ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a form of military assistance: the supply of military equipment to insurgents. It discusses that the laws on providing arms should be even more restrictive for the provision of arms to states. The ethical issues surrounding the supply of military equipment to insurgents in order to tackle human rights violations has become particularly pertinent in the wake of the Arab Spring. The chapter considers four potential principled reasons why arming rebels might appear to be preferable. The arming of rebels is widely viewed as generally illegal according to international law. The reasons largely stem from a clear and obvious difference to direct military intervention, which largely explains its popularity as a foreign policy option for states supplying arms to rebels in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, the Balkans, and beyond: the arming of rebels does not involve sending troops to fight beyond the borders of the state.
