Preventive killings as “self-defense”: The new conceptualization of individual preventive “self-defense” in military operations

• In Event: Institutional Failures

Abstract

This paper explores how the US military reinterpreted the concept of individual preventive self-defense. The paper, divided into three parts, first explores how the US adopted a new definition of “imminent threat” to change the rules on the use of lethal force in preventive self-defense reactions. In this part, I show how the US embraced a redefinition of “imminent threat” that abandoned one of its key traditional elements – that is, the immediacy of the threat. In the second part, I examine various cases of preventive use of force from the occupation of Iraq to show in which situations US troops were allowed to use force preventively (e.g., when seeing an individual talking on a phone in the vicinity of US troops; when seeing an individual digging into the ground; when seeing an individual fleeing from a site of a military attack; when seeing a vehicle parked during a curfew). In the final part, I examine how the redefinition of preventive self-defense relaxed the rules for the use of lethal force (e.g., lower threshold for using lethal force, overly broad criteria for determining “imminent threat”), and thus enabled killings of innocent civilians.

Author

• Vasja Badalič, Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law