acceptable, including in populated areas, and whether or how this relates to accountability for such use. Fourth, states in particular should recognize and act on their responsibilities to the victims of explosive weapons, in the same way as they have already accepted similar obligations through treaties such as the CCW's 2003 Protocol V, the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.
Building an action-oriented research and policy agenda on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas
The explosive violence framework could provide ‘a powerful point of engagement for organisations and institutions concerned with civilian protection’Footnote 99 and others. A growing number of actors have already begun to engage with the problems that explosive weapons use poses to humanitarian protection, human rights, and development.
Progress to date in building the discourse and agenda-setting
The United Nations
As mentioned in the introduction, the UN Secretary-General has repeatedly expressed concern about the humanitarian impact of explosive weapons use in densely populated areas. His concerns appear to have resonated strongly within the family of UN agencies and institutions in the areas of development promotion, humanitarian co-ordination, staff security, refugee and child protection, mine action, and disarmament, since explosive violence is increasingly apparent as a theme in statements and items for consideration in working-level policy processes.Footnote 100
Early steps to raise awareness were facilitated in part by a project entitled ‘Discourse on Explosive Weapons’ (DEW) at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), which commenced in early 2010. The DEW project organized several symposia, bringing together practitioners and policy-makers in order to stimulate discussions on explosive weapons issues and explore ways of addressing the humanitarian challenges involved. UNIDIR published several briefing papers and summary reports, and disseminated explosive-weapons-related information via a dedicated website.Footnote 101
Alongside this, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) played an important role in raising awareness of the impact of explosive weapons on civilians in armed conflict. The head of OCHA, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, repeatedly emphasized the humanitarian challenge posed by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, for example in a statement at the Security Council's open debate on the protection of civilians in July 2010,Footnote 102 and, more recently, in statements calling for the protection of civilians in LibyaFootnote 103 and Côte d'Ivoire.Footnote 104 OCHA also co-hosted two explosive-weapons-focused events in September 2010,Footnote 105 raised explosive-weapons-related concerns in its briefings to the Security Council's informal expert group on the protection of civilians, and supported inclusion of the issue in the Secretary-General's reports on civilian protection.
In his latest report on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, the Secretary-General made specific recommendations, calling on
Member States, United Nations actors and international and non-governmental organizations to consider the issue of explosive weapons closely, including by supporting more systematic data collection and analysis of the human costs of their use. This is essential to deepening the understanding of the humanitarian impact of such weapons and to informing the development of policy and practice that would strengthen the implementation of international humanitarian and human rights law …
I would also urge increased cooperation by Member States, both in terms of collecting and making available to the United Nations and other relevant actors information on civilian harm resulting from the use of explosive weapons and in terms of issuing policy statements that outline the conditions under which explosive weapons might be used in populated areas.Footnote 106
These recommendations offer a broad mandate for the international community to orient itself toward confronting the effects of explosive weapons on civilians, initially by developing a more detailed picture of the humanitarian problem and policies and practices around the use of explosive weapons. It also suggests opportunities for engagement, in particular by states, to clarify how they regard their obligations to protect civilians, and prompt thinking on steps to enhance the level of civilian protection in practical terms.
The International Committee of the Red Cross
An important strand of ICRC humanitarian work in recent decades has been to focus attention on the human costs of the wounding effects of weapons of various kinds. Evidence of the humanitarian problem this poses can be seen in data collected by the ICRC through its field hospitals.Footnote 107 An ICRC study on the effects of violence on the provision of health care, published in mid-2011, explicitly identifies explosive weapons as one of the principal forms of violence affecting hospitals, and other healthcare facilities, medical vehicles, healthcare personnel, and the people in their care.Footnote 108
Despite this, the ICRC has tended to frame the humanitarian problems posed by use of explosive weapons primarily in terms of international rules governing the conduct of hostilities, especially the rules of distinction and proportionality, and it often uses legalistic terminology in its humanitarian communication. Of late, however, the ICRC appears to be lending greater emphasis to the specific problems that explosive weapons pose for civilians in that communication. Senior ICRC staff publicly stated in 2010, for instance, that ‘Waging battle in densely populated urban areas, sometimes with highly explosive weapons’ was an example of the constant evolution in the means and methods of warfare contributing to the suffering of civilians in today's conflicts.Footnote 109 The ICRC president noted that ‘military operations conducted in densely populated urban areas, often using explosive force … can have devastating humanitarian consequences for civilian populations in such environments’,Footnote 110 later adding that it is very difficult to respect the rules on distinction and proportionality in such situations.Footnote 111
The ICRC further elaborated on the problem in a report on IHL and the challenges of contemporary armed conflicts prepared for the 31st International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. In that report, the ICRC took the position that: ‘The use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas exposes the civilian population and infrastructure to heightened – and even extreme – risks of incidental or indiscriminate death, injury or destruction’. Moreover, ‘due to the significant likelihood of indiscriminate effects and despite the absence of an express legal prohibition for specific types of weapons, the ICRC considers that explosive weapons with a wide impact area should be avoided in densely populated areas’.Footnote 112
Interested states
Although there was little echo from states in the 2009 Security Council open debate on the Secretary-General's concerns about the impacts of explosive weapons use on civilians,Footnote 113 there was some change discernible during 2010. In September, together with OCHA, Austria hosted a panel discussion on humanitarian impacts of explosive weapons in New York. In the November 2010 Security Council open debate among states, an increase was noticed in statements relating to the humanitarian problems posed by the use of explosive weapons in the vicinity of civilians. A number of representatives – including those from Australia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Norway, Slovenia, and the European Union – shared their concerns about the threat posed to civilians by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and the humanitarian consequences of such use, and some supported the Secretary-General's recommendations quoted earlier.Footnote 114 Switzerland considered that the ‘use of certain explosive weapons in densely populated areas is clearly a major source of suffering for civilians in situations of armed conflict’ and said that the issue should be considered further, ‘especially with a view to better implementing international humanitarian law’.Footnote 115 Mexico condemned ‘the use of explosives in areas where civilian populations are concentrated because of their indiscriminate effects and the attendant risks’ and expressed the hope that the Security Council ‘will in the future adopt more forceful measures in response to the humanitarian impact of the use of explosives in densely populated areas’.Footnote 116 At subsequent Security Council debates on the protection of civilians, additional states voiced concern about the humanitarian impacts of explosive violence. In November 2011, Norway invited others to hold discussions on this issue ahead of the next debate.Footnote 117
Civil society
Landmine Action's 2009 Explosive Violence report provided both a conceptual basis for treating explosive weapons as a category and some initial research into the pattern of harm that such weapons cause in populated areas. Since then, a number of other NGOs have begun to undertake work to increase knowledge about how explosive violence affects particularly vulnerable groups. Concerned about children being killed or injured by explosive weapons, or dying because of damage caused to health services and infrastructure, Save the Children UK published a study in early 2011 that analysed impacts on children of the use of explosive weapons in populated areas in a number of contexts, including Afghanistan, Iraq, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Somalia, and Yemen; and a detailed policy analysis was published by the Dutch NGO, IKV Pax Christi.Footnote 118 In March 2011, Action on Armed Violence published a study of 100 incidents of explosive weapons use around civilians, which illustrated and analysed patterns of harm.Footnote 119 Meanwhile, explosive weapons have begun to be identified as an analytical category in studies of civilian casualties such as those of the British-based project Iraq Body Count.
This has helped to prompt recognition among a broader group of NGOs about the particular humanitarian problems that explosive weapons appear to cause. In March 2011, a group of NGOs met in Geneva to form a coalition focused on this theme. The International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW) was founded by Action on Armed Violence, Handicap International, Human Rights Watch, Medact, Norwegian People's Aid, Oxfam International, IKV Pax Christi, and Save the Children UK. Many of these civil society actors have worked together in the past on explosive-weapons-related problems including landmines, cluster munitions, and explosive remnants of war. INEW calls for ‘immediate action to prevent human suffering from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas’.Footnote 120
The outline above indicates that investigating and tackling the effects of explosive weapons on civilians is becoming a more urgent concern among a broad range of actors in the international community. Building the debate is already well underway. Significantly, the actors with an interest in the humanitarian problem of explosive weapons do not appear limited to one particular stream of policy work, something that may reflect their recognition of the transversal nature of this problem. However, it also underlines the need for a coherent research and policy agenda to build upon recognition of the humanitarian problem and generate further direction and momentum toward effective ways in which to respond. The explosive violence framework suggests several next steps. It is to some ideas about an agenda, and identifying some of its necessary elements that we now turn.
Building a clearer picture of the human costs
The central proposition of the explosive violence framework is that elevated levels of civilian harm results from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, and that these elevated levels of harm are prevalent across a range of spatial and temporal contexts. Although evidence from a number of different studies appears to support this proposition, there is a need for further research into the pattern of harm in order to deepen understanding and inform the policy debate, in line with the UN Secretary-General's recommendation, supported by a number of states.
More case studies into the pattern of harm of explosive weapons use in particular situations would be helpful, both individually and in aggregate, in illustrating the actual effects of the use of explosive weapons.Footnote 121 Useful data can also be gleaned from other sources, such as Human Rights Watch assessments of the impact of recent hostilities on civilians in Southern Lebanon, Georgia–Russia, and Somalia, although such reports until recently did not use the terminology of explosive weapons.Footnote 122 Being able readily to compare the effects of explosive weapons use using more common criteria, especially the manner in which data is categorized, would make it easier to test assumptions and scrutinize user claims.Footnote 123
Analysis of large relevant datasets for trend information about explosive weapons use would help in mapping the pattern of harm. To this end, tools developed by Coupland and TabackFootnote 124 to model the global cost of armed violence on civilians statistically have already been used to a limited initial extent in the explosive violence context, based on collation, coding, and analysis of media reporting.Footnote 125 Meanwhile, several projects have sought to collect casualty data for Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and to analyse these datasets for trends, including deaths and injury from use of explosive weapons, according to type of perpetrator. In Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA), and others have each collected their own civilian casualty datasets, including various weapons-related categorizations (air strike, IED, etc.). However, until portions were released recently to the journal Science, these datasets were not available in the public domain.Footnote 126 This highlights two challenges associated with large datasets of civilian casualties. First, for a variety of reasons, it can be difficult to obtain access to datasets.Footnote 127 Second, the way in which data is categorized in these datasets is a significant factor determining the explosive-weapons-relevant trends (if any) that can be observed. If these political and methodological challenges can be overcome, significant opportunity exists for systematic investigation into establishing whether there is a pattern of harm from explosive weapons use across different geographical contexts.
Such data could also be of value in developing improved technical analysis of which explosive weapons cause what kind of harm to civilians, and thus point toward policy options to prevent such harm. Many militaries have, since World War II, developed sophisticated techniques to improve the technical characteristics of their explosive munitions, to increase their lethality using insights from wound ballistics and other disciplines, and to enhance protection for friendly combatants on the battlefield from them (for instance, ‘danger close’ buffer zones). In contrast, a systematic understanding of the gamut of effects on civilians of explosive weapons in populated areas appears to lag behind, as shown in the course of recent international efforts to address the risks of cluster munitions to civilians: ‘major military nations have basic deficiencies in their knowledge about the humanitarian consequences associated with their use of force’.Footnote 128 Questions to raise include: Are some explosive weapons worse in enclosed or semi-enclosed urban environments than others, for instance, in terms of blast or fragmentation risk to civilians in the vicinity? How do explosive weapons vary in their impact on physical infrastructure essential to civilian wellbeing, such as water and sanitation networks? How do concentrations of structures such as buildings modify the effect radiuses of different explosive weapons? Findings of such technical research could inform operational measures to enhance civilian protection, and user policies.
Critically examining norms governing explosive weapons policies and practices
Research into the pattern of civilian harm, and the technological characteristics and contexts of use associated with that harm can be usefully combined with research into the social and legal norms governing explosive weapons policies and practices. Work on the latter could, for example, contribute to articulating the hitherto implicit transition between situations characterized by a strong presumption against the use of explosive weapons by states (law enforcement) to situations marked by general acceptability of such use in the vicinity of civilians (armed conflict).
Future research in this area could involve a survey of national and international policies and practices governing the production, stockpiling, transfer, and use of explosive weapons, including an analysis of laws and policies determining who may use explosive weapons against whom, among whom, where, and for what purpose. This could also include an examination of protective standards applicable to activities involving explosive weapons, and the responsibility assumed by users towards persons put at risk and those harmed by such activities.Footnote 129
States, in particular, should heed the UN Secretary-General's call and issue policy statements about what use of explosive weapons in populated areas they consider acceptable. Such information would improve transparency about targeting processes that have escaped scrutiny under IHL. It would also increase user accountability towards domestic publics and towards victims of explosive violence. Revealing that states accept different levels of risk to civilians depending on the context of use would help to shift the burden of proof onto users to justify when, why, and under what conditions explosive weapons may be employed in populated areas. In combination with evidence of a pattern of civilian harm from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, this could contribute to ‘de-normalizing’ recourse to this practice in situations of armed conflict and persuade users to change their policies and practices associated with elevated civilian harm.
Conclusion
In this article we have argued that, historically, the use of explosive weapons in populated areas has been a significant source of harm to civilians during armed conflict, and continues to be so today despite international rules devised to protect civilians from the effects of hostilities. A consistent pattern of civilian harm appears to manifest itself when explosive weapons are used in populated areas. However, at least until recently, states have not acknowledged that there might be a humanitarian problem beyond ‘accidental’ or atypical incidents of harm from explosive violence, or particular worst culprits such as cluster munitions. Yet many of the arguments used to justify controls over perceived worst culprits also apply to other explosive weapons, which in practice can cause equivalent harm when used within concentrations of civilians. Indeed, some of those states opposing, for instance, international bans on anti-personnel mines or cluster munitions insisted that restrictions on these weapons would compel them to deploy ‘worse’ weapons such as heavy artillery or rockets out of military necessity. But such threats prompt a stark question: if it is unacceptable to use one kind of explosive weapon, why would it be acceptable to use another if the harm to civilians is similar or worse?
Of course, reconciling the brutality of armed conflict with civilized norms such as protecting civilians is a conundrum for which humanitarian law provides principles that are at times in tension with one another. Often, it seems, military necessity trumps concern for the protection of civilians. In this regard, the explosive violence framework, and considering explosive weapons as a category in particular, provides one way to formulate questions and collect relevant evidence in order critically to examine the claims made by explosive weapons users of all kinds about their commitment to protect civilians, to stigmatize the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, and to hold users to greater account for the harm they inflict on civilian populations. It invites a humanitarian discourse that welcomes evidence, rather than a discourse favouring the status quo based on elastic notions of military necessity and proportionality that lack transparency.
Tools for research and policy analysis such as the explosive violence framework are especially important when states claim civilian protection to rationalize their explosive weapons use, as in contemporary conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya, and Côte d'Ivoire. It is striking that, in the context of the last, in 2011, the UN Security Council explicitly held up the use of ‘heavy weapons’ as a threat to the civilian population that should be prevented with all necessary means. Without defining or even describing this threat, the Security Council authorized military intervention that foresaw the use of explosive weapons in populated areas that could pose equally acute hazards to civilians.Footnote 130 This underlines a risk that, without informed understanding of the effects of explosive weapons as a category and in the absence of rigorous examination of user claims about these weapons (such as accuracy), the discourse remains a circular one in which laws are perceived as rationalization rather than restraint. Not only will this breed cynicism about the value of legal rules on the means and methods of warfare among states, but it undermines efforts to stigmatize use of explosive weapons in populated areas by non-state actors at a time when the former are losing their monopoly on technology of explosive force to the latter.
On the other hand, a discourse based on evidence about the effects of explosive weapons and norms around their use or non-use would help to clarify which explosive weapons cause a pattern of elevated harm to civilians when used in populated areas, and hopefully lead to meaningful efforts to prevent their use in those contexts by anyone. Whether enhanced prevention is best achieved through more international treaty-making or other forms of normative strengthening remains to be seen, especially as current research and advocacy on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas is at a formative stage. Nevertheless, greater evidence and more sophisticated argumentation about the effects of explosive weapons on civilians will increase pressure on users of explosive weapons to justify their policies and their actions. History shows that such critical examination is usually necessary in order to call into question general attitudes about means and methods of warfare, and to generate the political and diplomatic momentum necessary to improve humanitarian standards for civilian protection in armed conflict.
