Not mini-civilians: The legal obligations towards children as children in armed conflict

The protection of children in armed conflict is stalled by interpretive failure rather than legal deficiency. While the existing international humanitarian law (IHL) architecture possesses the normative material to shield children, a profound chasm remains between formal and effective protection. This article asks: how should IHL’s foundational principles be reinterpreted to bridge the distance between legal promise and systemic harm? The prevailing “mini-civilian” construction, treating children as indistinguishable from adults in military assessments, is a lethal legal choice. By failing to disaggregate children in proportionality and precautionary assessments, belligerents read into IHL limitations that are inconsistent with the text itself, as well as IHL’s very object and purpose. A corrective framework is not a deviation from IHL’s logic, but its necessary fulfilment. Drawing on emerging State practice and evolving military doctrines, the authors argue for recognizing children’s distinct physiological, psychological and developmental vulnerabilities as independent variables in harm assessments. Ultimately, this requires replacing adult-centric bias with a recognition of children as a legally distinct category of protected persons with a lower threshold of harm. The imperative is to ensure that legal recognition translates into protection that is real, differentiated and enforceable.