ABSTRACT
Violence in war is subject to feverish regulation.2 This regulation, partly, depends on a categorization of human beings as either combatants or noncombatants (and, in a not quite overlapping categorization, soldiers or civilians). The principle of ‘distinction’ is founded on the stability and recognizability of these categories and this principle, in turn, is a constitutive preoccupation in the work of international humanitarian and military lawyers. All of this is threatened, though, by a sense that the distinction cannot work: because war is now total, or because resistance is multiple, spontaneous and permeable, or because law is sidelined by the imperatives of insurrection, occupation or annihilation, or because these categories are continually bleeding into one another.3
