The Humanitarian Problem with Drones

One of the difficulties with the debate on drones is that it has become a sort of lightning rod for all kinds of anxieties about the use of force in today’s world. Drones are, often problematically, the emblematic weapon for a range of other phenomena, and unsurprisingly, attract much polemic. The challenge, therefore, is to find the specific problem with drones as a technology in armed conflict that could not be dealt with better by invoking a larger genus of problems. To do this, this Article outlines ways in which drones have been seen as problematic, which this Article argues are either not specifically humanitarian or are really dealing with something else such as what the legal framework applicable to the War on Terror should be. Separating these very important debates from the humanitarian questions about drones is crucial to making conceptual headway. This Article then examines whether drones have any specific or inherent characteristics that other weapons lack and addresses whether one such characteristic is a drone’s ability to cause unwarranted harm to civilians. It seeks to explain how, regardless of the answer to that complicated question, drones are much more likely to be perceived as inflicting excessive damage due to their highly discriminatory potential but also, crucially, the way in which they maximize the safety of the drone operator. Drones’ unique ability to ensure the absolute safety of the operator not only maximizes States’ ability to minimize collateral harm, as has already been observed elsewhere, but also has the potential to fundamentally alter the laws of war’s tolerance for collateral harm, which it is argued was always based on the assumption of a tradeoff between harm to the attacker and to “enemy civilians”—a tradeoff that has now been rendered moot. Moreover the one-sidedness of drone warfare in many cases goes to the heart of the humanitarian compact in that it makes one side to a conflict entirely vulnerable to the other. The Article then attempts to contextualize the drone problem within a larger history of exogenous technological shock to international humanitarian law. It finishes with a reflection on how anomalous drone warfare is, and in particular whether it manifests a radical novelty or reconnects with old themes already evident in colonial warfare. Overall, the Article is interested in determining not so much whether drone use may or may not be “legal,” than more broadly, how it impacts some of the moral underpinnings of the laws of war

Of Shrines, Memorials and Museums: Using the International Criminal Court\u27s Victim Reparation and Assistance Regime to Promote Transitional Justice

This article reviews and critically assesses the Rome Statute\u27s complex victim reparation and assistance regime. The regime is a dual one, characterized by its reliance both on reparations ordered by the International Criminal Court and assistance provided by the Trust Fund for Victims. Both approaches raise a series of quantitative, qualitative, scope and contextual problems which are very imperfectly answered at present. In particular, there is a risk that the broader needs of transitional justice will be omitted as falling neither under reparations or assistance. Rather than address the issue of the best reparations/assistance regime in the abstract, this article explores the real-world potential of a particular form of transitional practice, namely the construction of shrines, memorials and museums to commemorate victims of mass crimes. I conclude that there are complex ties between the construction of such monuments and memory, transitional justice, and victim expectations. Moreover, there is a discreet but constant practice of fitting the building of such commemorative monuments both within judicial theories, such as responsibility and reparation, and less formal processes of reckoning with the past, such as truth commissions. The experience of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in ordering monuments as reparations is highlighted as evidence of an innovative international best practice. This article seeks to assess how this experience could be transferred to the ICC/TFV context. I conclude that, although additional complexities would arise, there is no reason why the Rome Statute\u27s victim reparation and assistance regime could not order or encourage the building of so-called sites of conscience. Such action would better manage victim expectations, make good use of scarce resources, address collective victim needs, make sense symbolically of the harm caused, provide a more complex narrative of events than international criminal verdicts, highlight multiple causes and responsibilities, and help distinguish the ICC and TFV\u27s efforts from competing initiatives. It would, in other words, help better integrate international criminal justice with transitional justice goals

Le droit international peut-il être un droit de résistance ? Dix conditions pour un renouveau de l’ambition normative internationale

Le droit international (di) se présente comme un droit de consolidation de la souveraineté et de sa limitation par la communauté internationale. Demeurent exclus de ce face à face les efforts engagés par la « société civile », les individus ou les mouvements sociaux, qui concourent pourtant à renforcer les objectifs du di. Le projet normatif incarné par le di pourrait bénéficier d’une plus grande reconnaissance de la part significative qu’ont joué et pourraient encore jouer les acteurs non-étatiques dans son établissement. Il y aurait là une convergence entre l’aspiration substantive croissante du di à être un droit de l’humain, et le développement de modalités de mise en oeuvre du di renouvelées qui prendraient pour assise la figure centrale de la résistance. Pour que prenne forme cette utopie, on se propose d’identifier dix conditions préalables à son avènement.International law has traditionally been, first, a law aimed at reinforcing sovereignty and, second, at taming it via the emergence of an international community. Typically excluded from this encounter is a whole series of efforts by civil society, individuals, or social movements, which help reinforcing international law’s goals. International law as a normative project could significantly benefit from a greater recognition of the striking role played by non-state actors in its implementation. If international law increasingly casts itself substantively as a law of human beings, then its modes of implementation should follow suit. The idea of resistance as a rehabilitation of civil society’s role could be provide the missing link. The article suggests ten preliminary conditions before such an utopia can take place

Protecting Identity by Ignoring It? A Critical Look at the French and Rwandan Paradoxes

This article seeks to critically examine political and legal practices of racial blindness by comparing two countries that have most enthusiastically embraced it as an official policy and even ideology: France and Rwanda. By highlighting the differences but also the significant commonalities between the two, it seeks to dynamically emphasize their explicit and implicit construction of race and ethnicity The case for racial blindness is first presented in the terms in which it is largely understood in those countries, and taken seriously as an effort to deal with their unique legacies and political circumstances, notably as part of a desire to transcend some of the toxic consequences of race and ethnicity However, the clear limitations of pretending that races and ethnic groups do not exist officially are also underlined and racial blindness is found to be wanting as a model of antiracism historically, functionally and in principle

Effect of the addition of doped-cobalt on the properties of recycled tungsten carbide powder sintered by SPS

A key issue that has appeared in the last twenty years is the availability of certain materials. Cobalt is considered as a critical raw material since it is massively used in batteries for electrical cars [1]. Cobalt is also the usual binder in cemented carbides because it gives excellent hardness to toughness ratio at the tungsten carbide parts. There is a tendency to replace cobalt by other binders such nickel or iron [2] but cobalt remains the best one. Recycling old WC parts is a solution to limit the use of raw cobalt powder and to keep the benefits of the cobalt as metallic binder in cemented carbides. The recycled powder has been provided by the company Höganäs S.A. Belgium. It contains 7.5 wt% cobalt with an average WC particle size about 45 µm. The as-received powder has a very low sinterability [3]. To enhance the sintering processes, the powder has been milled with the addition of cobalt beforehand doped with 20 wt% Cr3C2 [4]. Two powders have been prepared: WC-10(Co+Cr3C2) and WC-15(Co+Cr3C2). The powders have been sintered with two sintering technologies: vacuum sintering (VS) and spark plasma sintering (SPS). In vacuum sintering, the samples have been heated with 4°C/min to reach 1400°C for 1h. In SPS, the samples have been heated with 150°C/min to reach 1200°C for 10 min. The pressure applied during SPS was 50 MPa. The density of the samples was characterized before the samples were mounted into resin and polished. The microstructure before and after etching was evaluated, as well as the mechanical properties (hardness and toughness). X-rays diffraction was used to characterize the crystallites growth appearing during the sintering and the prospective change in phases. The results show that the mechanical properties are 10% higher for SPS than for VS. It is explained by the smaller crystallite size and the higher density. No disturbing phases, such the brittle eta-phase or graphite was found in the XRD patterns. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the company Höganäs for providing the powder and the Belgian Ceramic Research Center (BCRC) for the SPS experiments. References [1] CDI, “Cobalt Development Institute.” [Online]. Available: https://www.cobaltinstitute.org/. [2] T. W. Penrice, “Alternative binders for hard metals,” J. Mater. Shap. Technol., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 35–39, 1987. [3] A. Mégret, A. Thuault, C. Broeckmann, S. K. Sistla, V. Vitry, and F. Delaunois, “Frittage des carbures de tungstène-cobalt recylés [Sintering of recycled tungsten-cobalt carbides],” in MATERIAUX 2018, 2018. [4] V. I. Stanciu, V. Vitry, and F. Delaunois, “Effect of doped binder on the microstructure of a WC-Co composite,” in Euro PM2018 Congress & Exhibition,20

Stochasticity: A Feature for the Structuring of Large and Heterogeneous Image Databases

International audienceThe paper addresses image feature characterization and the structuring of large and heterogeneous image databases through the stochasticity or randomness appearance. Measuring stochasticity involves finding suitable representations that can significantly reduce statistical dependencies of any order. Wavelet packet representations provide such a framework for a large class of stochastic processes through an appropriate dictionary of parametric models. From this dictionary and the Kolmogorov stochasticity index, the paper proposes semantic stochasticity templates upon wavelet packet sub-bands in order to provide high level classification and content-based image retrieval. The approach is shown to be relevant for texture images

Passively Stabilized Doubly-Resonant Brillouin Fiber Lasers

We consider ultra narrow-line lasers based on doubly-resonant fiber cavities, describe experimental techniques, and present two methods for passive stabilization of single-frequency fiber Brillouin lasers. In the first approach, Brillouin fiber laser is passively stabilized at the pump resonance frequency by employing the self-injection locking phenomenon. We have demonstrated that this locking phenomenon delivers a significant narrowing of the pump laser linewidth and generates the Stokes wave with linewidth of about 0.5 kHz. In the second methodology, the fiber laser is stabilized with an adaptive dynamical grating self-organized in un-pumped Er-doped optical fiber. The laser radiates a single-frequency Stokes wave with a linewidth narrower than 100 Hz. The ring resonators of both presented lasers are simultaneously resonant for the pump and the Stokes radiations. For adjusting the double resonance at any preselected pump laser wavelength, we offer a procedure that provides a good accuracy of the final resonance peak location with ordinary measurement and cutting errors. The stable regime for both Brillouin lasers is observed during some intervals, which are interrupted by short-time jumping-intervals. The lasers’ stability can be improved by utilizing polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber configuration and a cavity protection system