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Non-international armed conflicts are defined as conflicts that have crossed a certain threshold of violence and where at least one party is a non-state actor. In situations like these, international humanitarian law (IHL) takes primacy and, is widely accepted to be binding on all sides. However, the situation becomes complicated when a state does not accept that there is an internal armed conflict at all and thus refuses to apply IHL as the binding legal system. On the other hand, if human rights law (HRL) is applied instead (and exclusively), the position and role of a non-state actor raise some significant questions. This paper does not necessarily suggest one solution over others, but rather considers some emerging possibilities, albeit controversial, as well as aiming to expose some limits and obstacles that one might encounter when faced with the decision whether non-states actors can / should be or …