Accountability and Multinational Military Operations

Abstract The chapter focuses on the rules on ‘international legal responsibility’ of states and international organizations as one scheme of holding actors of multinational military operations ‘accountable’. It shows that the ‘pluriverse’ of multilevel military operations gravitates in terms of ‘legal accountability’ around three basic sub-problems: the ‘attribution of conduct’, the ‘attribution of responsibility’, and the allocation of secondary obligations stemming from responsibility. With respect to these matters, the actors involved and the various overlapping spheres of control they exercise over multinational military operations pose a major challenge that international legal scholarship has yet to address in a satisfactory manner. In that regard—so the key argument—‘multiple attribution’ and ‘multiple responsibility’ appear as feasible concepts to process the realities of multinational military operations in a manner that would facilitate the accountability of relevant actors.