Military personnel participating in international operations are often deployed to areas where armed groups inflict violence on civilians. In such instances, soldiers must decide how to respond, effectively becoming executors of the law. This article draws on legal consciousness theory and 33 interviews with Norwegian military officers to explore what soldiers perceive as the ‘law’ and how they make sense of legality in determining what constitutes a just response. It finds that officers are conscious of three sources of legality – a mission mandate, a senior commanding officer, and a personal obligation to humanity – which they stand before, engage with, and struggle against, respectively. In actively drawing on these ideas about justice, the officers create and reproduce order in violent contexts. This article adds to theoretical debates about the different ways in which people invoke the law in difficult circumstances. It contributes empirically to an understanding of why authorized militaries behave inconsistently when encountering violence against civilians.

中文翻译：

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保护的义务？武装冲突中军官的法律意识

参与国际行动的军事人员经常被部署到武装团体对平民施暴的地区。在这种情况下，士兵必须决定如何应对，有效地成为法律的执行者。本文利用法律意识理论和对挪威军官的 33 次访谈，探讨士兵将什么视为“法律”，以及他们如何理解合法性来确定什么是公正的回应。它发现，军官们意识到三种合法性来源——任务授权、高级指挥官和对人类的个人义务——他们分别站在、接触和反对这些来源。在积极借鉴这些关于正义的想法时，官员们在暴力环境中创造和再现秩序。这篇文章增加了关于人们在困难情况下援引法律的不同方式的理论辩论。它有助于从经验上理解为什么授权军队在遇到针对平民的暴力行为时行为不一致。