When Humanity Becomes Conditional: The Legal Crisis Triggered by Social Polarization -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

The radical premise on which International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is based is that in the middle of war it must remain unconditional to humanity. Not even as targets. Protection does not depend on identity, ideology, or badges of allegiance. And that assumption is withering today not because the law has changed, but how the societies have.

We are entering an era when humanity itself is becoming politicized.

In today ’s conflict the world over, social polarization has ceased to be just background noise. It predetermines where and what sort of violence you may encounter. Communities are no longer just divided, they are morally segregated. Opponents are not looked at as adversaries, and much less as opponents: they are existential threats. In such an environmen t, the legal boundary between combatant and civilian starts to blur not as a doctrinal matter but as first of perception. And law follows suit when perception goes wrong.

IHL depends on an agreement over very little. There has been that consensus shattered.

In today’s polarized societies, civilians associated correctly or incorrectly with the”other side” are increasingly seen as legitimate targets. Hospitals which treat the enemy are no longer neutral.Journalists who contravene dominant narratives in their reporting no longer have protection.Whole populations come into the doghouse. And pro tection beco mes conditional.

This is a change of the very moral foundation of humanitarian law itself, rather than just an infringement on it.

The principle of distinction, possibly the cornerstone of IHL presumes that the parties will discern between a combatant and a non combatant. But polarisation substitutes identity based judgments for legal categories. Ethnicity, religion, political affiliation these become stand ins for guilt. In such a context, the law doesn’t just go wrong by accident. It’s as if the law itself were being viewed through a polarized lens.

The result is a silent but brutal shift: many of the protection has gone instead to selective humanity.Is the decline of neutrality equally frightening? And when humanitarian aid workers, medical personnel or international observers rely on the image of impartial, they are neutral in a conflict-ridden situation suspect what? To give any help is to be accused of taking sides. To remain neutral is to be seen as an accomplice. The fewer the possibilities for humanitarian action open up instead of closing because the legal bars stand enforcers are there is over anger inhibiting every move. Law cannot function where trust has broken down.The international response, however, remains fundamentally inadequate. Legal frameworks continue to assume rational actors and shared norms even as those disintegrate. Accountability mechanisms focus on finding individual perpetrators; the structural conditions that make such breaches inevitable are ignored. We are trying to enforce 20th century legal norms in a 21st century world of atomized societies.This is a category mistake and a costly one. If humanitarian law is to endure as more than a living tradition, it must grapple with a reality where polarization isn’t simply a political problem; it is as much legal challenge. The law cannot remain blind to social conditions that determine whether it works or not. It has to change so as in future not only acts of violence are punishable but also their driver narratives.This means recognizing incitement, alienation and identity based neglect as forerunners of legal erosion; they are not tangential matters. It means building up protection for humanitarian workers in a social setting that is hostile. It means to design accountability mechanisms that can cope with group dynamics so departing from a focus only upon individual responsibility. Above all it needs to restress both legally and morally that humanity is not a matter of ifs and buts. By that I mean: once your personal characteristics determine what benefits of protection you may get from the law, the law itself has then become irrelevant.

If Law becomes a dead letter, then the violence itself, equally if its forces still have an identity, needs no further justification.

。 It only needs a label.

A system that purports to protect civilians while leaving them to barter over their humanism, apart from failing to deliver on its promises, is simply swindling.

Half human serves as a euphemism for not human at all. If humanity is conditional, etiquette for international human rights is only slowly degrading. But in fact it no longer exists.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia