Professor Christiane Wilke
Law and Legal Studies Professor Christiane Wilke is continuing her research in the area of international law and airstrikes with a $194,759 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Her project is investigating civilian deaths and injuries from airstrikes.
“As a first step, we inquire how we come to know how many civilians have died in airstrikes. Who is counted as a civilian, who is doing the counting, and what counts as evidence,” she explains. “The second step examines how these deaths are embedded in stories about the war and its morality. Finally, we want to know more about how prosecutors and judges respond to airstrikes.”
She notes that, despite international concern about civilian deaths from airstrikes used in modern warfare, there are only three instances of airstrikes in the post-1990 period that have been judicially investigated as possible war crimes.
“So far, no NATO officer has been held accountable for airstrikes that killed civilians,” says Wilke, who is collaborating with Max Brookman-Byrne at the University of Lincoln. “We are examining which factors explain why civilian deaths from airstrikes are often understood as ‘tragic’ and ‘unfortunate’ but not illegal incidents.”
The goals of the project include:
• undertaking the first systematic study of governmental and
non-governmental reports on airstrikes in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, including a comparison of different reports on specific airstrikes;
• proposing a methodological toolkit for analyzing and interpreting these reports that will be available on the project’s website;
• training PhD students in the use of these methodologies;
• opening doors for other researchers who want to use this data for studies on aerial warfare, military culture, international law, or related subjects;
• and contributing to the knowledge about the impact and limits of international law in contemporary armed conflict.
Tuesday, May 19, 2020 in Department of Law and Legal Studies, News, Research
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