Preventing Accountability: The Erasure of Civilian Victims and the Quest for Impunity

This chapter examines how the legal framework of preventive warfare, coupled with the practices associated with preventive military operations, created the conditions for the erasure of civilian victims of preventive attacks, thus providing impunity to the perpetrators. The chapter is divided into three parts. Firstly, drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of precarious lives, that is, lives that may be exposed to injury and death, I argue that preventive warfare maximized the precariousness of civilian lives by relying on legal frames—and the practices used to implement them—that redefined large numbers of civilians as legitimate military targets. Redefined as dispensable persons, civilians were deprived of protection against attacks and thus subjected to deadly violence. Secondly, the chapter sheds light on how investigations into incidents of preventive operations contributed to the “disappearance” of civilian victims. I will examine, for example, how military review boards, tasked with reviewing cases of preventive “security” detentions, often failed to recognize unlawfully detained civilians due to the lack of adequate procedural safeguards (e.g., denial of the right to challenge the lawfulness of detention, denial of access to information about the reasons for detention, and denial of the right to confront witnesses). Instead of recognizing civilian victims of detention, the review boards blurred the line between civilians and “security threats” in order to erase civilians as victims of state violence. Thirdly, the chapter examines how other techniques—that is, denial, secrecy, and strategic ignorance—contributed to the “erasure” of civilian victims of preventive operations.