| Summary/Abstract |
The requirement of having some rules and laws under which war should be conducted emerged consequent to the Geneva Convention of 1864 which was basically about the “Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field”. It was only in the 1899 Hague Conference that codification of the laws of war on land, as the “Hague Conventions 1899” was undertaken. The wars post that convention used the rules that emerged, to interpret the “Jus in Bello” concept or the “Just way to wage war”. While these were infringed many times, however, the laws did rein in truant states and permitted trials of war criminals. In a short period of less than a century since the laws emerged, countries and organisations had learnt to circumvent the rules in the form of proxy wars and terrorism. In this milieu conflict is waged in a zone where the rules can be twisted and misinterpreted or waged in a manner that neither do they follow the law, nor (legally) do they infringe it. Conflict is no longer black or white, it is opaque, it is in the “Grey Zone”.
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