( Twelve minute read)
The present moment finds the world as dangerously divided and on the edge of international violence as any in the last thirty years. Why?
You could blame #Bill Gates for this reason.
He was blinded by the good of connecting us all and our every actions in the world, with the Internet which has introduced an epochal change that is been used both for good and bad.
Since the internet became a thing (in a period of conflict and transformation of international relations) states use to be able to find new ways of discovering points of common interest and signalling willingness to conform to particular norms.
This is no longer possible as everything is connected to some other another thing, or event with an eroding of International laws.
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The world faces many threats that require collective action for an effective response..
Climate change, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and future pandemics, including those deliberately engineered using cutting-edge technology, may lead the list.
The present moment of crisis has many causes – geopolitical, economic and cultural and the Internet/ AI algorithms running social media and killing programs.
Russia’s armed attack on Ukraine and now the Israel war have prompted many to despair of international law.
What it means as a practical matter is that the formal adoption of new international rules through international agreements faces roadblocks that seem likely to persist for some time.
WHY?
Because suddenly just about everyone has a portal to cyberspace, a wonderful world with an amazing range of images, sounds and writing, further democratized connections and influence around the world through cyber-activity.
These developments are transforming our world. The difference from twenty years ago could not be greater.
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The cyber-revolution, an explosion in connectivity that increasingly allowed people to bypass central authorities to communicate, agitate and organize, unfolded during the first decade of the present century.
What is the value of a legal order that has no effective remedy in store against even the most blatant violations?
Global governance seemed to have overcome the burgeoning nationalism of the 19th century.
The establishment of the International Criminal Court arguably marked the end of history in the field of international law. Surely now we don’t need another war or the current wars, to open our eyes about the insufficiency of the post-1990 international legal order.
The differentiation concerning the real-life implications of international law are now so profound with wars conducted with AI drones and targeting programmes, we are left to realize that even in cases so clearly in violation of the most fundamental principles of international law, international law hardly seems to contain power.
Due to the lack of centralized enforcement, how international law influences states and other actors in ways that are often implicit rather than explicit, influencing the cognitive, psychological aspects of human nature, rather than the faculty for rational calculus.
Our understanding of legal terms was guided by moral concepts, not anymore.
In the absence of effective formal international law-making, jurists face a choice that will require a lot of work on language and perceptions.
It is sometimes incredibly difficult to find out whether states choose their course of action due to cognitive or motivational biases or out of sheer self-interest.
In the case of international humanitarian law, we are likely to see entrepreneurial rules favoured by states that project military force into conflicts, either international or non-international, rather than those preferred by states that find armed conflicts unfolding on their territory against their will.
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I offer here a stylized and truncated narrative that focuses on two factors:
(1) geopolitical changes related to the use of force in international and non-international disputes, and (2) the achievements of information technology.
This is not the entire story,
The collapse of Soviet Union in December 1991, seemed to put an end to the bipolar regime that had governed international security issues since the Second World War. This opened the door to the possibility of a new world order based on the international rule of law. It became possible to imagine a world where international uses of armed force would rest on international consensus, reflected in the actions of the United Nations Security Council, and thus increasingly rare.
Worldwide, States walked away from the bipolar structure that had dominated international relations for the previous forty years. Many thoughtful people believed that we found ourselves in a new age of collective security and democratic peace with the international rule of law and peaceful resolution of international disputes replacing the threat of armed conflict and the risk of Armageddon.
After 1991, armed conflict did not disappear, but shifted and is still shifting to AI weapons beyond any human control, that will produce atrocities yet to be seen- forever wars. Al-Qaeda and Da’esh embody non-State parties to such conflicts.
Forever wars, that spawn mass terror attacks resulting coalitions invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. ( the former with the Security Council’s approval and the latter without.) However conquest did not result in triumph, but instead in prolonged insurgencies that in many ways resembled the old wars of national liberation.
Resulting in a right to collective self-defence against non-State organizations operating on the territory of Syria and Russia and Iran introducing forces at the invitation of Syria’s government.
That are neither anti-colonial struggles of national liberation nor civil wars confined to the territory of a State. Rather, they involve armed struggle by non-State actors to bring about a regime change in a particular State or region that extends outside the borders of the contested territory.
As freedom spread from the virtual space to the physical space.
Cyber-tactics could defang authoritarian uses of targeted force by enabling elements of surprise and swarming for popular uprisings that resist State-sponsored suppression of protests.
The cyber-revolution, in the eyes of some, represented the death knell of violent authoritarian regimes and thus provided yet another path to a democratic peace. Such as the 2011 Arab Spring.
Authoritarians increasingly exploited the new technologies to survey and remove their adversaries.
Once an instrument of liberation, cyberspace increasingly became the place where States bolstered their defences against dissidents. The same technologies that gave states greater resources to leverage domestic social control also provided new instruments for prosecuting international conflicts.
These actors also can infiltrate online media so as to engage in disinformation and psychological warfare. The cyber-tools not only greatly multiply the efficacy of these interventions, but complicate attribution of responsibility. These malign capacities exacerbate both traditional international disputes and the prosecution of non-traditional armed conflicts.
Both developments breed instability and leverage threats to peace and prosperity. They also raise issues related to international humanitarian law.
This may mean developing rules with which states will comply while maintaining plausible deniability that their compliance represents a broader commitment to cooperation or any indication of the normative pull of the rule of law.
With the capacity to conduct over-the-horizon operations, typically drone strikes, against persons they believe to be implicated in imminent armed attacks have developed non-trivial standards and rules of evidence to constrain military actors in choosing whom to target.
Before it becomes impossible, international law must be updated to the technology it is supposed to operate in.
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