The principle of proportionality under international humanitarian law prohibits an attack if the expected harm to civilian persons and objects is excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage. In this article we argue that, when applying the principle of proportionality, the incidental harm to a child must be given a higher value as compared to incidental harm to an adult. This reflects the broader framework of international humanitarian law, which creates stratifications amongst different groups of civilians and provides special protection for children in times of war. This aligns with the practice of many militaries, which tends to implicitly assign a heightened worth to the lives of children due to moral and political considerations. Such reasons stem from the perceived vulnerability of children as well as their moral innocence reflecting harmlessness and blamelessness. Indeed, harm to children’s lives tends to generate a greater backlash among the community to which they belong and, as a result, a military disadvantage. We argue that the greater weight assigned to the lives of children in proportionality assessments is not simply a matter of morality or strategic calculations, but in fact a requirement from a more wholistic interpretation of international humanitarian law.

Cash transfer programs are the most common anti-poverty tool in low- and middle-income countries, reaching more than one billion people globally. Benefits are typically targeted using prediction models. In this paper, we develop an extended targeting assessment framework for proxy means testing that accounts for societal sensitivity to targeting errors. Using a social welfare framework, we weight targeting errors based on their position in the welfare distribution and adjust for different levels of societal inequality aversion. While this approach provides a more comprehensive assessment of targeting performance, our two case studies show that bias in the data, particularly in the form of label bias and unstable proxy means testing weights, leads to a substantial underestimation of welfare losses, disadvantaging some groups more than others.

Focus here is placed on the pharmaceutical and biomedical applications of novel clay-drug hybrid materials categorized by methods of administration. Clay minerals have been used for many years as pharmaceutical and medicinal ingredients for therapeutic purposes. A number of studies have attempted to explore clay-drug hybrid materials for biomedical applications with desired functions, such as sustained release, increased solubility, enhanced adsorption, mucoadhesion, biocompatibility, targeting, etc. The present review attempts not only to summarize the state-of-the-art of clay-drug hybrid materials and their advantages, depending on the methods of administration, but also to deal with challenges and future perspectives of clay mineral-based hybrids for biomedical applications.

This paper compares social policy responses to the cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland. In seeking to protect citizens from an inflationary shock, a series of fundamental social policy questions arise. What would the aims of support packages be? To what extent should support be universal or targeted? If targeted, did existing policy architectures facilitate or frustrate the targeting of support? As the scale and persistence of the inflationary shock became evident, smaller and near-universal responses gave way to larger support packages with a greater reliance on targeting. Social security systems played an important role in policy responses, though often by passporting one-off payments rather than a strengthening of these core programmes. Passporting led both to improved distributional outcomes vis-à-vis the more universal elements but created new administrative challenges and led to rough justice in some circumstances. The reliance on one-off payments underlined the temporary nature of policy responses.

In light of ongoing debates about income targeting in the welfare state, this article explores how the design and outcomes of income targeting policies are related to popular targeting preferences. Based on the unique combination of fine-grained opinion and policy indicators in a multilevel analysis, the results show that targeting preferences are indeed empirically related to targeting policies. However, whether these preferences are affected more by the de jure targeting design or the de facto targeting outcome seems to vary between two very different policy domains. In the case of unemployment benefits, the results suggest positive policy feedback: support for high-income targeting increases when unemployment benefits are designed to benefit those with previously higher incomes. For income taxation, by contrast, the results suggest negative policy feedback. In that case, it is not so much the de jure design but rather the de facto outcome that matters: the more taxes effectively work to the advantage of higher-income earners, the less support there is for a tax that levies the same amount on everyone, regardless of income.

Rising inflation in the Nordic societies has changed the living standards for many families. The situation differs not only between the four Nordic countries analysed, but even within each of the Nordic countries. The needs for intervention have varied. Several elements have been used to determine who is facing the most risks. This article shows how to combine automatic stabilisers with temporary policy interventions to deal with increased inflation in general or specific sub-elements (such as oil, natural gas). Focus is on the degree of and criteria for targeting. Possible distributional consequences of the adopted measures will be discussed. Lastly, the article considers whether the observed responses to the crisis have implications for the understanding of the Nordic welfare state model. The article investigates institutional, political and economic reasons for the variations in the interventions. The article concludes that in managing the crisis, the Nordic countries have adopted stronger targeting towards those considered to be in need, displaying some innovations in their social policy approach. Yet, one can trace a high degree of path-dependency, with the countries adhering to universalist principles, with an aim of redistributing resources.

Many contemporary armed conflicts are shaped by the reliance on airstrikes using traditional fighter planes or remotely piloted drones. As accounts of civilian casualties from airstrikes abound, the ethics and legality of individual airstrikes and broader targeting practices remain contested. Yet these concerns and debates are not new. In fact, a key attempt to regulate aerial warfare was made 100 years ago. In this article, we approach the regulation of aerial warfare through an examination of the 1923 Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare and the contemporary scholarly discussion of these rules. While the Draft Rules have never been converted into a treaty, they embody logics of thinking about civilians, technologies of aerial warfare, and targeting that are still resonating in contemporary discussions of aerial warfare. This article argues for a contextualized understanding of the Draft Rules as an attempt to adapt International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to the new technological realities while maintaining distinctions between different kinds of spaces and non-combatants. We argue that the Draft Rules prefigure later debates about the legality of aerial bombing by tacitly operating with a narrow understanding of the civilian and by offering a range of excuses and justifications for bombing civilians.

This article aims to clarify how international humanitarian law (IHL) rules on targeting apply when drug cartels are party to a non-international armed conflict. The question of distinguishing between a cartel's armed forces and the rest of the cartel members is a pertinent matter. It is crucial to avoid considering every drug dealer a legitimate target, just as we do not consider that everyone working for the government is a legitimate target. Nevertheless, it is unclear at what point a member of a cartel would change from being a criminal to being a member of the armed wing of the cartel, hence becoming a legitimate target. The present article will suggest a teleological approach to solving this conundrum.

Endless armed conflicts against terrorist groups put civilian populations at risk. Since France has been involved in the Sahel from 2013 onwards, transnational non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) of extended geographical and temporal scope against groups designated as terrorists are not a US exception anymore. NIACs against terrorist groups, conducted not only by the United States but also by France, persist and have been reconfigured around threat anticipation. How can anticipatory warfare be best constrained? This article argues that it can be best done through more constraining rules regulating target selection in NIACs and, in particular, by redefining the notion of continuous combat function (CCF). Many elements explored in this article indicate that the United States and France select targets that they pre-designate as terrorists, before these targets are engaged in hostilities. Instead of responding to the observed participation of these individuals in hostilities, strikes are based on contextual and behavioural elements ahead or outside of such moments. This paper argues that when war consists of threat anticipation, it becomes very extensive and particularly risky for civilians. Furthermore, recent State practice in the counterterrorism context reveals the pitfalls of the notions of direct participation in hostilities and CCF as defined in the 2009 International Committee of the Red Cross Interpretive Guidance. Outside this context, the interpretations proposed in the Interpretive Guidance might seem sufficient to constrain target selection processes and to protect civilian populations. However, when applied to armed conflicts that are driven by threat anticipation, the pitfalls of these interpretations emerge. I formulate a critique of these interpretations as being partly responsible for anticipatory warfare and propose an alternative theory for the CCF test.