Come limitare le arti più perniciose: un'indagine sugli approcci della dottrina internazionalista italiana del secondo dopoguerra alle nuove tecnologie militari

This article analyzes how Italian international legal scholarship after the Second World War addressed the regulation of emerging military technologies. The central question concerns whether regulating new weapons requires specific provisions or whether general principles — particularly those expressed in the so-called Martens Clause — can directly govern technological innovation in warfare. To this end, three general approaches are singled out. A dominant positivist current held that in the absence of explicit treaty or customary rules, even highly destructive or dehumanizing weapons could not be considered unlawful. In this view, general principles have been acknowledged as capable of serving interpretive functions at best, but they could not themselves create prohibitions. Alongside this approach, Giuseppe Barile and his school introduced a historically grounded natural-law perspective. They attributed normative force to the ‘collective legal conscience’ and viewed the Martens Clause as embodying substantive principles of humanity capable of informing the legality of new weapons. A third orientation, exemplified by Antonio Cassese, combined doctrinal analysis with a policy-oriented critique, emphasizing the insufficiency of vague general bans and urging states to translate humanitarian values into concrete legal norms. The article concludes that, despite methodological differences and without departing from the positivist legacy, Italian scholarship consistently recognizes the central — and essential — role of states in shaping the legal regulation of new technologies.