ABSTRACT
Technological change poses a major challenge to the rules of war under the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) and related instruments of international humanitarian law. Weapons development often proceeds much faster than the rules of conflict can be negotiated during peacetime, while the pressures of combat lead states to bend if not completely break those rules during wartime. Yet there is little consensus in the academic literature on the role of technological change in furthering or undermining international cooperation on humanitarian issues.1 We also lack a systematic analysis of how states attempt to balance the demands placed on them as chief rule-makers in international politics with the rapid pace of modern technological change. Most general theories of international relations do not systematically incorporate technology and technological change into their analysis, except perhaps as ad hoc idiosyncratic variables, as when discussing sources of uneven economic growth2 or dramatically innovative military technologies, such as nuclear weapons.3 The opposite problem of this tendency is to treat technology as so pervasive-as, for example, a fundamental component of globalization-that one finds it difficult to isolate any discrete cause and effect relationships based on it.
