Su-kyoung Hwang, Korea’s Grievous War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 69:
The debate over civilian immunity was the debate over liberal immunity in a different guise. The assumption that liberal democracies are less prone to target civilians is a longstanding myth. Incidents reported from some of the major battlefields of the past century have repeatedly contradicted this myth and revealed that democratic states are far from being able to claim moral superiority in their use of violence against civilians. What continue to be matters for dispute are questions of motive and whether the means justify the end. Insofar as the use of states of emergency and other forms of legal exceptions are concerned, liberal democracies share much in common with authoritarian and totalitarian states.