"While casualty counting during modern conflicts is deficient due to organizational, political or strategic reasons, the international organizations responsible for collecting such data […] face difficulties to access the conflict scene, resulting in under-reported, unreliable or no-reported data."
"War deaths from malnutrition and a damaged health system and environment likely far outnumber deaths from combat."
"An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in US war zones since 2001, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting."
"We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others — even if it means taking those latter lives."
"The Principle of #Proportionality, codified in Protocol I Additional to the #Geneva Conventions, defines as disproportionate any attack in which the incidental damage to civilians is excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated from the attack. However, it is close to impossible to pinpoint exactly what is meant by “excessive”. This writer posits that this vagueness is not a coincidence, but rather a tool, serving the purposes of attacking states."
"One ‘moral technology’ plays a central role in contemporary Western wars: ‘rules of engagement’. These rules take the form of (written) texts which state the circumstances under which the soldiers/airmen are authorized to open fire. Their claim to ‘morality’ stems from the fact that they present themselves as invitations to ‘master’ violence. [They] provide a concrete and operational translation of the ‘proportionality’ principle by stating how many ‘non-combatants’ airmen are allowed to kill"…
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