SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTED BY THE DIH: PRELIMINARY CONCEPTUALIZATIONS TO AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

The article describes the context in which the question arises about the social representations of the International Humanitarian Law: a situation of armed conflict, reflected in a symbolic world in which normative notions, which have a more or less widespread acceptance, coexist with contradictory evaluations and practices. There appear next the basic principles IHL, the essentials of the theory of the social representations and there is focused the application of the semantic differential technique to tackle these representations. Finally, some investigations are reviewed on Human Rights carried out from the perspective of the social representations; this allows to assess the scope of this theory for an investigation that is proposed specifically in the field of the IHL.