Assignment:
International Humanitarian Law (IHL), the U.S., and the Digital Public Sphere
This final project asks you to examine an issue in international humanitarian law from two connected perspectives:
First as a legal problem, and then as a digital public debate. Your paper should show how legal meaning changes once it moves into public discourse online. Need Assignment Help?
Core Purpose of the Project
Your project should explore the difference between:
- legal meaning: what the law actually says
- public meaning: how those legal ideas are interpreted, simplified, politicized, or debated on social media
A strong paper will analyze both.
Required Structure
Your paper must include three major parts:
Part I: Legal Analysis
Work like a legal analyst. Use a legal primary source to build a real IHL debate and present a clear, defensible interpretation.
Questions to consider:
- What does the law actually say?
- How have states, courts, or institutions interpreted it?
- What is your own reasoned legal reading of the issue?
Part II: Digital / Social Media Analysis
Work like a digital historian or media analyst. Trace how that same legal issue travels through social media.
Analyze how legal ideas are:
- translated
- simplified
- politicized
- weaponized
- memefied
- mobilized
Questions to consider:
- How do legal ideas circulate online?
- How are they changed when they enter public digital debate?
- What does this do to political understanding and interaction?
Integrated Conclusion
Your conclusion should do more than summarize. It should explain how legal meaning and public meaning interact.
Required Sources
You must include:
- At least 1 legal primary source
- This should be a legislative, treaty-based, court, case-law, or similarly formal legal document.
- At least 1 social media primary source
This should be a post, thread, video, account, comment section, or other directly analyzable digital source from a platform such as X, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Truth Social, or a similar platform.
At least 5 academic secondary sources
These should be academic journal articles, or books from reputable academic presses.
Citation Style
Use Chicago Style (Notes-Bibliography).
Length and Format
Minimum length: 10 full pages of text
Double-spaced
This does not include the cover page, bibliography, or appendices
Final Reminder
Because this is an end-of-semester assignment, late submissions will not be accepted unless a student provides a serious and legitimate excuse.
All submissions will be reviewed through Turnitin for plagiarism and AI use.
You may use AI tools within reason as part of your writing process.
However, your final submission must still reflect your own thinking, analysis, and voice. If a submission is found to be more than 50% AI-written, it will need to be revised and resubmitted.
Please make sure that:
- your work is your own,
- your ideas are clearly expressed,
- and any use of outside tools does not replace your own analysis.
Conclusion:
This assignment is designed to help you think about the growing importance of social media in the emergence of a new public sphere and its possible impact on future business and employment opportunities, especially for STEM graduates. It also asks you to reflect on the responsibilities that come with participating in this new digital environment.
This is not only a legal research paper. It is also an analysis of how law enters the digital public sphere. Your job is to connect a formal legal issue to the way it is publicly debated online.