Analysis shows contrasting views between international humanitarian law and law of armed conflict, indicating a complex relationship.
The international humanitarian law (IHL) vision and the law of armed conflict (LOAC) vision assign different logical priorities to humanity and military necessity, individual and state, leading to their contrasting views towards the humanisation of the law of war (i.e., the parallax). However, by deploying Martti Koskenniemi's method in From Apology to Utopia, it could be argued that both of the visions' argumentative structures are based on liberal theory. Its inherent contradiction determines that the positions of the IHL and LOAC visions would eventually become relative. The parallax is diminished and replaced by an optical delusion: no matter what criticism has been made in debates, it would be no more than a repetition of existing liberal problems. Nevertheless, by referring to field theory, it is still possible to argue that this type of competition has already been the best way to exhibit the parallax between politics and the public.
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Ruoran Yan (2025) studied this question.
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