Amanda Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Law at Australian Catholic University, contributes a chapter to the 2023 book, Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law:
Revolutionary War and the Development of International Humanitarian Law
The distinction between civilians and combatants and the protection of civilians are perhaps the central precepts of international humanitarian law today.
…Vietnam served as the archetype of the contemporary conflicts that had prompted the ICRC to draft new laws. When the ICRC began calling for new laws of armed conflict it
was concerned by military developments, such as aviation, that had “almost wiped out” the fundamental distinctions between combatants and civilians. It was also troubled by the rise of a “truly enormous tidal wave of guerrilla activity” that had not been anticipated by earlier conventions.
The Vietnam War was the consummate example of these concerns. Moreover, the Vietnam War informed the drafting process by challenging the traditional Western understanding of the laws of armed conflict. The revolutionary writings on people’s war, put into practice in Vietnam, shaped a new language and paradigm of a just war, while advocating for the legitimacy of guerrilla warfare.
This language was adopted by Palestinian movements, which presented their struggle as analogous to the Vietnamese people’s war. Support for the Palestinians and the Palestine Liberation Organization led to a series of United Nations resolutions, proclaiming the rights of national liberation movements and their fighters in a quasi-legal language that would later be repeated at the Diplomatic Conferences.
There was also growing support for the Palestinian and the Vietnamese resistance in the West. Wars against imperial powers were increasingly accepted as just and the means used to oppose them seemed shocking.
Popular and academic commentary in the West questioned the lawfulness of counterinsurgency techniques, in particular attacks on civilians. These discourses were reflected in the debates at the Diplomatic Conference and ultimately in the provisions of the Additional Protocol I.
