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This seminar challenges the broad interpretive discretion States exercise in applying international humanitarian law (IHL), arguing that it has become a structural mechanism for legitimising military conduct that undermines IHL’s core protective function. States increasingly invoke expansive interpretations of military necessity, proportionality, and military advantage to rationalise operations resulting in extensive civilian harm. At the centre of this problem is a specific doctrinal shift. The practice of substituting the legally required standard of concrete and direct military advantage with a self-constructed one has become an identifiable feature of contemporary State conduct. This substitution recalibrates the proportionality assessment by placing certain, immediate civilian harm against prospective, temporally remote military advantage, thereby inverting the balance that the rule was designed to maintain.

Drawing on case studies spanning contemporary armed conflict – from the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Israel’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon – the seminar demonstrates that this pattern is structural rather than incidental to particular conflicts. It further identifies a critical legal distinction between attacks governed by Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I (AP/I) and the destruction of property in controlled territory, which is governed by the stricter imperative military necessity standard – a distinction that States have systematically collapsed to their advantage. The seminar will conclude that a more rigorous and legally constrained approach to assessing military advantage is necessary to close the gap between what States claim to justify and what IHL actually permits.

This will be a hybrid event