On September 5, 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order restoring the name of the Department of Defense to its pre-1949 title, the Department of War.¹ In keeping with his brand of “saying the quiet part out loud,” Trump’s move to replace the term “defense” with the term “war” reads like an admission of the true mandate of this branch of government: waging war. In the lead-up to his signing of the order, Trump explained how the euphemistic 1949 rebranding had ushered in an era of prolonged conflicts and marked the end of US military victories. In other words, reverting the title should bring back “the good old days” when the US military fought and won wars that had clear beginnings and ends.

The new/old name performs an important rhetorical move that works on two levels: it folds military activity carried out by the US into the framework of war, thereby granting it moral and legal legitimacy, and it pushes the boundary of how war is understood.

This development thus points to a broader problem: even though it is repeatedly challenged and undermined in practice,² the legal-conceptual framework of war as defined by international law continues to be used to describe forms of military activity that amount to occupation, expansionism, interventionism, and other kinds of organized political violence and warlike conditions.

In the early nineties, the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard famously argued that the disappearance of the declaration of war, and, consequently, the disappearance of its end, were indicators that the “Gulf War” could not be considered a war. He described the wars of his times—and eventually of ours—as police exercises in domination rather than duels between armies, as had been the case prior to the modernization of warfare. Baudrillard based this description on a second argument in favor of revisiting the vocabulary of war: the rampant disregard for proportionality in armed conflicts, which has been absorbed into war discourse via the term “asymmetrical warfare.” To this, I add yet another argument—which is at the heart of this essay—the increasing inoperability of the principle of distinction through which international law codifies the civilian-military duality, creating the categories of “combatant” and “noncombatant.”³

Despite growing and warranted criticism, the logic and language of international law retains its hold over both public discourse and foreign policy. In particular, this principle of distinction of international law remains a legal and moral benchmark against which the legitimacy and acceptability of killing, destruction, torture, trial, detainment, and suspicion are determined. It maps onto a naturalized, dualistic understanding of the relationships between civilians and the military. But its ramifications reach beyond the immediate context of organized military violence: Civilian and military designations are driving principles that have transcended the “battlefield” and gone on to pervade economic and industrial policies and trade through concepts like “agile manufacturing”⁴ and “dual-use.”⁵ In fact, the civilian and military realms have historically been entangled in ways that dualistic conceptions foreclose and conceal. Their interrelationship has become increasingly difficult to ignore as it has been amplified by the convergence of technological, media, and socioeconomic developments.

While the principle of distinction is often present in legal and humanitarian discourse,⁶ its spatial dimensions remain underexplored. In this essay, I argue in favor of revisiting the vocabulary of war and the framework of international law that predominantly produces it. I focus primarily on the inoperability of the principle of distinction by examining the spatialities through which contemporary military violence is organized and enacted: How are conceptions of the civilian-military nexus shaping and shaped by the ways in which contemporary societies organize and inhabit space? When, where, and through which mechanisms does some-one-thing begin and cease to be considered “military?”

The legal construction of distinction: The dualist codification of international law

International law recognizes two mutually exclusive categories of humans in armed conflicts: noncombatants (who must be protected) and combatants (who may be killed). Thus, international law constructs noncombatants through a negative definition: there is no such thing as a “civilian” per se; a civilian is simply a noncombatant. It is then unsurprising that international law can be weaponized under paranoid imperial mandates:⁷ everyone is a combatant until proven otherwise. This leaves noncombatants with the burden of having to prove their noncombatant status—often while they are under threat or attack.⁸

Although seemingly reductive, international law nonetheless accounts for gray areas and attempts to resolve their ambiguities. Two points are particularly useful to keep in mind. The first is that affiliation does not equate to participation. In other words, being a member of an armed party or a combatant group does not necessarily make one a combatant or a legitimate target. As flawed as it is, international law still recognizes that a combatant is only a combatant while they are directly involved in hostilities (i.e., operating a weapon). What is more, “Protocol II of the Geneva Conventions distinguishes between those who are fighting and those who are not (or those who are no longer fighting),”⁹ stating that “the whole population is considered to be civilian and is protected unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities (Article 13.3 APII).”¹⁰ International law, therefore, does not consider “combatant” a fixed identity, but a role bound in space and time that one might step into and out of. And it is only while one is in that role, cognizant of risking one’s life (except for the drone operator), that one’s life can be “legitimately” taken.

The second point is that, contrary to what Annalena Baerbock, the former German minister of foreign affairs, once stated¹¹ and then denied¹² after she was elected president of the UN General Assembly, international law also stresses that “the presence of armed elements within the population does not deprive it of its civilian character and of the protection attached (Article 50 API).”¹³

Yet, despite these protections, Israel equates affiliation with participation and disregards civilian protection when it conducts aerial raids on densely populated areas under the pretext of targeting members of armed groups. International law is then clearly no guarantee of protection when one is faced with high explosives and airpower. Legal principles are no match for atrocity. At best, their application can provide a symbolic, historic sense of justice after the fact, but it cannot bring back the dead.

An international framework is only as useful as the consistency with which it is equally and justly applied to all implicated . But there is, of course, ample evidence to the contrary. The US Military Commissions Act of 2006, conceived in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, codified, for example, the category of “unlawful enemy combatant.” The president was, in turn, granted broad discretion to determine this status under US law, providing conditions under which figures were stripped of all protections, detained, and tortured. What does it say about international law that the lawyers of the George W. Bush administration¹⁴ could “turn the definition of torture on its head”¹⁵ and make legal attempts to introduce and operationalize the category of “unlawful combatant”?

What does it say about international law if the principle of distinction is invoked, across Occupied Palestine, to afford armed settlers and a more widely hypermilitarized society the rights and protections that international law reserves for civilian individuals, communities, and objects?¹⁶ What does it say about international law if it is simultaneously being weaponized¹⁷ by Israel to manufacture discontent with¹⁸ and legitimize the outright massacre of Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Iranians, and others?

In “When Settlers Become Civilians,” Mohammed Jameel Abdulla explains¹⁹ how time and procreation together turn settlers into rights-holders and citizens. “To pursue the logical conclusion to the settler question means warfare,” Abdulla writes, and “to adopt an attitude of warfare toward civilians defies common sense morality.” Ultimately, Abdulla concludes, “a third cosmic horror befalls the Dispossessed: The Dispossessed become terrorists.” So when Israel attempts to justify genocide by claiming to be faced with “the children of darkness,” with “Hamas media operatives,” and with a population of “human shields”²⁰ that has chosen a “terror organization” to rule over them, those “pursuing the path of justice” must refuse to engage with such discourse, lest they, upon reaching its logical conclusion, become terrorists, too. By this logic, civilians are not innocent any more than combatants might be culpable.

The civilian-military nexus: Agility for some

The term “dual-use” was introduced after World War II to account for the civilian and military applications of nuclear material. Its scope was later widened and the term operationalized to categorize and regulate the mobility of materials and technologies considered to have military applications (i.e., things that, by design, have the potential to be weaponized). Categorizing something as dual-use is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: it all but guarantees that a seemingly neutral object will fulfill its lethal potential by invoking the very possibility ascribed to it. The term also maps directly onto the civilian-military duality: it posits civilians and the military as separate realms, while at the same time collapsing them by claiming a belonging to both. Its paradoxical nature raises a set of additional questions that challenge the applicability of international law, such as: if a ship carrying materials that have explosive potential docks in a civilian port, then does the port temporarily lose its civilian status?

The logic of dual-use was crystallized in a 1991 report funded by the US Department of Defense, produced by academics and led by industry actors. This report introduced the paradigm of agile manufacturing.²¹ As a strategy, agile manufacturing was founded on a dual-use logic and aimed to compete with Japanese manufacturing by making things programmable after purchase. Software updates, bug fixes, and such—but also, if the “geopolitical climate warrants”: surveillance, tracking, weaponization, and “bricking” (remote disabling). The principles of agile manufacturing are not limited to end products. They also apply to how production systems operate: to making manufacturing responsive to changing conditions and requirements, including those set forth by, for example, the Department of War. In other words, this framework is a blueprint for repurposing the factories that produce refrigerators or cars into ones that produce tanks or bombs. Agility is thus an antonym to distinctiveness.

In many ways, the civilian realm has historically been at the service of the military realm: one is not born but becomes—is made into—a soldier. Materials are not inherently, but become—are made into—weapons. Resources, industries, and people are routinely mobilized for the “war effort.” During World War I, people in Germany, Austria, and the UK were asked to donate metal from their kitchens and gardens. Pots, pans, doorknobs, railings, even communities’ church bells and organ pipes were melted down into munitions. The “civilian home” was literally dismantled to become an arsenal. At the scale of industrial production, the privately owned French automaker Renault mobilized to build and produce the FT 17 tank for the French army; it was followed by Italy’s Fiat, which built the Fiat 3000 tank. These are all early examples of agility at its finest.

The interdependence of the civilian and the military tends to be somewhat successfully concealed in imperial cores, except when it is celebrated and used to garner support for troops or increases in military spending. But the porosity between the civilian and the military is denied to those engaged in armed struggles for liberation. In these contexts, distinction is constructed as a condition that determines who is humanized and who is legible as a victim: it is manipulated and weaponized to legitimize their killing. Mohammed el-Kurd illustrates this double standard²² by referring to the way Western news media has, in the past three years, authorized Israelis and Ukrainians to humanize their fighters without distancing themselves from them—to recognize the civilians within the combatants by referring to them as brothers, sons, friends, and the like. On the other hand, those on the receiving end of imperial military violence—Palestinians, Shi’ites, and others—are repeatedly asked to reinstate civilian distance from armed struggle, and to demonstrate distinction where there is none. Agility here is not tolerated.

Where is war? The spatiality of warfare and the (in)operability of distinction

Sustaining the separation and separability of civilians and combatants requires resources, one of them space. But ever since the first industrialized mass killing apparatus known as World War I, the spaces through which organized military violence comes to exist, and that make it possible, have moved well beyond the trench and taken on increasingly different forms. The front line—that space of proximity with combat and death that was conceived as distinct from common “civilian” life—no longer exists as such. This is due to multiple factors.

One factor is the evolution of weapon technologies: Although ranged weapons are not modern inventions, the decoupling of the combatant’s body from their weapon and the industrialization and technologization of weaponry certainly are. How do physical and visual distance from a target relate to the act of killing and to the willingness to carry it out?²³ One way this decoupling has taken place is through the development of heavy artillery and missile technologies, which accelerated during World War I.²⁴ Consequently, World War I is still called “the first experience of total war,” where the world saw “the dissolution of the juridical distinctions among governments, armies, and people.”²⁵ Indeed, missiles expanded the space of military violence²⁶ well beyond combat zones and the scale of bodies in combat, and brought so-called civilian spaces within the reach of the battlefield.

In the 1920s, following the 1918 Armistice, the Hague Commission on Air Warfare attempted to regulate aerial bombardment by outlawing the deliberate targeting of civilians. This presupposed that missiles could be systematically controlled and that their violence was targetable and precise. It sidelined their indiscriminate violence—be it deliberate, accidental, or deliberately accidental—and overshadowed the predictable unpredictability of blast events.²⁷ The regulation did not prevent the carpet bombing of Dresden and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Even forms of spatial reorganization developed in the 1940s and 1960s, like “Atomic Urbanism” and “Cold War Planning,” quickly became obsolete with the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, drones, and other forms of remote military assault that accelerated the expansion of an ever-more-destructive battlefield.

But this is not only about “high” or “advanced” technology. It is also about how basic technologies are deployed indiscriminately: the constant sound of surveillance drones does not care for the distinctions of international law. Neither do terror, forced starvation, toxicity, and booby traps. The shock wave of a sonic boom,²⁸ for example, runs through all bodies and flesh whether they hold guns or not, belong to a certain party or not.

Just how a shock wave enters the brain is still not understood. Some believe entry is through the natural openings in the skull: the eye sockets, ears, nostrils, and mouth. Another theory is that since shock wave pressure hits the entire body, not just the head, it’s transmitted into the chest or abdominal cavities and surges to the brain by way of the body’s vasculature. Once inside the skull, the wave advances through the brain at the speed of sound, passing through both fluids and matter, which respond differently to the wave’s properties.²⁹

The mass atrocity committed by Israel on September 17–18, 2024, which it branded “Operation Grim Beeper,” is propagandized as a precise and highly advanced intelligence operation. But there was nothing precise or advanced about this crime: by infiltrating supply chains and setting up shell companies to conceal their involvement,³⁰ the Mossad remotely and simultaneously detonated thousands of communication devices that it claimed belonged to Hezbollah operatives. While this attribution is meant to legitimize the operation, it in fact violates international law in more ways than one.³¹ During the attack, the devices happened to be located in homes, hospitals, grocery stores, city streets, and funerals. Some of the devices exploded in the hands of healthcare workers, and in the hands of children and family members of the alleged targets, killing or maiming³² and disabling them for life. Although the operational details of the attacks quickly became public knowledge, this did little to calm the widespread terror and suspicion that Israel could, at any moment, detonate devices like mobile phones or household appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners from a distance.

The practice of booby-trapping is testament to how everyday objects can be turned into lethal weapons that operate through an extended temporality. The Israeli Occupation Forces have often rigged toys and food cans in Palestine³³ and Lebanon³⁴ to explicitly target the starved and the young when and where they least expect it. These objects seamlessly blend into the environment, waiting to kill or maim long after “war” is declared over. Similarly, since 1982, Egypt has documented over eight thousand casualties in the Western Desert due to land mines from World War II³⁵—an average of more than 180 casualties each year, roughly one death every other day.

Unexploded munitions—in other words, technical failures—continue to ravage countries once subjected to indiscriminate aerial bombardment.³⁶ In Europe, hundreds of millions of unexploded shells from the 1914–1918 period remain along the Western Front where public access is still restricted. In Gaza today, the UN estimates that 5 to 10 percent of the tens of thousands of tons of ammunition dropped by Israel remain unexploded and pose a daily threat to Palestinians.³⁷ In South Lebanon, Israel enacts domicide and ecocide despite a ceasefire agreement, leaving people without inhabitable homes or arable lands for years to come.³⁸ It is thus not only the spatiality of warfare that has expanded, but also its temporality.

The spatiality of military violence has also shifted with the evolution of how military labor, research, logistics, and procurement are organized.³⁹ While previously centralized in state arsenals, factories, and institutes, military violence today operates through semiprivatized, outsourced, and globalized networks. Some of the technological changes mentioned also mean that military violence can be carried out from “peace zones” or “safe areas.” Drone operators sit in secure air-conditioned rooms, seamlessly exiting the military realm when they punch out of work and go home at the end of the day.⁴⁰ In parallel, the privatization of “defense” industries⁴¹ further expands the spatiality of military violence: production moves into urban commercial zones, or is subcontracted to private firms that are dispersed across the world. Contractors often share industrial parks, shipping ports, airports, and other logistical networks with civilian industries. The last two years have helped us realize just how many ships and planes share space with us as they carry weapons and weaponizable goods.⁴² But international law predates this spatial redistribution and thus does not account for the ways it complicates its applicability.

Media has also evolved the space of war, not just through the representation of military violence but also through material and operational fusion with telecommunication infrastructures.⁴³ This coming-together has driven informational and psychological warfare as well as, increasingly, surveillance, the coordination and execution of military operations, logistics, and fundraising. Over the years, digital media operations have, in fact, come to comprise a fourth branch of the military, alongside the army, navy, and air force.⁴⁴ In particular, “social media has emerged as a primary battleground in military operations.”⁴⁵ The year 2009 saw, for example, the Israeli Occupation Forces establish a New Media Desk, which included the launch of a blog, a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, and real-time online campaigns led by trained full-time operatives.⁴⁶ It has used this digital presence to try to strengthen its online public diplomacy (Hasbara) to legitimize the occupation and slow genocide in Palestine.

In the last three years, it has also deployed displacement orders through these platforms,⁴⁷ marking the incorporation of social media in military operations. Beyond these dedicated channels, and since the intensification of its assaults on Lebanon in 2023, Israel has also repeatedly jammed GPS signals above Lebanon. This may make the use of guided missiles more difficult, but it also severely impacts civil aviation, and any device or technology using geolocation, from map and location services, to ride-sharing apps, dating apps, and weather forecasts. Civilians and the military rely on much of the same infrastructure; thus, when these infrastructures are targeted or weaponized, it becomes very difficult to speak of distinction.⁴⁸

Finally, there is also a sociopolitical dimension to the question of where war is and may be enacted: under an imperial world order, military confrontation may involve armed resistance groups, insurgents, guerrilla fighters, militias, and other forms of nonstate military actors.⁴⁹ These actors tend to be socially embedded in, emerging from, and operating within populated urban communities and spaces, especially in contexts where national armed forces are incapable of or unwilling to provide defense to these communities and spaces. They may have nonmilitary organs within their structures, which provide education, healthcare, or financial services. Despite the provisions of international law, this socio-spatial continuity is often weaponized to frame these actors as legitimate targets, and to treat their non-armed branches and their social infrastructures as extensions of the military. Presupposing that functioning states must hold a monopoly over the use of violence, foreign aggressors legitimize military interventions that claim to target nonstate combatants but in fact massacre communities and destroy the spaces that sustain them.⁵⁰ This rhetorical maneuver transforms the ambiguities of distinction into a license to enact indiscriminate violence.

The ambiguity of distinction is similarly weaponized against national military institutions: In 1999, NATO bombed the Radio Television Serbia building in Belgrade, killing sixteen media workers. As justification, NATO claimed the station was spreading military “propaganda.” During World War II, entire cities were targeted not for their military installations but for their industrial and residential cores. These aerial bombing campaigns were justified as strikes against the social and civilian infrastructures that sustained the enemy’s war effort. Similarly wholesale and indiscriminate was the US implementation of the so-called strategic hamlet program in Vietnam in the 1960s, an effort to isolate communist fighters from their communities. Outside the “hamlets,” the US declared “free-fire zones.” Peasants who refused to be displaced from their homes to join the hamlets were considered insurgents and, thus, legitimate targets.⁵¹

International law frameworks have not altered this course: this logic persists in the way Israel tries to legitimize its Dahye Doctrine, according to which it targets its opponents’ economic interests and centers of civilian power in an attempt to turn communities against militants. It is also behind its map-and-bomb practice, according to which it issues displacement orders to communities so as to isolate and locate militants. And it is embedded in its AI-powered Gaza Doctrine, through which it has automated and quantified the process of constructing targets. United under the umbrella of state terrorism, the key difference between the Gaza Doctrine and the Dahye Doctrine is the shift from targeting locations to targeting people regardless of their location.⁵² Israel has plainly stated its goals of aerial supremacy over Iran and the region as a whole, and of establishing buffer zones in parts of Syria and South Lebanon⁵³ where it has already begun enforcing land- and air-based⁵⁴ forms of occupation, its expansionist desires made concrete before our eyes.

The spaces and objects through which organized death-dealing unfolds, and that make it possible, are not neatly segregated along the lines of civilian and military. Rather, their spatial entanglement betrays the legal construction of distinction, thus pointing to its inoperability. And where distinction is inoperable, one simply cannot speak of war but of what is more adequately described in terms of atrocity, genocide, domination, or policing. Because it is under these kinds of conditions that one’s relationship to death and struggle cannot offer any kind of protection. And increasingly, it is in these kinds of conditions that people live and die.

Collapsing distinctions, Building solidarities

This predicament is akin to a military boomerang:⁵⁵ technologies are developed by and for the military, then released and embedded in everyday civilian life to the point of dependency, after which they are recaptured by the military and weaponized at massive scales with little room to opt out of them. The very same internet infrastructure that many Palestinians in Gaza rely on as a lifeline enables cyberwarfare and military crowdfunding. Drones used to film weddings are being retrofitted to drop grenades. The animation and video game industries develop detailed 3D simulations that are then used in remote warfare to navigate complex terrains. Civilian industry is not separate from military power; it is its very underpinning.

The battlefield is no longer a place apart; it reaches everywhere and everything.

The distinction between civilian and combatant is nothing more than a construct. To recognize this is to admit that it is a politically motivated, historically specific, ideological fiction used to maintain and exercise power. It is not destiny. Disconnected as it is from lived reality and from the evolving spatiality of warfare, the principle of distinction has become inoperable. This allows it to be manipulated to expand the zone of killability and manufacture ungrievable bodies with impunity. If it has become painfully clear that international law was not designed to facilitate people’s liberation, then its reductive discourse must also be expulsed from debates, thinking, imaginaries. Its distortions must be exposed and its logics refused. And if they are to prefigure collective liberation, solidarities must be built outside its terms.⁵⁶