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We describe a compiled database of daily reports of attacks involving civilians that are associated with the Russian aggression to Ukraine. We argue how obtaining reliable estimates is beneficial for conflict resolution and postwar. Using appropriate statistical methods we correct for undercount and report unbiased estimates, with their associated confidence intervals. We discuss the territorial and time heterogeneity of civilian incidents. We argue that media sources, combined with appropriate methodologies, can be a timely and appropriate method for estimating the extent of harm in war times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay examines the theories according to which 'actions' carried out by autonomous weapon systems enabled by strong artificial intelligence in detecting, tracking and engaging with the target ('intelligent AWS') may be seen as an 'act' of the weapon system for the purpose of legal responsibility. The essay focuses on the material act required for the commission of war crimes related to prohibited attacks in warfare. After briefly presenting the various conceptions of the act as an essential component of the material element of criminal offences, it argues that the material act of war crimes related to prohibited attacks is invariably carried out by the user of an 'intelligent AWS'. This also holds true in the case of so-called 'unintended engagements' during the course of a military attack carried out with an intelligent AWS. The essay moves on to examine the question of whether, in the case of the use of intelligent AWS by the armed forces of a state, the 'actions' of intelligent AWS — including those not intended by the user — are attributable to the state. It demonstrates that under a correct understanding of the concept of 'act of state' for the purpose of attributing state responsibility under international law, such attribution is unquestionable. It underlines that, suggesting otherwise, would bring to a breaking point the possibility of establishing violations by states of international humanitarian law in the conduct of hostilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An error in the operation of an autonomous weapon system (AWS) results in civilians or civilian objects being attacked. In such situations, have civilians or civilian objects been 'made the object of attack', such that there is a breach of the rule prohibiting attacks against civilians or civilian objects? This question — which is important because of the high probability of such errors — forms the subject of this article. It argues that the rule prohibiting attacks against civilians or civilian objects requires due diligence — contextually reasonable efforts — across the targeting process, to ensure that civilians or civilian objects are not attacked. This implies that AWS errors breach this rule if the errors are unreasonable, i.e. if they originate in a failure of due diligence at any point in the process of development and deployment of AWS. Moreover, the risk-sensitivity of due diligence obligations suggests that the higher degree of risk involved in the development and use of an AWS leads to a corresponding increase in what constitutes contextually reasonable efforts to ensure that civilians or civilian objects are not attacked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If autonomous weapon systems (AWS) cause harm beyond their legitimate military use, e.g. by killing innocent civilians, the question arises as to who can be held responsible. Due to the great number of persons involved in the construction, programming, training, and deploying of AWS, a 'responsibility gap' has been diagnosed. As it is neither theoretically nor practically feasible to impose criminal responsibility on AWS themselves, various doctrines of international criminal law (ICL) have been suggested with a view toward making individual persons responsible for the AWS's malfunctioning. The mens rea requirements of ICL are, however, likely to severely limit individual criminal responsibility. The author suggests that the emphasis should not be on bending legal doctrine in a futile effort to close the 'responsibility gap' but on establishing specific obligations to train, test, and continually observe the operation of AWS in order to avoid malfunctioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Russian forces have bombed Ukrainian cities, targeting schools, apartment buildings, and hospitals. The UN commissioner for Human rights estimates that over 1600 Ukrainian civilians have already been killed. Thousands more Ukrainians have been wounded or have died in defense of their country.

Violence against civilians in civil war is widely thought of as a strategic choice by combatant groups. We argue that a common strategic logic of competition underlies diverse theories of civilian victimization. We develop a theory of strategic complements in victimization, hypothesizing that an armed group's propensity to victimize civilians will increase with its expectation that its competitors will act likewise. We test this argument by structurally estimating a formal model of strategic interdependence between armed groups using data from the Colombian civil war. Our findings indicate that strategic expectations are responsible for a substantial amount of violence against civilians: the two major combatant groups would have systematically victimized civilians in at least 9% fewer municipalities if they had expected no violence by their rival. Examining causal mechanisms, we also find that victimization in the Colombian case was more likely aimed at controlling civilians than at influencing peace negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has drawn unprecedented attention to the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. It comes at a time when mass starvation in war is resurgent, devastating populations in Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria, and elsewhere. The practice has also drawn the scrutiny of the United Nations Security Council. And yet, despite this heightened profile and sharpened urgency, what precisely is criminally wrongful about starvation methods remains underspecified. A common way of thinking about the criminal wrong is as a form of killing or harming civilians. Although its differentiating particularities matter, the basic wrongfulness of the crime inheres, on this view, in it being an attack on those who ought not be attacked. For some, this supports a broad interpretation of the starvation ban. However, for others, the graduality of starvation preserves the continuous possibility of the avoidance or minimization of civilian death or harm in a way that direct kinetic attacks do not. In combination with the method's purported military utility, this distinctive incrementalism has underpinned arguments for the permissibility of certain forms of siege and other deprivation and a narrow interpretation of the starvation crime. Drawing on the moral philosophy of torture, this Article offers a different normative theory of the crime. Starvation, like torture, is peculiarly wrongful in its distortion of victims' biological imperatives against their capacities to formulate and act on higher-order desires, political commitments, and even love. This process does not merely raise the cost of fulfilling those commitments. Instead, starvation tears gradually at the very capacity of those affected to prioritize their most fundamental commitments, regardless of whether they would choose to do so under the conditions necessary to evaluate matters with a "contemplative attitude." Rather than palliating, the slowness of starvation methods is at the crux of this torturous wrong. Recognizing this redefines the meaning and place of the crime in the framework of international criminal law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments involved in civil wars often gain a strategic advantage from intentionally killing civilians. However, targeting civilians might also tarnish perceptions of the government's legitimacy abroad, increasing the risk of foreign actors punishing the government. How can governments attempt to navigate this dilemma? Focusing on the United States as one of the most frequent interveners in civil wars after the Cold War, we examine one particular strategy governments might employ: public diplomacy campaigns (PDCs) targeting both the public and elites in the United States. PDCs can help governments restore perceptions of their legitimacy abroad in the face of civilian targeting by mobilizing coalitions of support and undermining critics. When governments can achieve plausible deniability for civilian deaths via militias, PDCs enable governments to reduce the damage to foreign perceptions of their legitimacy. When rebels engage in civilian targeting, PDCs allow governments to publicize these actions. We compile data PDCs in the United States by governments engaged in civil wars. Our results have important implications for current understandings of civil war combatant foreign policies, foreign interventions, and international human rights laws and norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some groups fighting in civil wars target civilians more than others? We propose an explanation that challenges the current focus on material and organizational factors and instead brings back and emphasizes the role of ideology. We argue that the ideological frameworks of armed groups, whether state or non-state, condition their decisions about targeting, in some cases setting normative constraints on action even if such choice involves higher costs and risks. We examine these hypotheses using a mixed-method approach that combines a statistical analysis of a newly constructed disaggregated data set on all fatalities in Northern Ireland's conflict between 1969 and 2005 with a comparative historical study of the interaction between key ideologies and the armed groups that adopted them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do rebels target civilians as part of the process of establishing control in their territories? This research note shows that transition periods after rebels gain territorial control are remarkably violent for civilians. Speaking to the civilian victimization and rebel governance literature, we investigate the immediate time period after rebels successfully capture and hold territory. We argue that rebels use violence to gain compliance in newly captured territories until they are able to build up local capacities and institutions for peaceful governance. To test this argument, we draw on methodological advances in integrating event data and combine multiple datasets to study patterns of violence perpetrated by the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone from 1997 to 2001. The findings of our spatiotemporal analysis show that civilian targeting increases in the period after rebels capture territory from the government compared to areas without territorial takeover, suggesting that life under the roof of rebels is initially more dangerous for civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the logic of civilian targeting in the Turkish-Kurdish civil war. It analyzes two instances of PKK violence: against pro-state Village Guards' families in the 1980s and school-teachers in the 1990s. Against original data, we evaluate the extent to which the dominant conceptual tools available in civil war literature help us make sense of these instances and argue that there is a need to go beyond the established selective/indiscriminate distinction if we want to capture the logic of PKK's targeting. Consequently, we build on and specify further recent conceptual developments in the field and show that both cases are better understood as instances of collective targeting. We further show, however, that the collective nature of each differs in relevant ways: while the killing of the families of Village Guards constitutes an instance of collective targeting in the sense of "extended group association," in the case of school teachers there are indications of a secondary spatially differentiated selection criteria accompanying the collective logic. Our analysis emphasizes the field's need for stronger conceptual foundations underpinning our theories of violence against civilians, as well as the limitations of understandings rooted in an "ontological individualism" when applied without careful consideration to non-Western societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peacekeeping mitigates killing, but nonlethal violence also influences both positive peace and stability. We evaluate peacekeepers' effect on one such type of abuse, sexual violence. We posit that peacekeepers raise the cost of abuses and foster institutional and cultural changes that curb violence. We find that missions both reduce the chance of any violence and limit its prevalence; larger deployments and multidimensional missions are more effective. Governments curtail violence more quickly than rebels do in response to military contingents; rebels are especially responsive when missions include large civilian components. These findings contribute to our understanding of peacekeeping in three primary ways: we expand the evaluation of peacekeeping to consider nonlethal violence; we draw attention to mission size, capacity to use force, and civilian-led programming as determinants of effectiveness; and we demonstrate how addressing nonlethal violence requires similar tools as lethal violence but is further enhanced by specific civilian-led initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This study investigates how ASM and LSM affect local conflict in Eastern DRC. • We exploit variation in conflict, mineral prices and LSM across space and time. • Rising mineral prices increase conflict around ASM, but not around LSM. • The expansion of LSM production activities decreases battles but increases riots. • When LSM production expands in ASM areas, violence against civilians rises. Existing research suggests a strong link between mining and local conflict but makes no distinction between artisanal and industrial mining. We exploit variation in mineral prices and the granting of industrial mining concessions to investigate how the mode of extraction affects conflict in Eastern Congo. Rising mineral prices increase battles over artisanal mines, indicating competition between armed groups. This effect is much less pronounced for industrial mining. Moreover, the expansion of industrial mining decreases battles, suggesting that companies can secure their concessions. Such expansion does, however, trigger riots, and, when it crowds out artisanal mining, also increases violence against civilians and looting. In line with case-study evidence, these negative effects only materialize when industrial mining companies expand their activities from the research to the production phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent, does sexual violence influence the likelihood of conflict management in intrastate conflicts? Despite a growing body of research that explores conflict-related sexual violence, the literature presents little insight on its effects on conflict resolution. Extending feminist international relations (IR) theory to intrastate conflicts and applying a gender lens to the power to hurt argument, I argue that when rebel sexual violence is public knowledge, the likelihood of conflict management increases because the state perceives it as a threat to its masculinity. I systematically test this argument on all intrastate conflict years from 1990 to 2009 using the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict and the Civil War Mediation data set. The results provide robust support for the argument. This presents an important refinement of traditional rationalist conflict bargaining theories and opens new avenues for the research and practice of conflict management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the impact of foreign troop support on combatant-perpetrated sexual violence against civilians? We hypothesize that biased troop support increases the risk of sexual violence by the subordinate party both as a consequence of strategic considerations and as a product of a situation increasingly conducive to opportunistic behavior. Time-series cross-section analyses of all civil wars during 1989–2012 are largely supportive of our expectation. Rebel groups are more likely to perpetrate sexual violence the more troop support the state receives. Likewise, state forces are more prone to commit sexual violence the more they are challenged by troops supporting the rebel group(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on both protection of civilians and the problem of sexual violence. We explore the impact of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping on the occurrence of wartime sexual violence. Acknowledging the difficulty in reducing sexual violence, we propose two conditions under which peacekeepers are more likely to be successful: when the mission has a protection mandate and when the conflict actors exercise a high level of control over their forces. We find that the ability of peacekeepers to reduce sexual violence in general is weak. Only police within protection missions reduces the risk of sexual violence by rebels. However, when the actors exercise control, the number of peacekeepers is associated with a lower risk of sexual violence by both governments and rebels. We conclude that dealing with sexual violence by weak and fragmented actors is a challenging task beyond the current capacity of UN peacekeeping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do conciliatory and coercive counterinsurgency tactics affect militant group violence against civilians? Scholars of civil war increasingly seek to understand intentional civilian targeting, often referred to as terrorism. Extant research emphasizes group weakness, or general state attributes such as regime type. We focus on terrorism as violent communication and as a response to government actions. State tactics toward groups, carrots and sticks, should be important for explaining insurgent terror. We test the argument using new data on terrorism by insurgent groups, with many time-varying variables, covering 1998 through 2012. Results suggest government coercion against a group is associated with subsequent terrorism by that group. However, this is only the case for larger insurgent groups, which raises questions about the notion of terrorism as a weapon of the weak. Carrots are often negatively related to group terrorism. Other factors associated with insurgent terrorism include holding territory, ethnic motivation, and social service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The armed conflicts of the twenty-first century, which often take place among civilian populations rather than on traditional battlefields, push states to acknowledge and rectify the resulting harm to foreign civilians. In particular, asymmetric conflicts, which involve confronting non-state actors within civilian populations, tend to cause more of what has come to be known as 'collateral damage.' Such harm to civilians can be inflicted, for instance, in checkpoint shootings, drone attacks, or riot control efforts. How should these losses be addressed? This Article examines two competing models. The U.S. military provides compensation to civilians injured by its activity in Iraq and Afghanistan through a military-run program, governed by the Foreign Claims Act and condolence payments. In contrast, Israel enables non-citizen Palestinians injured by Israeli military actions to bring tort lawsuits before Israeli civil courts. Notwithstanding the differences between these two conflicts, both entail military forces engaging with civilians while assuming quasi-military or policing roles. Yet, scholars have not yet juxtaposed the distinct compensation mechanisms applied in each conflict, vis-à-vis the goals of monetary damages under tort law. This Article seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on tort theory, social psychology, and socio-legal studies, the Article examines the structure of domestic conflict compensation programs. It utilizes data from public records, interviews with relevant stakeholders, NGO reports, and Freedom of Information Act requests to compare the American and Israeli compensation paradigms. Through this analysis, the Article offers guidelines for designing compensation programs that address both government accountability and victims' needs to effectively redress the harm modern-day conflict causes to civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing availability of event data has led to a surge in micro-level research investigating civil war violence. Event data, however, introduces bias due to systemic underreporting of events. This study introduces a method that accounts for this bias by making a spatial prediction of unreported events based on the known locations of rebels and their preferences for local-level factors estimated using habitat analysis. I then combine this prediction with known locations of rebel activity and use it to predict rebel territory and relocation patterns. I next perform a regression analysis on 119 African rebel groups that links preferences to conflict behavior. Preferences for gold, petroleum, gemstones, and cobalt are associated with civilian victimization, whereas rebels who prefer steeper slopes are more successful in battles with government forces. Further, government forces tend to be successful when battling rebels with preferences for petroleum and international borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on fratricidal jihadists and discusses why Islamists keep losing their civil wars. Topics include fratricidal jihadists stated to share three unique characteristics or flaws that make them prone to internecine wars such as framing their civil conflicts along Manichean lines, pursuing transformative goals and beginning as extreme factions that indiscriminately target civilians in their wars against a regime.

Allegations of civilian deaths or injury or damage to civilian property caused during combat operations require an investigation to determine the facts, make recommendations regarding lessons learned in order to prevent future occurrences, and recommend whether individual soldiers should be held accountable. Using the factual circumstances of the airstrike on the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital, this Article articulates how, in the context of targeting, a violation of the Law of War is made punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice as explained by the recent Targeting Supplement promulgated by The Judge Advocate General of the Army. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article focuses on the tension between the often-referred-to articulation of the principle of distinction, as reflected in Additional Protocol I, and four practices that have been continuously employed in ground operations by most if not all of the world's militaries: masking, firing warning shots, breaching structures, and maneuvering with heavy machinery. These practices may very well result in incidental harm to civilians or incidental damage to civilian objects, yet they are either directed at an object that is not necessarily a military objective or they are not directed at any object or person at all. In light of the sheer universality of these practices for many decades--both before and after the conclusion of Additional Protocol I--this Article proposes four preliminary lines of thought that may help in gaining a better understanding of Additional Protocol I's provisions as well as their application in ground operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article confronts one of the most difficult and contested questions in the debate about targeted killing that has raged in academic and policy circles over the last decade. Suppose that, in wartime, the target of a military strike may readily be neutralized through nonlethal means such as capture. Do the attacking forces have an obligation to pursue that nonlethal alternative? The Article defends the duty to employ less restrictive means ("LRM") in wartime, and it advances several novel arguments in defense of that obligation. In contrast to those who look to external restraints--such as those imposed by international human rights law, U.S. constitutional law, or, indeed, the laws of war themselves--to check the operation of military necessity, I argue that the most plausible LRM obligation exists as a limitation embedded within the necessity principle itself. Indeed, the principle of military necessity supports not one, but two, related LRM restraints. The first restraint--virtually ignored yet highly relevant to contemporary debates--is a right reason requirement: it prohibits the killing of combatants for reasons unrelated to the pursuit of military advantage. Specifically, the necessity principle does not permit a preference for lethal force over capture when that preference is driven by considerations such as retributive justice, a desire to avoid due process obligations relating to capture and trial, raising morale, and diplomatic sensitivities. The second restraint--more familiar to the debate yet still deserving of further exploration--is objective in nature. It demands that lethal force benefit from a cognizable expectation of military advantage. The Article develops and defends these claims, engages both contrary and complementary viewpoints, and anticipates objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts are complex, dynamic processes wherein the frequency and intensity of violence changes throughout the contest. In this article, we explore the temporal dynamics of two long-term civil wars—DR-Congo and Sudan—to identify systematic and random conditions that lead to changes in civilian targeting. Violence committed by rival political actors, territorial exchange, and the number and addition of violent agents strongly shape the likelihood that civilian targeting events and casualties increase or decrease over time. General and country differences emerge from vector autoregression analysis to suggest that (1) three types of violent agents—rebels, militias, and the government—are locked in spirals of violence where violence against civilians by one actor leads to subsequent violence by another actor; (2) rebels and government forces respond to the other side’s acquisition of contested territory by increasing counterattacks on civilians, specifically in DR-Congo; and (3) increasing numbers of active nonstate agents lead to higher violence rates in the following months. Among these, civilian targeting by rival actors triggers the most follow-on violent events against civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) has grown rapidly over the last decade. This article consolidates existing social science research on CSRV according to two lines of inquiry: its causes and its consequences. Overall, research has considerably advanced our knowledge of the causes of CRSV, particularly in four aspects: purpose, context, individual motives and intra-group dynamics. However, there is a need to better understand the societal consequences of CRSV, in particular how it affects relations in families, and within and between communities. Overall there remains a shortage of empirical, in particular mixed-method, designs to produce research which is relevant for policymakers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article talks about Israel's mode of fighting in the Gaza Strip and the author's claim that it has transferred the risk away from its own soldiers to enemy civilians by launching aggressive military campaigns. Topics discussed include Operation Protective Edge (2014), and one Israeli soldier to 84 Palestinian civilians killed in Operation Cast Lead.

Why do armed groups ever direct violent attacks against humanitarian organizations? While scholars have analyzed wartime violence against civilians, little research exists on violence against other noncombatants, like humanitarian organizations. Violence against aid workers, however, is common in wartime, with devastating consequences for civilians, who suffer when aid organizations respond by reducing services. This article argues that much of the violence against humanitarian organizations is strategic. By serving as substitute providers of public goods, aid organizations can bolster the government. Insurgents thus target aid workers in an effort to force them out of particular regions, undermining government support. To test this argument, we analyze variation in violence across space and time using an original panel dataset on attacks against aid workers in Afghanistan, 2008-2012. Despite aid organizations' attempts to remain neutral, we find evidence that insurgents strategically target aid workers in areas where their services likely strengthen government support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the raping of women civilians and the sexual economy in Hungary during World War II under the occupation of the Soviet Union, referencing the Hungarian sexual assault victim Róza Bodó's diary. An overview of Soviet Union soldiers' sexual assault against women on Hungary, including in regard to the trauma of the women rape victims, is provided.

How does the location of rebel-held territory shape insurgent relations with civilians? We argue that when rebel groups control territory domestically, they are strongly incentivized to cultivate mutually beneficial relations with civilians living in their territory and limit their violence against them, while insurgencies with foreign territorial control are incentivized to deploy violence against civilians to gain compliance and extract resources. We test this hypothesis in three ways: a quantitative analysis of all insurgencies from 1989 to 2003 followed by a qualitative case illustration and the synthetic controls method that leverages the mostly exogenous acquisition of foreign territory by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) after the 1991 establishment of the northern Iraq no-fly zone. Our results strongly support our hypothesis. These findings shed light on potential broader patterns of civilian victimization by insurgents, and the conditions under which insurgents may strive to limit civilian casualties and provide governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a single conflict, the scale of government violence against civilians can vary greatly—from mass atrocities in one village to eerie restraint in the next. This article argues that the scale of anticivilian violence depends on a combatant's relative dependence on local and external sources of support. External resources make combatants less dependent on the local population, yet create perverse incentives for how the population is to be treated. Efforts by the opposition to interdict the government's external resources can reverse this effect, making the government more dependent on the local population. The article tests this relationship with disaggregated archival data on German-occupied Belarus during World War II. It finds that Soviet partisan attacks against German personnel provoked reprisals against civilians but that attacks against railroads had the opposite effect. Where partisans focused on disrupting German supply lines rather than killing Germans, occupying forces conducted fewer reprisals, burned fewer houses, and killed fewer people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a critical examination of the current theoretical debate concerning the effects of indiscriminate violence. It argues that indiscriminate violence has been treated as an essentially random counterinsurgency tactic, but that the important distinction between its random and retributive variations has been overlooked, along with critical issues o f timing and location, which has made it difficult to evaluate its efficacy in quelling rebel violence. Prior research has shown that both random and retributive violence reduced insurgent activity in the targeted locations and in the short term, but it does not necessarily follow that indiscriminate violence is effective. This article uses microlevel ethnographic evidence from Chechen villages during the period from 2001 to 2005 to show that indiscriminate violence deployed retributively against village communities generated insurgent activity in other areas because local avengers and rebels from the targeted populations sought to avoid further retributive violence against their village communities. Moreover, the insurgent activity occurred at least nine months after the initial act of retributive violence. Indiscriminate violence deployed randomly against village communities generated insurgent activity within the same targeted area, since the insurgents did not fear retributive violence in retaliation, and occurred with a delay of at least six months. As a result, the rebel reaction to indiscriminate violence is not observed immediately or, in the case of retributive violence, in the same location. This finding has crucial implications for evaluating the efficacy o f indiscriminate violence in counterinsurgency operations, and underscores the importance of understanding how the social and political context can shape the way populations react to dif­ ferent forms of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population issues often factor into militarism as, historically, population was identified with power. The destructive capabilities of weaponry in the twentieth century shifted the role of population as more civilians were at risk, and the introduction of nuclear armaments did so even further. During the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union entered into a nuclear arms race which threatened the earth’s entire population, and the earth itself. The neutron bomb was introduced as a clean weapon, however, and its proponents argued that it would protect property while killing people. This article examines various aspects of population as it related to arguments for and against the neutron bomb, beginning in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We offer our apology and condolences to the victims' families. We accept full responsibility for what happened in the hospital and will pay blood money for the victims' families [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses wartime images created by civilian internees during their incarceration in 1914/1915. Their paintings, sketches and photographs are used to create a sense of a civil community and challenge stories about relentless hostility. As the juxtaposed images from the Ruhleben Camp near Berlin and the Rottnest Island Internment Camp in Australia show, cross-cultural encounters between Germans and Australians were experienced and depicted with striking similarities. Generally, descriptions and discussions of civilian and POW internment were over-determined by propaganda and censorship, but this paper seeks to highlight a more private and humane side of internment, as captured by pen, paint and camera. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the battlefield violence at the Western Front during the First World War. Topics include examples of battlefield transgression such as prisoner and soldier killings, use of illegal weapons, and civilian deaths in Germany, Austria and Hungary due to starvation, legal distinction between civilians and combatants as the reason for transgressive violence against civilians in Western Europe, and confinement of civilians by belligerents.