 Okay. Great. Okay. So, right. So we have a smaller audience today. Hopefully people trickle in. I think it's just this time of year, right? Everyone's really busy trying to navigate timetables and work and workload or whatnot. But I'm looking forward to this discussion myself and I imagine Mervyn are very much interested in the content of the research that you're doing, Francisco. So it'll be a great discussion. No doubt. So for the recording and for everyone who is in the virtual audience, I just want to give a warm welcome and thank you for being a part of the seminar series. Welcome back to our next new voices seminar. So my name is Amanda Chisholm, and I'm a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies, and organizer and chair of this series. So for those of you who don't know new voices and global security is a virtual path platform. It's in its second year running. We're designed to showcase and amplify the diverse and vibrant expertise of our PhD and ECRs across the school. So this year we have formed a collaboration with the journal Critical Military Studies, where the editor in chief, Victoria Basham will be working closely with our presenters and developing blog posts based on their presentations. So please watch that space for the publication of these or watch this space for the publication of these posts as they materialize. Today I'm very pleased to welcome Francisco Lobo and Francisco is a doctoral researcher at the Department of War Studies here at King's College. His thesis focuses on the professional military ethics human rights and human dignity. He holds a law degree from the University of Chile. He also holds an LLM in the International Legal Studies from New York University, and that's sponsored by the Fulbright Commission, and a masters of law specializing in international law from the University of Chile. He is a lecturer in international law human rights law international criminal law and legal theory. He has worked as a New York University fellow in international law and human rights as an international law commission of the United Nations in 2018 where he assisted the special report on preempt sorry preemptory norms of general international law in New York and Geneva so this is quite an incredible background you have Francisco. So his research interests include international law human rights, the love armed conflict and just war tradition and international criminal law as well as multidisciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of violence from the perspective of history philosophy and ethics. The title of Francisco's talk today is the capture or kill debate revisited putting the human back into human enhancement of soldiers. The presentation is based upon an article that is forthcoming, which revisits the cutting edge capture or kill debate, offering a fresh outlook that reconstructs the notion of human enhancement of soldiers from a normative standpoint. Francisco is joined today by Professor Mervin Frost who will act as his discussant. Mervin is a professor in international relations here in war studies in a world renowned scholar on ethics and international relations. He was educated at the University of Stellenbosch and subsequently a Rhodes scholar read politics at Oxford. Mervin had held lectureships at the University of Cape Town and at Rhodes University before being appointed to the chair of politics and head of department of the University of Natel and Durbin. In 2006 he took up the position of professor of international relations at the University of Kent and Canterbury, and he is past president of the South African Political Studies Association and was editor of its journal. Mervin has held international executive roles and international research bodies including International Studies Association, and he also serves on numerous editorial boards. From June to August 2019 Mervin was the first distinguished professorial visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia, and beyond his role in war studies. Mervin is currently a professor or professorial research associate at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. His areas of interest are ethics and international relations, international political theory, ethical issues surrounding private military and security companies. A huge welcome to you both. And again to you the audience for coming and listening to what's going to be a no doubt a gripping discussion. So Francisco has agreed to talk for about 15 or 20 minutes at which time Mervin will offer some reflections and commentary before we open the floor up to you the audience for any questions and feedback. As usual, you can either ask these questions by raising your hands to ask them live or put them in the chat box and I can read them out loud. But without further ado Francisco the floor is yours. Thank you Amanda for that introduction. Thank you Mervin for being here for reading the article, and to everyone for being here today. For this discussion, which will hopefully not be just a legal discussion that's that's not the aim but a broader discussion beyond the legal issues. That's my, my aim here today. I will share my screen. I think if I if I share the desktop then I can access everything. So hopefully you can see that right, and you can still hear me okay. Excellent. So I'll just minimize the windows here. Maybe there. Okay. Okay, so yeah, a slight change in the in the title of the presentation is not called the capture or kill debate anymore because that's the title of the article. But yeah I decided to focus more on military honor and human dignity which is the title of my PhD research here at King's and has to do more with the ethical side of things and not so much the legal side. Even though the article I will be presenting today is like 90% legal legal stuff, but I will try to briefly recap the legal discussion the legal debate. So whenever lawyers and academics say they're going to be brief, they're lying, they're probably not going to be brief but I'll do my best to actually be brief, recapping the debate so some preliminary considerations. Well, as I said, as Amanda said I'm doing the PhD in worst studies here it's not a PhD in law. I wasn't interested in just studying the legal aspect of armed conflict I wanted to move beyond that. I still use the law quite a lot quite often as a point of departure as a normative framework. I go back to the law constantly my supervisor, Dr. Maria Varaki she's also a lawyer so that's very helpful but it goes beyond legal aspects, what I'm doing here and what I'm looking at with my research is ways in which we couldn't we could still respect for human rights and human dignity in the military during their training and during their education experiences. That's what I'm doing here at King's, but I wanted to say a couple of things about language and terminology. In the legal field we tend to use lots of expressions very freely and very clinically Mary. It sounds clinical and forensic when we do it like the law of armed conflict or targeted killings or combatants noncombatants neutralize and all of that. But we are actually talking about killing people or not killing people we're talking about people's lives we're talking about destroying people's properties. Separating families bombing countries so there should be trigger warnings or we should find more trigger warnings in legal scholarship in all scholarship that that deals with armed conflict and we don't find those often enough so yeah I will be talking about the capture or kill debate that's the name that it has in the literature in the legal literature but I am well aware that this is this is not a small. This is not a trivial matter it's it's literally a matter of life and death so I'm very aware of that and yeah lawyers tend to forget that with all their acronyms under. Technicism. And the second the second consideration in terms of language is well. There's also another flaw that you can find in legal scholarship that it's a lack of passionate discourse. She's relying on last year said there she's a professor at Harvard Law School, she has been defending for a couple of years, the need to write more passionately about the law of armed conflict or humanitarian law that doesn't mean you have to be emotional about it but just not treated as something again clinical scientific but actually if you're going to write about war on conflict about destroying people's lives, you have to do it with with passion with conviction you have to engage with arguments about just war arguments about what's right and what's wrong, not merely the legal stuff and she she wants to rescue that tradition that the legal scholarship had in the 60s and 70s, writing about the Vietnam war, and that during the war on terror was lost so she wants to revive that tradition and that's pretty much in favor of doing that so that's that's all about language and terminology, but yeah let's move on to the debate to the capture kill debate in IHL let me minimize this. So IHL is international humanitarian law or the law of armed conflict. Yeah, I'm already using that. See, this is this is a problem. The capture kill debate is a debate that's been going on in the literature for roughly 10, 12 years. It's not actually something that they discussed in the military I was I was informed about this by a colleague in US Army Special Forces he once told me, look, we don't even call it that I mean this is not part of mission statement ever they don't tell us like in the briefing you get a capture or kill. No, that's not part of the professional lingo that they use, but lawyers and legal scholars have been using this language for over a decade now to refer to some issues in IHL so that's that's why I'm using it as well. And yeah, it starts with the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law, according to this principle, which is a cardinal principle in IHL. You only allow you're only allowed to target combatants or military targets, and you're not allowed or it is prohibited to target non combatants non military targets that's that's the the essence of the principle of distinction. But you, you can exceptionally target non combatants, if they are directly participating in hostilities or DPH, another acronym, DPH means direct participation in hostilities and in 2009 the International Committee of the Red Cross the ICRC came up with an supportive guideline to actually explain what what does DPH mean and how good governments and the military, maybe apply this category or avoid misapplying the category of DPH and thus sticking to the principle of distinction which is the most important thing in the end. So, the ICRC came up with restraints on the use of force in direct attacks in 2009 in the in the guidelines, and they revived what was known as the Pitec Continuum because that's the name of a scholar and practitioner who came up with it. In the 70s, but the Pitec Continuum basically states this, if we can put a soldier out of action by capturing him, we should not warn him. If we can obtain the same result by warning him, we must not kill him. If there are two means to achieve the same military advantage, we must choose the one which causes the lesser evil. So it's an escalatory rationale. If we capture, if not possible, one, if not possible, then kill as a last resort. And that's the Pitec Continuum and the ICRC reintroduced it in 2009, but not without controversy and actually a lot of experts, IHL experts who were at the conference in 2009, well, and before, were against this. And the ICRC took note of that. It's actually in the guidelines. And yeah, that's how the debate started in 2009. And in this debate, we have two camps or two sides. We have the restrictionists and the expansionists. So the restrictionists are those who are in favor of applying the continuum, the Pitec Continuum, the escalatory rationale. So capturing overkilling should be favored. And the expansionists, this is all as a matter of legal certainty, by the way, this is not an ethical debate. This is a legal debate. So restrictionists say the law says what they believe it says. And expansionists say, well, no, the law actually says something different, but this is all within the realm of the law, by the way. So restrictionists believe in the Pitec Continuum. Expansionists think that there is no evidence in state practice to support this continuum. It could be ethically attractive, sure, but it's not a matter of law. And the Pitec Continuum is a tax-ladder international humanitarian law, so states have freedom to capture or kill, depending on what's more convenient or military necessary in a given operation. That's basically the gist of the debate. As I said, I'm not going to get much into it. If you read the article, you'll see that, well, there's a lot of information there. If you're interested in the nitty-gritty of the legal debate, please read the article. But other than that, I'll just briefly recap the main points. So, where does this come from, the debate? How could it be that lawyers don't agree about what IHL or this branch of the law actually says? Well, that's usually the case with any branch of the law. A constitutional law, a private law, criminal law, you will always find controversy among lawyers, so this is no different. But in the case of IHL, I believe there is some misunderstanding surrounding the purpose of IHL. The purpose of IHL, the law of armed conflict or international humanitarian law, is not to preserve life. We're beyond that when we were talking about armed conflict. The purpose of international human rights law, that is to preserve life because we're not in a situation where life can be taken legally, which we call war, right, or armed conflict. If we are in a situation of armed conflict, then the purpose is not to preserve life because it's not part of the logic of warfare, but to alleviate human suffering. That's the whole point of IHL, that's the main point. So we find a tension between restrictionists and expansionists, which I call as centrifugal tension because it's in the end a tension between human rights law, which is a different field, and international humanitarian law. And here the problem is that restrictionists, I'm sorry, are trying to import human rights categories into or law enforcement categories, the escalatory rationale and all that, into IHL, which is a different field, a different legal field. And on this I'm with the expansionists. But there's also a centrifugal tension within IHL, within the law of armed conflict matters are not clear military necessity and humanity, which are two other principles within IHL besides distinction. They are supposedly they work together or one is supposed to temper or moderate the other, but we don't have clarity about what humanity means, actually, and that that is one of the reasons I wrote the article because I wanted to contribute to the debate about not only capture or kill but actually providing humanity with its own content. And the problem that we find within IHL is that all definitions of humanity, the principle of humanity is that well, if something is not military necessary, then it goes against the principle of humanity, and something is military and if it's required needed, you will find different formulations again, you will find them in the article but in the end it's all very circular, because military necessity stands for what is needed required necessary to achieve a given operational goal. If it goes beyond that, or if it's not necessary, then it goes against the principle of humanity, but then humanity is just military non necessity or what is not military necessary and that that doesn't tell us much actually about what humanity actually stands for on its own. So that's the problem of definitional circularity that that I identify. So there is a need in the end to confer an independent content to the principle of humanity and that is why that is what I tried to do in the final sections of this article. So how can we do this. Well, as I said I'm interested in going beyond the law beyond the legal debate. This is not something that a lot of lawyers like to do. Actually, most of them don't like to go beyond the law and venture into ethics or philosophy. They're more comfortable within the confines of legal reasoning and legal discourse. So the good point of departure from the law and beyond beyond the law and moving into the field of ethics is the renowned Martin's class Martin's class is a class that was introduced in IHL instruments over 100 years ago, but it has been preserved in the formulations in different international treaties. And this is like the latest version of the Martin's class that we can find in additional protocol one to the Geneva conventions. And it's, it says just this, in cases not covered by this protocol, or by other international agreements, civilians and combatants remain under the protection and authority of the principles of international law, derived from established mechanisms, from the principles of humanity. So humanity here is key, and from the dictates of public conscience. Now, I remember one of my IHL professors once told us that whenever you resort to the Martin's class in a legal debate, that means you run out of arguments out of legal arguments and it basically means you surrender. Okay, okay, I don't have the legal answer but remember the Martin's class and so that's why lawyers don't like this very much because it means that they run out of legal arguments and they have to venture into ethics or morality and as I said they're not very comfortable with doing that but I don't mind that. And I think actually that I agree with part of the literature that says that the Martin's class actually codifies the ancient code of chivalry and what in the Middle Ages was known as the use or moron or the law of arms, which was the the normative code that the military professionals were talking about at the time or proto-professionals were talking knights, soldiers, etc., applied in during armed conflict amongst themselves. And the Martin's class is again a crystallization, a codification of that tradition. Regarding ethics, the concept of honor is very important today in the military, it's still important. We might think that it's quaint obsolete but actually within the military it's part of the values, the stated values of some militaries in the world including some US institutions as well. So it's definitely something very, very topical, honor or military honor still. And within the debate, the capture kill debate, actually some scholars like Avrilia Bloom acknowledged that there are some honor theories that espouse the capturing over killing side of the debate. So these are the theories, for instance, advanced by Thomas Nagel and Paul Kahn, again during the article if you want to check them out, but in the end military honor is seen as a fighting fair against the enemy and as an enhanced sense of morality in the sense that the military think they are called to apply a higher set of standards of values, higher than civilians, higher than society, so they should abide by a more strict code of ethics and of law, of course. And I also tried to connect this in the article with human dignity, the concept of human dignity, which is mentioned in some IHL key instruments, but it's not developed well it's also mentioned throughout international human rights law but never defined so that's also something I'm looking into in my PhD research, the concept of human dignity, and there are a number of theories, philosophical legal about human dignity, I like the rank conception advanced by Jeremy Waldron legal theorists back at NYU. He believes that human dignity is actually legal status, which comes with privileges, both in times of peace and in times of war so in times of peace we have the right to life, the right to offer trial, etc. But also in times of war, we're entitled to being treated with respect, the right not to be humiliated, the right to offer trial, etc. All of which we can find in common article three to the Geneva Conventions and article 75 of the additional protocol of the conventions. This is all Lex Lara IHL Lex Lara means it is part of the law is not just a suggestion is not that just something that would be nice to have in the law this is actually part of the law that's what we mean when we say Lex Lara so I think this this this is a promising avenue to actually endow the principle of humanity within IHL with a content of its own, other than just mirroring or repeating what military necessity is or is not rather. So what is the absolute of all of this. Well in the end, my conclusion, after all those pages that some of you may have read or not in the article is that the legal duty to respect human dignity and it is a legal duty grounded again on common article three grounds at the same time a legal option is just an option to capture that should be seriously considered in scenarios short of loses of war versus war are legal under IHL where a fair fight is not possible. Again, as a result of this rich tradition of military honor chivalry, everything that we can find codified in the end in the in the Martin's class. So maybe something something about policy recommendation at the end of the chapter and that is something I'm actually looking during my PhD research military training and education is well teaching all these values, teaching the military, the people who will actually make decisions about whether to capture or kill another human being teaching those folks. Well, what military honor means what human dignity means. So it is key that during military training and education we do just that. We shouldn't underestimate the value of tradition within the military. And I just wanted to close by illustrating this with with a maybe it's something anecdotal but I found it very interesting when I was watching these on the news like this month or this is very recent but as you can see in the US. They came up with this brand new uniforms for their brand new space force. People that don't like them don't mind that much that the uniforms, they think they're too sci fi that they're too. Well, they're just prototypes but yeah they didn't get a warm reception by the public. I think it's actually kind of the point that they look sci fi if it's a space force but anyway, my point is this uniform is brand new it doesn't have tradition, because the space force doesn't have any tradition I mean it's new it's something for the future, but the military actually don't value innovation, and stuff for that refers to the future, as much as they do tradition the past and glorious epic past, and the future that came of those who came before. And this is also very interesting this is a new uniform that the US Army reintroduce is not so new actually because it's the same World War two uniform that what they call the greatest generation that once donned when once used to fight the Nazis and the Japanese Empire, and it's it's made a comeback, because it reminds the US Army and US public in general of an epic narrative that they pretty much care about still. It's loaded with tradition with their very best traditions so and the concept of military honor and of chivalry. They're all about tradition in the end it's tradition even older than than what the greatest generation did eight decades ago. That goes back 1000 years ago, maybe more, and well the military tend to favor tradition and tend to favor this these narratives that espouse reviving our best traditions. So with that I will close and yeah hopefully we can, we can. I will stop sharing. We can have a discussion now with mervin and then move on to the Q&A. Thank you. Thanks very much for just because that was that was very interesting and I've read your whole paper with great, with great interest. I want to comment about those last two slides you showed about the military in their proud new uniforms. I spent three months at the Australian Defense Force Academy. And there were any number of photographs and photo opportunities that exactly mirrored that you know soldiers men and women in their uniforms looking extremely proud, and as it were, commanding recognition as being dignified you know dignity was essential to them. We quite often see similar kind of demands in war studies amongst our students. Now, I just want to make a few comments and raise a couple of questions problems that I detected. But my first priam. advice. I want to come clean right at the beginning is that I'm not an international lawyer. And for those of you haven't read this paper, it is in large measure, an international law paper. The conventions of lawyers are to be seen everywhere, you know, it's very detailed and very cool rational kind of logic chopping up of the different positions. And at the heart of this paper is very are various tensions, the one is between international humanitarian law, sometimes referred to as the international law of armed conflict and international human rights law. Now, the IHL, as all of you probably know, stems all the way back to the 1860s. And it was European states horrified at what war did to people and to them sort of agreed amongst themselves to institute some norms to restrain how wars were fought. The international human rights law is much more modern, and it really only got going after World War Two, and we see it in all in the United Nations for example and there are a whole lot of legal instruments subsequent to World War Two in which these elements are spelled out. There are interesting distinctions between the two for what's key for international humanitarian law, the laws of armed conflict is humanity. And as we're minimizing the damage to humanity, whereas international human rights law, what's central there are human rights of course. So, Francesco's key interest is focused on this question, which is, what underlies the differences between these interpretations of international law, you know say wants to make it clear to us why they're the tensions between the two bodies of law. And then he's more interested indeed in tensions within international humanitarian law. So there's another set of tensions there. And the tension there is around these two concepts necessity on the one hand, and humanity on the out on the other, and Francesco is very clear about the vagueness of this notion of military necessity, because it's very difficult notion. You can only specify, and this is just a logical point. One can only specify that something is necessary. If you know what it's necessary for. So you have to have the goal very clearly in mind. Yet in wars and conflicts of other kinds. The goals are often far from clear. So just think of what we've experienced just in the past past couple of decades. We had the second war in Iraq, where the goals that the people pursuing the war on the side of the West, including our Prime Minister Tony Blair, the gold shifting as the war went. So as the goal shift necessity changes. Is the gold victory is the gold total victory is the goal simply to get back to the status quo anti in other words to get the guys out and and then continue as you were. So this notion of necessity is reaching your goal is really a pretty dodgy idea. The notion that you must, as it were constrained necessity which was is already dodgy with the notion of humanity that itself is highly problematic. What is the humanity constraint. It's all very well saying humanity is your nice warm cuddly feeling I'm in favor of humanity. Well who's not everybody's in favor of humanity. And so I take the, the, the punchline of this. This paper when you got through all the black little law and you finish you wonder where's the meat. Well the meat is this, the meat, the meat is about trying to give some substance to the notion of humanity, and the substance he looks for is in the notion of dignity. And as he said, as logo said earlier, he said the notion of dignity falls back towards the chivalric tradition and the use of more honor amongst soldiers. And there's the huge tradition in Europe. Of that, where the semi professional soldiers in the Middle Ages, respected each other, and did minimum damage to each other because they wanted to live and earn a salary on another day. You wanted to kill them. You wanted to win, but you didn't want to, to lose yourself or lose your life. All of this, this notion of introducing human dignity, and then showing us that picture of soldiers who clearly think about themselves as having dignity and so on. All of this presupposes that what we're talking about are a wars between states and conventional militaries with armies in uniforms and quite often with the notion of where the battle is taking place a battlefield and so on. And so it harks back to two world wars. But the problem with all this, and I guess this is my central question to Francesco is the wars that are the majority there are lots of wars going on, lots all over the place. So in Somalia and Eritrea in Sudan, in Syria, ongoing in Libya, in Burma, these wars are not at all like the kind of wars where you get honor among soldiers. Once the soldiers given up fighting hands up, and then the debate in this paper is about should you shoot that person or not, because they might be military necessity in shooting him because you can't just think of each individual you have to think of the campaign as a whole. But modern wars, for example, the so called global war on terror is not at all like that. On the on the one side of the so called terrorists who don't see themselves as terrorists. And on the other side, all of us who are fighting terrorism, but this is not between soldiers who are not one another. There's very much an idea that the terrorist is beyond the pale. And so, you know, you had the President of the United States sitting in the Oval Office deciding, you know, whether to wipe out bin Laden or not. No question of capturing him, you're going in there to wipe him out. You don't want any long court cases and so on. I guess I'll just end there. There's lots more to say but there's this big question of, aren't you simply talking about fine legal points in wars as they used to be fought, but the prospect of that kind of war appearing anytime soon is highly unlikely. Thanks very much. Before you pop in to respond to Mervyn's really important and informative commentary. I'm going to abuse my position of chair and also just tag on to what Mervyn, some of his reflections to and this is also disclosing I am not an international expert by any means my curiosity around ethics and military values and honor comes from a position of a feminist curiosity, and particularly looking at women, peace and security, and broader important, you know, for the past four decades feminist research on military military values military culture, duty, honor, to which, you know they argue quite persuasively that these concepts are not neutral they're very gendered and racialized to right. And so I wonder if you can reflect on, especially you know when you're articulating what recommendations you have, you know around training and, you know, and instilling values and honor in soldiers right as a way to to to prevent loss of dignity, or what not when you're coming into conflict is that I guess the racialized and gendered aspects of this for you, you know I mean reflecting upon. Particularly, I imagining the military as you're talking about and the military conventions is similar to what Mervyn was talking about you know conventional armies conventional militaries. And they're espoused ideas of duty and honor. But I, you know I'm thinking in the 1990s serene razzak did you know an entire book on the Canadian airborne regiments in Somalia, and the ways in which they're racialized violence against locals how they perceive to be enemies. And so what I'm wondering, baiting and torturing local Somalians was a part of them reimagining their own dignity as soldiers and trying to find value in a mission. You know, and so I just wonder and that that's not just one case in isolation, you have more recently the Australian special forces in Afghanistan the whole report on them right so there's like this, this parallel running of, you know, quite a point by these men and women that are supposed to be espousing these values and espousing this dignity and I just wonder if you can reflect upon that and how your argument holds or how it might speak to that. I'll be quiet now we do have some questions in the Q&A box but maybe if you can just reflect on Mervyn and my. Excellent. Thank you thank you so much for for the feedback for the questions. Yeah that's that's always the big issue nowadays in legal scholarship what about NIAX non international armed conflicts they call them NIAX. And yeah because everybody forgets about NIAX in the end they all talk about international armed conflicts or IAX and yeah but the war on terror is actually something that's been going on for what two decades now and it's basically NIAX or or some some hybrid form of NIAX and IAX if you take Afghanistan for for instance. So yeah what about NIAX so how to apply put differently how to apply the principles of chevrolet and the of military honor to non state actors. Well, there is a funny funny anecdote there is a there are some drug dealers in Mexico who call themselves the Knights Templar. Okay, that that sounds funny but it's probably not what we're looking for here okay so no but there there is some work being done right now and yeah for a while now at the ICRC but also by some other NGOs like Geneva call. I also mentioned them in the article, working with non non state actors who are involved in armed conflict and looking at ways in which they could be trained in IHL in their law of armed conflict, but also in ethical principles. And they actually want to adhere to ethical and well normative framework more generally these non state actors, because it actually it's good for for PR. If not out of conviction, you can also argue it's out of conviction I mean. If not that well at least for PR reasons is good for is good press to say yeah we abide by IHL for instance the FARC in Colombia. We abide by IHL therefore we are legitimate actors and we deserve a place that deserve to sit on the table in the transitional government in Colombia, for instance, stuff like that. Yeah, they are interested in being trained in the law of armed conflict and maybe ethical principles. But yeah there's there's there are a lot of groups actually they're not as uniform as states, I would say, as legal actors so yeah you have the FARC in Colombia but you also have ISIS you have the Tamil Tigers I mean it's a very diverse collection of entities, but they can be legal subjects that's also very interesting from an international law perspective states are not the only actors the only legal subjects not anymore, at least in the field of international law you have the individual of course as entitled to have human rights but also non state actors like belligerent groups they are entitled to certain privileges and rights and they also have obligations to if they want to sign a peace treaty or well in the end participating in international life. So there is some interest but I would say it depends on each group and some of them will not take it seriously like the Knights Templar in Mexico, but some of them will and some of them will be just not into it at all, and I would put ISIS in there I mean ISIS would say, look, yeah, you have your notions, your Western notions of chivalry and military honor. Good for you but we're not. We're not part of that world, actually our view of the world is better what we had 1000 years ago we want to bring that back, sort of like you guys with military honor and chivalry, but our version of the middle ages is actually much better than what they would say right, so they wouldn't actually buy into the whole chivalry premise I don't I don't think unless you you maybe bring saladin to the to the mix but yeah they probably won't like that either. So, um, yeah it's it's a challenge NYEX are challenged definitely for for legal scholarship but yeah for everyone actually nowadays. And yeah, moving on to to Amanda's question. Definitely, the gender angle is something pretty much neglected in legal scholarship. I don't cover it in this article, either, but this year I published a blog post in E international relations that I would refer you to regarding contemporary military honor. I mentioned the Brayton report about Australia, and I also mentioned gender violence that's been going on in in the US military for a long time, and that they are finally taking a bit more seriously this year in the US after the death of a soldier in the hands of another soldier so yeah they're looking into that in the US right now, and I connected in this blog post with the the idea that military honor demands from soldiers, an enhanced ethical code or the idea that they they should be held to higher ethical standards than the rest of society. So if society is already into gender equality, I mean, at least in theory we know that's not the case in practice but at least in theory, then the military should do even better. That's my thesis. And that that should be explained and talk to the military during training and education of course. But we were still a long way to go when it comes to gender equality in society and within the military. No doubt, no doubt about that. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. Thank you. I think just you know just to that final point, not only the US military but the can, no one talks about Canada and this is a scandal in Canada that we have now. I think it's we're on our fourth chief of defense staff who's had to step down because of sexual violence allegations that have happened throughout their career right so it's something about, and again something about what the feminist to particularly argue is that you have particularly amongst the officer core, a strong espousing of values, duty, honor that's higher than the civilian, right, and that the idea that you know and non commissioned also sign on to this running parallel with violence against women and men right you know Aaron Belkin with the US military talks a lot about some sexual violence against male soldiers and queer bodies in the US military right. And so that is a tension that I think has always sat with particularly European or Western military so it's something as something to to grapple with in that military officers also grapple with but I won't lament on that anymore. You do have a few questions and then Ruben wants to ask live but Brent Spillner asks. It seems like there's an inescapable more personal risk to soldiers involved in a capture mission that will necessarily involve close contact with a resisting enemy compared to a kill mission. That can be accomplished from a distance with modern weaponry shouldn't that risk and the commander's duty to protect the lives and well being of his or her subordinates to the extent of their military tasks and permits be factored into this ethical calculation. So that's the first question. The second question is anonymous person from Australia, who says, has this has this topic been related to the recent case of the Bretton reports, the inspector general of the Australian Defense Force Afghanistan inquiry report a report into war crimes allegations committed by Australian Defense Force during the war in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. So if I'll keep those questions if you want to refer to them into the Q&A, but I think we'll do is we'll do a collection and we'll just get Ruben to ask his question and then you can respond to all of them. Francisco. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Go ahead Ruben. Thank you very much. Francisco thank you very much for that for the presentation and thank you for that that acknowledgement that the concept of honor is not just a Western construct. That is, you know, what we find in local norms culture, especially religion in regard to Islam and Buddhism where the work of ICRC has been a little forward leaning on that points to the fact that that honor is a as a construct that is widely recognized beyond the bounds of the sort of, you know, the Western concept of chivalry. I wanted to pose a question that I think there was a bit of a follow up and maybe an overlap so please excuse me. And that is that that the paradox you talk about and I think that Colin Carl has also referred to this in terms of the annihilation restraint paradox is that how are we better able to prepare soldiers to operate in that paradoxical area between annihilation and restraint. I know work has been done in the Israeli Defense Force about the training that has been given by soldiers and how sometimes that can lead to soldiers overreacting to circumstances but also soldiers underreacting as as they would term it in those same circumstances. And I'd like to understand how some kind of balance can be achieved from a military perspective, but also from a humanitarian perspective how we can sway that more towards restraint. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Should I just answer. Okay. Yeah, so yeah, regarding the first, first question, the risk for soldiers. Yeah, that's that's also a very important question lawyers throw around all these concepts capturing killing. Yeah, because they're they're all comfortable writing about this stuff we're thinking about it and they're not actually on the battlefield so that is a problem. And, yeah, well, some some authors believe that the military should be exposed to a higher risk of being of getting harmed or maybe even getting killed because it's part of their job as part of their profession. Especially in philosophy in just war tradition philosophy revisionists who are people that are not comfortable with with treating combatants as equals they believe that just combatants should not be treated equally to unjust combatants so it all comes back to the justice of the fairness of the war. And you should actually Well, people who are unjust combatants or unjust civilians supporting an unjust war should be exposed to high risk. So and that means maybe opening the door to killing scientists, but maybe also people in factories. Yeah, and that's that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go down into. I don't want to agree with revisionists. I'm more of a traditionalist in the just war tradition. Because I believe that protects people better in the end it's very, very hard to know what when a war is just. And when it's unjust so yeah, it's it's as messy as the military necessity principle, even more because military necessity has a technical component to it, but just or unjust wars combine ideological ethical historical philosophical dimensions that are just very very hard to fathom. So yeah, but I would agree I would agree that the military profession is a profession that entails a higher risk. Occupational hazard let's call it that, just like with firefighters or some other professions that yeah when you sign up for them, you assume a bigger risk to yourself that doesn't mean that your commander doesn't need to care about you or because there are also legal legal responsibilities that could be triggered if the commanders are not do not exercise their due care in a reasonable way so but they are exposed to higher risk, that's for sure. And yeah, in an operation to capture. Again, they don't call it that I was told that by my body over there at special forces they don't they don't ever call it that. But if it comes to that. That comes with a job that that's something that they just assume. And then you're recruited that's that's a whole different discussion again between revisionist and and traditionalists in the just war tradition. Well, if I'm a professional soldier I chose the risk right. But what if I'm recruited what if I'm a conscript. I don't want to go to war but my state is making me otherwise I will be in jail, or even worse, or they do something to my to my family so is that acceptable risk that I should assume. Well, that's a different question. That's a different question regarding Australia. Well yeah actually I have been very engaged with the Australia case. I have written two pieces about Australia this year. That's what happens when your life is boring but the world's not. You tend to write stuff about what's going on outside so in the case of Australia. You might want to publish a blog post on strife, you might want to look into that about the bread turn report and some ethical and legal aspects stemming from it special, specifically the, the potential involvement of the international criminal court, I think that that's that's been neglected in the debate so far. And also in this piece I was telling you about on international relations challenges to military honor. I mentioned the bread turn report because in the return report on this alleges war crimes committed in Afghanistan, the word honor. That's not enough is not mentioned anywhere is nowhere to be found, either as a value or as a legal principle is nowhere to be found. And I would say that what happened in Afghanistan wasn't only illegal. It wasn't only a breach of international law probably of Australian law, but also a breach of the principle of military honor these special forces. You know, they behave against the code of military honor. And yeah, that reflects badly on all of Australia special armed forces of course, and all of Australia I would say. Yeah, how to prepare soldiers for this gray area of operations that's another big, big challenge with hybrid wars or what what scholars sometimes call us at VIM, which is something in between law enforcement and us at Bellum so VIM is Latin for force. So it's not policing is not war is something in between policing and war VIM. Yeah, there's a whole new scholarship developing around that topic. And it's difficult because you also have on the ground, the tactical corporal sometimes they call it the tactical sergeant phenomenon, which means that in the same urban environment. In the next block you need to behave as a combatant in the other block, you move on and you suddenly become a law enforcement officer or a policeman. And in the next block you're supposed to provide humanitarian assistance. Give food and water to people who need it so, and that's the tactical corporal tactical sergeant phenomenon and we need to train soldiers for just that urban warfare requires just that. It's complicated if we're always referring back to the more quaint traditional principles of military honor and chivalry that we're not designed for for that kind of scenario. So that's another challenge for military education and training. That's for sure. That's for sure. Yeah, I don't know if we have more questions but I don't think we do but we're almost at a time anyway so we're being very efficient with our time I mean. This is such a fascinating discussion right and I think when you bring in international law to, you know, political scientists, critical security studies or security studies scholars to this is just like a. We see the challenges the limitations and the importance as you acknowledge in your presentation of language right how we articulate and. So, you know, this is a fascinating talk that when we do are allowed to meet more in person, much more often Francisco I think you know you may have a need to go to the pub and have a broader discussion about this. Right, that's what I have to say about it I just want to you know thank you so much for taking the time to present your work here today I look forward to reading that article is that a forthcoming article do you have. It was published last year already out in the military law review. You know, why don't you pop that to me in an email and then we can circulate that through social media to. Great, can't wait to read that. So yes, thank you so much for presenting your work, you know your PhD work but your articles well and Mervyn thank you for your thoughtful and detailed engagement on on the work as well too. And to the you the audience for asking those really engaging questions and listening in this is that you know, all of us together make make this platform this space are really engaging and important space for intellectual debate. So I'm going to be quiet now and just leave the final words to to you Francisco and Mervyn if you have anything final to say before we close off and let everyone do whatever they need to do this afternoon. Thank you. Thank you for organizing it. Thank you for just go for your paper and yeah and thank you to the audience for coming. Same here thank you Amanda thank you Mervyn for the time thank you to the audience and yeah looking forward to keep the discussion going. Yes. All right, have a great afternoon everyone. Take care.