The phenomenon of human shields challenges core tenets of international humanitarian law (IHL), including its careful dialectic between the imperatives of humanity and military necessity. Although the principles of distinction, precaution, and proportionality are well established in the abstract, consensus remains elusive when these concepts are applied to situations involving human shields, who blur the boundary between civilians and combatants. And while the prohibition against using human shields is absolute, it is too often honored in its breach in today's asymmetrical conflicts. Indeed, resort to human shields has become attractive precisely because it exploits protective legal rules to the detriment of those principled armed actors who value—and thus strive for—IHL compliance. These parties, in turn, are struggling to adapt their operations to a practice that has become “endemic” in the modern battlefield.

The nomenclature of human shields did not exist in 19th century colonialism, but one can find its proxies in the debates regarding the principles of distinction and proportionality when defining legitimate targets. Its specters appeared in the discussions weighing human life and moderating warfare, revealing how the imperatives of colonial conquest inflected “humanitarian reason” and its epistemic and political investments. The colonized territory rendered all civilians as potential human shields merely by existing there. The colonizer/colonized distinction trumped the civilian/combatant distinction and exposed the radical instability of the principles defining the notion of human shields; the colonizer seldom thought he had reached the threshold of disproportionality in violence against the colonized. Instead, the “civilizing mission” rendered the colonized body perennially vulnerable.

Human shields were prominent in the 2016 military campaign seeking to recapture Mosul from the hands of ISIS militants. On October 24, 2016, Pope Francis expressed his concern over the use of over two hundred boys and men as human shields in the Iraqi city. In an election rally the following day, Donald Trump decried the enemy's use of “human shields all over the place,” while the New York Times reported that the Islamic State is driving hundreds of civilians into Mosul, using them as human shields. A few days later, the United Nations disseminated a press release, warning that ISIS militants are using “tens of thousands” as human shields, thus casting massive numbers of Iraqi civilians as weapons of war.

In October 2016, the United States accused Russia of hacking political organizations involved in the U.S. elections and leaking pilfered information to influence the outcome. In December, President Obama imposed sanctions for the hacking. This incident damaged President Obama's cybersecurity legacy. The “hack and leak” campaign targeted American self-government—a challenge to his administration's promotion of democracy in cyberspace. It created problems for the president's emphasis on international law and norms as “rules of the road” for cybersecurity. The episode exposed failures in his attempts to make deterrence an important instrument of U.S. cybersecurity.

Theft of secrets is nothing new. Nor is it new to publicize stolen secrets with hopes of influencing (or instigating) leadership changes in government. So the theft of confidential information being stored by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is part of a long tradition, albeit perpetrated in a new venue: cyberspace.

Who was responsible for the cyberincursions upon the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that took place during the U.S. presidential campaign? Russia's “senior most officials”? A “a tattooed 26-year-old” running a server rental company in western Siberia? U.S. political party leaders and other insiders disinclined to implement “best in class” cybersecurity measures? Or does responsibility lie elsewhere?

The recent U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack raises several difficult questions in the fields of cybersecurity and privacy. Obviously, this was first and foremost a matter of security in that the hack likely involved a foreign government attempting to intervene in a presidential election process with the possible motive of influencing its outcome. From another perspective, however, the incident was also a matter of privacy, in that the fundamental motive of the DNC hack was to reveal “information that the victim wants to keep private” and to influence its future decision through the compromise of privacy.

The data breach of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the U.S. presidential election of 2016 is multi-faceted and has wide ranging implications. The discourse of “cybersecurity” is increasingly thought of through the lens of states and other powerful actors like large corporations, as a conflict or war that is waged by specialized combatants while civilians are relegated to the sidelines and are the victims of digital malfeasance or the object of regulation and education from those in power.

On November 30, 2016, after much uncertainty, the Colombian Congress finally approved a historic peace deal between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), bringing to an end the country's fifty-year conflict. This peace deal was a historical achievement, and had important ramifications for international law, as discussed in a recent AJIL Unbound symposium. But once the spotlights were off, the government was faced with the daunting challenge of implementing the complex, lengthy accord. In particular, the government had to draw up and pass through Congress the legal and constitutional framework for the transitional justice process—a key component of the peace deal. It is there, in the subtle details of domestic criminal law, where the balance between peace and justice must be achieved.