A duty to protect? Legal consciousness among military officers in armed conflict

Abstract

Military personnel participating in international operations are often deployed to areas where armed groups inflict violence on civilians. In such instances, soldiers must decide how to respond, effectively becoming executors of the law. This article draws on legal consciousness theory and 33 interviews with Norwegian military officers to explore what soldiers perceive as the ‘law’ and how they make sense of legality in determining what constitutes a just response. It finds that officers are conscious of three sources of legality – a mission mandate, a senior commanding officer, and a personal obligation to humanity – which they stand before, engage with, and struggle against, respectively. In actively drawing on these ideas about justice, the officers create and reproduce order in violent contexts. This article adds to theoretical debates about the different ways in which people invoke the law in difficult circumstances. It contributes empirically to an understanding of why authorized militaries behave inconsistently when encountering violence against civilians.