Spring 2023 Conflict Series: Caught in the cross-hairs, not the cross-fire: The targeting and weaponization of civilians in war

Each Tuesday, the Conflict, Security, and Development Series will examine new research, discuss creative policy approaches, and highlight recent innovations in responding to the challenges of security and development in conflict and post-conflict situations.

This week, we welcome Christopher Ankersen, Clinical Professor at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU's School of Professional Studies who will explore the record of civilian casualties in wars in the modern era, illustrating the ways in which they are instrumentalized in a wide range of warfighting strategies. He concludes by commenting on the 'fit for purpose' of the conventional international legal approach to this phenomenon, claiming that it is naive and insufficient.

According to the United Nations, over 18,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured and nearly 8 million have fled the country since the war began with Russia's latest invasion on February 24, 2022. We have all seen images of apartment buildings, theatres, and other civilian infrastructure utterly destroyed across the country. In this war, like in so many others, it is commonly felt that civilians have become 'caught up' in armed conflict and are either injured and killed by accident ('collateral damage') or through individual acts of psychopathic atrocity. Professor Ankersen argues that both of these cases, while they do take place, do not form the chief way in which civilians are implicated in the war. Instead, it is clear that civilians are deliberately targeted and weaponized in war, as a matter of policy, on all sides and in almost all cases throughout history.