In the reading, I learned about International Armed Conflict, which is when two or more states with legal armed forces have a conflict with each other. When this occurs, there is a set of guidelines states follow which is stated on the Geneva Convention. The purpose of the Geneva Convention was to regulate the conduct of armed conflict and to limit the effects of it. They protect people not taking part in hostilities and those who are no longer doing so. However, this raises the question of what happens when states do not follow the guidelines provided by the Geneva Convention.

The Geneva Convention dictates how prisoners of war and citizens should be treated during times of war. While there is no punishment stated in the document, violation of it can lead to outrage by many states which leads to different kinds of punishments such as trade sanctions or other forms of economic punishments for the offending state. This was interesting because many states have ignored the protocols, for example, Syria, Libya, or Afghanistan. What would happen if a big power country the U.S. violates it?

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.