Forms of Discipline and Military Law

The statement “Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all” urges the need of a well-disciplined and ordered army to a state where the military as last resort. military discipline is the centrifugal factor of winning the war. Therefore, it is evident that the purpose of military law is to promote justice, to assist in maintaining good order and discipline in the armed forces and to promote efficiency and effectiveness in the military which was well proved with analysis made with reference to the Sri Lankan Army act no 17 of 1949. Therefore, it is rationale to have a separate military justice system in the Army which is efficient and swift and contains special rules and punishments that are essential to maintain the discipline of troops as reflects by the above statement. Accordingly, the military justice system fulfills the expectation of a nation for a disciplined and efficient military which is even formidable against a superior army that ensures the success of its any assigned tasks

The passive response of peacekeeping commanders to genocidal acts committed in Rwanda and Srebrenica has raised questions regarding their individual responsibility. With the confirmation of state responsibility for the Netherlands and an interim decision in Belgium confirming responsibility for both the Belgian state and the military officials, the possibility that military commanders may face legal consequences after a failed peacekeeping mission becomes more likely. This paper explores whether international law imposes a duty to act on peacekeeping commanders. It furthermore looks into the question whether international (criminal) law provides a form of legal responsibility for a failure to fulfill that duty.

Two foundations for a duty act are distinguished. First, a duty based on the moral duty to safeguard life and provide aid when the physical integrity of the civilian population is at risk, that requires that the commander had the ability to act. Second, the commander may have had a duty to act based on his profession, which would be classified as a duty by contract or law. A failure to fulfil a duty to act could amount to omission liability, whereas criminal responsibility in the form of aiding and abetting by encouragement or tacit approval may apply if such a duty to act is absent. The latter form of responsibility is referred to as ‘bystander responsibility.’

By concluding that international law leaves sufficient space to attach criminal responsibility to the commander’s failure to act, this paper argues that the Responsibility to Protect doctrine has undergone a significant change: our perceptions of legal duties and criminal responsibilities are increasingly determined by moral norms and values. As such, the state and the international community are not necessarily central to the international legal spectrum. Instead, the international community may be perceived as a community of actors rather than a community of states. The individual is nowadays recognised as an actor that may have the ability to influence the course of events. This development of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine may have a transformative effect on international law. That effect is not necessarily perceived as advantageous for specific aspects of international law. For example, attaching criminal consequences to a failure to protect the civilian population may have a negative effect on peacekeeping as such. If countries are less willing to contribute to peacekeeping operations, the expansion of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine may defeat its own purpose: the protection of civilian populations from mass atrocities.

Military obedience, in the modern sense of the word, is the result of a rationalistic concept of order which developed between the14th and the18th century. According to this concept, the abstract and formal representations made by our mind in order to interpret the reality coincide with nature and can be applied to all the spheres of experience (such as politics, law, econonomy a.s.o.). Military order, which is based on the political paradigms of absolute monarchy and statalism, operates through the passive subordination of the subjects to authority. Nevertheless, there is a different meaning of obedience dating back to pre-modern times, when hierarchical subordination was not conceived in a formalistic way. It refers to the classical term “discipline” which means an active and constructive behavior based upon mutual trust. This trust being the result of a common share about the values that nowadays can be found in the field of human rights. For this reason, from a military point of view, classical “discipline” seems to be a more suitable tool than modern “obedience”, considering also the current crisis of some typical modern ideas (such as those relating to the “nation state” and legal formalism), as well as the new employment of the military in multinational peace-keeping or peace-enforcing task forces.

1. Uwagi wstępne -2. Sposoby regulacji prawnej przestępstwa ucieczki z pola bitwy: prawo koronne i litewskie -3. Postulaty de lege ferenda z połowy XVII w. -4. Przepisy dla autoramentu cudzoziemskiego -5. Nowe projekty prawne przez pryzmat idei oświeceniowych -6. Stosowanie przepisów penalizujących ucieczkę z pola bitwy -7. Przestępstwo ucieczki z pola bitwy w regulacjach krajów europejskich -8. Próba klasyfi kacji penalizacji ucieczki z pola bitwy -9. Podsumowanie.

“Ciudadanización y profesionalización militar. La reforma del sistema de justicia y disciplina de las Fuerzas Armadas. Argentina, 2006-2008”. Revista Historia y Justicia Nº6. Grupo de Historia y Justicia. Santiago de Chile. 2016. pp.198-227.

This is Chapter 5 from our book "Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society," which we encourage you to read and cite.  This chapter is a translation of what we think is one of Weber's more important essays, i.e. one about the nature of disciplined population, and why that discipline population is so important for modern institutions.  It has a dramatic and gloomy ending--if you want to skip there you can!  However we do urge you to read the whole thing.

Automated decision-making systems are becoming more prevalent in government processes around the world, in areas as diverse as the administration of social security, taxation, criminal sentencing and migration.3 These systems are most likely to be deployed in branches of government that must cope with a high caseload, as well as repetitive assessments against prescriptive criteria. However, as will be shown below, automated systems can vary in nature, which is likely to have implications for the manner in
which they are authorised or delegated, as well as for the risks that might be posed by indiscriminate use of those systems. Accordingly, this paper  rst canvasses the lexicon and meaning of terms such as arti cial intelligence and machine learning, before discussing technical aspects of the processes and tools these capacities can produce. Next, it applies the solution to three problems: assisting individuals when sentencing ADF members within the military discipline system; assisting ADF decision-makers to make consistent decisions when imposing administrative sanctions; and assisting central bodies such as the Career Management Agency with posting plots and career plans. This paper will not deal with some of the more nuanced legal issues surrounding automated decision-making.

The essay investigates the role of military discipline in civilizing and nationalizing Italian conscripts between 1861 and 1914 by intersecting a strictly normative approach with some suggestions coming from ego-documents. On the one hand, the essay focuses on the discipline regulations in order to evaluate to what extent the military authorities’ disciplining effort theoretically coincided with (or at least was a prerequisite for) recruited people’s true nationalization. On the other hand, soldiers’ memoirs and personal dossiers shed some light on the concrete application of the rules and on the file and rank’s subjective perception of the military discipline sense.

Urban military articles in modern Europe. An outline of the issues Military laws, taking into account the entities issuing them, can be divided into fi ve types. These are hetman's articles (announced by the chief commanders), royal articles (issued by the rulers), parliamentary articles (adopted by various representative bodies), confederate's articles (self-governing announced by all soldiers) and the urban articles, created by or under the authority of the city council. The paper presents characteristics of "urban military articles." These were the normative acts issued in the modern era directly by the city council or bodies acting under its authority. Promulgated acts were shorter than the other military articles, as in this case, military law was only complementary to the system of municipal law. These documents were primarily to ensure ef-fi cient supervision and control of the civilian municipal authorities over military troops. Civilians and private property was covered by special protection. Urban military articles imposed upon soldiers a fairly rigid moral framework, particular attention being given to the problems of alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, and even participation in urban amusements and festivities. More lenient penalties were applied in the urban military articles, which occurred the more strikingly the greater the proportion of urban citizens serving in the military. A sentence of imprisonment was provided more willingly, obviously using institutions operating in the cities.

Military Congregations’ Participation in Creating and Proclaiming Ordinances
and Articles of War in the XVI and XVII Century
The article explores soldiers’ participation in process of creating and accepting ordinances and articles of war. It was possible because of existance in army Sejmików – distinct for rittmeisters (Rittmeisters Council) and for the companions from one unit (Banner Council). In the beginning only rittmeisters had an influence over forming the articles of war. From the XVII century also companions could present their will. The acceptance of the officers was necessary to put legal rules into practice. From the nineties of the XVI century we can observe, that commander in chief (Hetman), Jan Zamoyski resigns from knights’ participation and tries, with the help of his own authority and Sejm’
enablement, to create legal rules by his own, without soldiers’ participation. Councils had a much greater authorisation in confederated units, that played a major role in legislation process.

From an international perspective, there has been a tendency to try and restrict or even avoid the use of military tribunals to prosecute members of the military or police responsible for serious human rights violations. Colombia has become a part of this trend over the past few decades, particularly through its Constitutional Court jurisprudence and a handful of
legislative developments. However, Colombia’s Legislative Act 02 of 2012 interrupted this trend by attempting to amend the country’s Constitution and extend the scope of military jurisdiction in Colombia, arguing that more confidence should placed in Colombia’s military and police. Although Colombia’s Constitutional Court quickly declared this constitutional reform unconstitutional due to some flaws in the congressional approval process, the substantial content and implications of this attempt at reform must be the starting point for subsequent debates about the benefits and scope of military criminal justice reform.

królewskiego (crimen laesae maiestatis) 4 . W końcu trzecim miejscem, w którym wprowadzano jednolite, zaostrzone przepisy porządkowe, były poczty towarzyszące posłom udających się zagranicę z misją dyplomatyczną. Niniejszy artykuł poświęcony jest temu ostatniemu zagadnieniu. Badania nad porządkiem prawnym stosowanym w orszakach poselskich pozwalają zająć się problematyką rozwoju prawa międzynarodowego, poziomem kultury prawnej ówczesnego społeczeństwa, a przede wszystkim wyjaśniają kwestię zachowania dyscypliny wśród zróżnicowanych społecznie i etnicznie ludzi w trakcie podróżowania poza granicami Rzeczypospolitej.

This article investigates how the contemporary war dispositif in cinematic representations captures and integrates bodies, gestures, space and desire. It focuses on two analytic aspects of this process, suture and interpassivity, and shows how soldiers, in cinematic space, confront trauma that results from an incompatibility between the accelerated speed of military dispositif and the slower rhythms of everyday life. It analyzes the clash between life speeds through three cinematic texts – The Hurt Locker, American Sniper and Good Kill – and clarifies how such disruptions motivate attempts to manage and renegotiate realities fractured by traumatic war experiences. More generally, it analyzes the ways in which war disfigures the phenomenology of bodies and the life world.