Rights defenders have always married high principle to a detailed catalogue of abuses. In the sixteenth century, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1552) pleaded for the dignified treatment of indigenous Americans on grounds that they were rational beings in the eyes of God. His theological claims were rounded out with lurid details of the conquistadores’ crimes, “the horrid and unexampled massacres, butcheries, and all manner of cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent.” This kind of graphic narrative remains the stock in trade of human rights advocacy. Human rights methodologies—site visits, surveys, hospital records, monitoring, and public reporting—are similarly almost ethnographic in their concreteness and detail (O’Flaherty and Ulrich 2010; Jacobsen 2008).
The laws of war set specific rules covering a range of issues, from respect for cultural property, to the treatment of human remains, to the release and repatriation of prisoners of war. However, the closer one gets to core questions of strategy and necessity the more general the rules become (M. Schmitt 2007). But it is also true that international norms are constantly being tested and revisited as general rules collide with particular cases. So it is with the rules of war, where principles of proportionality or military advantage are often hard to square with the actual consequences on the ground (Sandholtz 2008).
Consider the targeting or commandeering of schools by armed forces. Schools are classic civilian structures. But because they tend to be centrally located and solidly built, belligerents often use them as barracks, weapons depots, firing positions, or detention and interrogation centers. The laws of war allow combatants to use schools for military purposes—rendering them military “objects” and thus legitimate targets of attack—as long as the building is not simultaneously being used for educational purposes. Note how quickly and legally schools are militarized. By allowing belligerents to transform a school into a barracks or a weapons depot, IHL effectively trumps the children’s right to an education. “Guaranteeing the right to education is rarely a priority, or even a consideration, for armed forces and armed groups engaged in fighting,” notes the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (2012:55). “Even those armed forces that pride themselves on their knowledge and compliance with the laws of war may be unaccustomed and unfamiliar with the idea of having to take into consideration children’s rights or economic and social rights when planning maneuvers and tactics for the battlefield.”
This isn’t to say that IHL is callous or uncaring. The law forbids categorically deliberately targeting schools as such. But protection ultimately hinges on operational rather than humanitarian demands, in the sense that schools are not protected from being militarized in the first place. By contrast, human rights focuses less on the intentions of those targeting or taking over schools and more on the actual consequences for students, teachers, and the community. A student described to Human Rights Watch how his school in Jharkhand state, India, had been blown up by Maoist fighters in 2009:
The school has been damaged. There is no education happening here. There are no teachers, no instructors, no benches, no fans, nothing. The whole building has been ruined. The windows are smashed and blown. The floor is cracked, [and] so are the walls and ceiling. Even the door is broken. Everything is in ruins. (Human Rights Watch 2011:5)
Across the wartorn areas of the Middle East and North Africa, 13 million students—40 percent of the school-age population—were out of school in 2015. In Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, nearly 9,000 schools were closed because they had been damaged or destroyed or seized by belligerents or converted to shelters for the displaced (Gladstone 2015). In Syria the physical and bureaucratic school infrastructure has collapsed, leaving approximately 2 million children out of school. A fifteen-year-old boy noted the irony of seeing his schoolhouse turned into an interrogation center:
Some men came to our village. I tried to escape, but they took me to jail. Except it wasn’t a jail—it was my old school. It’s ironic—they took me there to torture me, in the same place I used to go to school to learn.… They had taken over the school and made it into a torture center. (Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack 2012:8)
A Syrian refugee living in Lebanon recalled,
students don’t go to school, because when they did there were shells—I think they targeted the school because shells fell all across it. Students were leaving to go home in the afternoon when it started and two children died—they were both very young. I am in ninth grade but this war stopped me from graduating and now my future is destroyed. (UNESCO 2013)
These impacts have rippled across the region. Among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey some 700,000 children are not enrolled in school. The High Commissioner for Refugees described “a generation of traumatised, isolated, and suffering Syrian children” (Onishi 2013; UNHCR 2013). Detail and data underscore what is at stake: the safety of students and teachers, school enrollment and retention rates, and successful educational outcomes that open the doors to children’s aspirations. As rights tap into this local knowledge the life-shattering effects of war come into focus. Without the structure and path to the future that schools provide, children are more likely to fall into radicalism and violence. Parents are apt to pull girls and young women in particular out of school, and it can take years to make up for lost education and training.
Or take the case of drone warfare. Many humanitarian lawyers have expressed skepticism about the risk-free nature of drone-based missile attacks and the “moral disconnections” of remote killing (O’Connell 2012; Whetham 2012). But the strategic frame of reference is constant: Were the people killed or wounded militants? Was the intelligence accurate? Will the attacks advance the overall war effort? This line of questions framed the discussion in terms of the capabilities of the drones and the intentions of their far-distant operators rather than the actual effects on people on the ground.
Human rights analysts paint a more visceral picture of the violence. U.S. drone activity is most active in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Drone attacks include both “named” strikes that target identified individuals or groups, and “signature strikes” or “Terrorism Attack Disruption Strikes,” in which the drones hover overhead while their operators look for suspicious “life patterns” that would indicate planning or participation in terrorism. Both kinds of strikes are conducted with deliberation and care, but there is always a danger of imposing a predetermined pattern on ambiguous circumstances (Cockburn 2015:15–16). Misidentifications and mis-strikes are routine. Wedding parties, family gatherings, and work details have all been struck. To some degree these “accidents” are driven by policy, particularly the working assumption that males of military age found in the vicinity of a suspected militant are themselves involved. Because of a tactic known as the “double tap” in which the targeted site is struck multiple times in relatively rapid succession, people are often afraid to help the wounded or collect the dead.
Life in the shadow of drones narrows. Residents are afraid to go to school, to attend weddings or funerals, or to gather for jirga councils. Particular rights are abridged: the right to life, but also the rights to assemble, to work, to be educated, to observe social and cultural traditions, and so on. Authorities rarely investigate attacks, much less acknowledge the harm victims suffer, or provide remedy or redress.
The psychological effects of drone warfare are pronounced. The incessant circling of drones overhead affects everyone under their gaze. (In Gaza, the slang word for drones is “zananas,” an Arabic word for a bee’s buzz.) The largest human rights survey of drone violence in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency to date was conducted in 2012 by researchers from the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford University Law School, and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (2012). Witnesses described the “constant and severe fear, anxiety, and stress” of living under drones, especially given the helplessness to ensure their safety (55). A psychiatrist described it as “anticipatory anxiety” (81) over the ever-present possibility of a strike wedded to the impotence to do anything about it. Villagers are at the mercy of the information and technology of the targeteers. One witness
