Klamberg, Mark --- "Exploiting legal thresholds, fault-lines and gaps in the context of remote warfare" [2017] ELECD 1275; in Ohlin, David Jens (ed), "Research Handbook on Remote Warfare" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 186

Book Title: Research Handbook on Remote Warfare

Editor(s): Ohlin, David Jens

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784716981

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Exploiting legal thresholds, fault-lines and gaps in the context of remote warfare

Author(s): Klamberg, Mark

Number of pages: 25

Abstract/Description:

Conflicts increasingly involve action at a distance as opposed to traditional battlefield engagements. Development of new weapons, modern communications and growing economic interdependence between states push national decision-makers to adopt asymmetrical strategies, overt as well as covert. States may adopt such strategies to minimize the exposure to risk of their own forces while their opponents can be easily attacked and also for the purpose of avoiding attribution and retribution. Since international law is used as a tool for legitimizing state policies—in the words of Sari—legal thresholds, fault-lines and gaps will be used by states to portray their own actions as legal or at least belonging to a grey area but never illegal. These issues have been brought to the fore not least by increased tensions between the West and Russia. Russia states in its 2014 Military doctrine that the nature and characteristics of modern warfare conflict includes, inter alia: a) [i]ntegrated use of military force, political, economic, informational and other non-military measures nature, implemented with the extensive use of the protest potential of the population, and special operations forces … h) participation in hostilities irregular armed groups and private military companies; i) the use of indirect and asymmetric methods Action; j) the use of externally funded and run political forces and social movements. Russia perceives as one of the main military dangers ‘subversive activities of special services and organizations foreign states and their coalitions against the Russian Federation’.