As the Geneva Conventions turn 70, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is changing its guide to how new weapons are reviewed. Here’s why we need to pay attention.

After witnessing the Battle of Solferino in 1859, one of the bloodiest battles of the 19th century, the founder of the Red Cross wrote, ‘If the new and frightful weapons of destruction which are now at the disposal of the nations seem destined to abridge the duration of future wars, it appears likely, on the other hand, that future battles will only become more and more murderous.’

In his reflection, Henry Dunant was right on one count and wrong on another. In 2019, shortened conflicts are not the experience of the ICRC. At the same time, the emergence of new weapons due to rapid technological change urgently requires a humanitarian check. That check consists of barely five lines of text, forming Article 36 in the first additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions.

Article 36 obliges countries that are party to the protocol to assess the legality of new weapons, methods and means of warfare during development or acquisition. It seeks to prevent or reduce suffering by setting limits on warfare, whether using traditional, cyber, space or autonomous weapons. While many countries acknowledge their shared interest in assessing the legality of new weapons, the practical steps in conducting such reviews are less well known.

This is where the ICRC plays an active role, encouraging states to learn from each other on process and practice. In the light of rapidly developing weapons technologies, and with an update to the ICRC’s guide to legal reviews on the way, it’s time to revisit Article 36.

This crucial article limits the use of weapons that target indiscriminately or cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering. For this reason, it’s seen as a useful stopgap in ensuring compliance with the laws of war. It’s bolstered by other areas of that law stressing that conducting warfare is not without its limits. In particular, Article 36 obliges parties to the protocol to conduct legal reviews during the study, development, acquisition or adoption of new weapons. The review applies to weapons in the widest sense of the word, as well as to how they’re used.

The ICRC holds that the obligation to review is an ongoing one. Should a previously cleared weapon be modified in a way that affects its use, the review process would be triggered once more. These legal reviews seek to determine whether the weapon is already specifically prohibited by any binding treaty or by customary international law. If not, it still needs to be held up against a number of other bodies of law.

If the weapon isn’t covered by treaty law, the ICRC holds that it needs to be considered in the light of a rule known as the ‘Martens Clause’, which applies ‘principles of humanity’ and the ‘dictates of public conscience’ to the weapon in question. The scope of these reviews can require a significant amount of evidence to inform them, prompting further questions.

While Article 36 sets the obligation, it doesn’t lay down a practical path for conducting legal reviews of new weapons. This lack of detail poses challenges of legal interpretation, but also of policy. Who should be responsible for the review? Who should participate? When will legal reviews occur? How will decisions be made and records kept? These practical questions are compounded by challenges arising from the environment in which the reviews operate.

Rapid technological change is the clear example that underscores Article 36’s importance and challenges countries to keep up with new weapon capacities. But, as weapons become more sophisticated, the process of reviewing them becomes more complex—and more expensive. Finding the evidence required for reviews (technical description, performance, health and environmental effects) can be resource intensive. Fewer than 20 countries worldwide are known to conduct legal reviews of new weapons. In the Asia–Pacific region, only Australia and New Zealand are on the record as doing so.

But considering what all these practical challenges amount to also provides the greatest incentive for countries to work together. Legal reviews are international obligations with the onus on individual countries to comply. They may vary in format or method from country to country, but cooperation and information sharing can render them less costly in resources and more effective in outcome. The ICRC is updating its guide to legal reviews to acknowledge these hurdles and to advance the conversation in lockstep with them.

The discussion should focus on both the need for legal reviews of new weapons and the practical path towards them. The global community has come together for such conversations before. The role of the ICRC in this space is to facilitate information sharing and to provide support and advice on weapons reviews. Its original 2006 legal review guide proposed types of weapons to include and empirical data and legal frameworks to consider, while recommending structures and formats.

In conversation with countries, the ICRC also identified a body of best practice. Reviews should start as early as possible. They should be multidisciplinary in terms of those involved, giving evidence and adjudicating. Military lawyers should receive technical training in the systems that they’re examining. Examining empirical evidence and the weapon’s intended use is critical.

In late 2018, the ICRC invited representatives from 13 countries for a three-day seminar in Australia dedicated to discussing Article 36 and the implications of new weapons. It provided an opportunity for countries in the region to learn from each other about emerging technologies and how to fulfil their obligations according to the laws of war.

The seminar was designed to get countries talking, encouraging more engagement with legal reviews and the challenges posed by new weapons. Ahead of the release of the ICRC’s updated guide to legal reviews, conversations like these aren’t a bad place to start.

It is frequently said that we are experiencing an information revolution. But what does that mean, and where is the revolution taking us?

Information revolutions are not new. In 1439, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press launched the era of mass communication. Our current revolution, which began in Silicon Valley in the 1960s, is bound up with Moore’s Law: the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every couple of years.

By the beginning of the 21st century, computing power cost one-thousandth of what it did in the early 1970s. Now the internet connects almost everything. In mid-1993, there were about 130 websites in the world; by 2000, that number had surpassed 15 million. Today, more than 3.5 billion people are online; experts project that, by 2020, the ‘internet of things’ will connect 20 billion devices. Our information revolution is still in its infancy.

The key characteristic of the current revolution is not the speed of communications; instantaneous communication by telegraph dates back to the mid-19th century. The crucial change is the enormous reduction in the cost of transmitting and storing information. If the price of an automobile had declined as rapidly as the price of computing power, one could buy a car today for the same price as a cheap lunch. When a technology’s price declines so rapidly, it becomes widely accessible, and barriers to entry fall. For all practical purposes, the amount of information that can be transmitted worldwide is virtually infinite.

The cost of information storage has also declined dramatically, enabling our current era of big data. Information that once would fill a warehouse now fits in your shirt pocket.

In the middle of the 20th century, people feared that the computers and communications of the current information revolution would lead to the type of centralised control depicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Big Brother would monitor us from a central computer, making individual autonomy meaningless.

Instead, as the cost of computing power has decreased and computers have shrunk to the size of smartphones, watches and other portable devices, their decentralising effects have complemented their centralising effects, enabling peer-to-peer communication and mobilisation of new groups. Yet, ironically, this technological trend has also decentralised surveillance: billions of people nowadays voluntarily carry a tracking device that continually violates their privacy as it searches for cell towers. We have put Big Brother in our pockets.

Likewise, ubiquitous social media generate new transnational groups, but also create opportunities for manipulation by governments and others. Facebook connects more than two billion people, and, as Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election showed, these connections and groups can be exploited for political ends. Europe has tried to establish rules for privacy protection with its new General Data Protection Regulation, but its success is still uncertain. In the meantime, China is combining surveillance with the development of social credit rankings that will restrict personal freedoms such as travel.

Information provides power, and more people have access to more information than ever before, for good and for ill. That power can be used not only by governments, but also by non-state actors ranging from large corporations and non-profit organisations to criminals, terrorists and informal ad hoc groups.

This does not mean the end of the nation-state. Governments remain the most powerful actors on the global stage; but the stage has become more crowded, and many of the new players can compete effectively in the realm of soft power. A powerful navy is important in controlling sea-lanes; but it does not provide much help on the internet. In 19th-century Europe, the mark of a great power was its ability to prevail in war, but, as the American analyst John Arquilla has pointed out, in today’s global information age, victory often depends not on whose army wins, but on whose story wins.

Public diplomacy and the power to attract and persuade become increasingly important, but public diplomacy is changing. Long gone are the days when foreign service officers carted film projectors to the hinterlands to show movies to isolated audiences, or people behind the Iron Curtain huddled over short-wave radios to listen to the BBC. Technological advances have led to an explosion of information, and that has produced a ‘paradox of plenty’: an abundance of information leads to scarcity of attention.

When people are overwhelmed by the volume of information confronting them, it is hard to know what to focus on. Attention, not information, becomes the scarce resource. The soft power of attraction becomes an even more vital power resource than in the past, but so does the hard, sharp power of information warfare. And as reputation becomes more vital, political struggles over the creation and destruction of credibility multiply. Information that appears to be propaganda may not only be scorned, but may also prove counterproductive if it undermines a country’s reputation for credibility.

During the Iraq War, for example, the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in a manner inconsistent with America’s declared values led to perceptions of hypocrisy that could not be reversed by broadcasting images of Muslims living well in America. Similarly, President Donald Trump’s tweets that prove to be demonstrably false undercut American credibility and reduce its soft power.

The effectiveness of public diplomacy is judged by the number of minds changed (as measured by interviews or polls), not dollars spent. It is interesting to note that polls and the Portland index of the Soft Power 30 show a decline in American soft power since the beginning of the Trump administration. Tweets can help to set the global agenda, but they do not produce soft power if they are not credible.

Now the rapidly advancing technology of artificial intelligence or machine learning is accelerating all of these processes. Robotic messages are often difficult to detect. But it remains to be seen whether credibility and a compelling narrative can be fully automated.