Beyond typologies of actors: ambiguous boundaries in non-international armed conflicts
24 September 2024
Author: Anastasia Shesterinina
In this post, Shesterinina examines non-international armed conflicts, acknowledging the multiplicity of actors and complex social processes that shape conflict dynamics. She explores the ambiguous boundaries between categories of actors and their implications for efforts to generate and apply clear typologies of actors in research on the lived experiences of conflict. The post argues that a more nuanced, contextually specific approach to actors and their relations can help better understand these complexities and lived realities of conflict associated with them.
About the Beyond Compliance Blog Symposium
The Beyond Compliance Symposium has been developed within the framework of our research programme on Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors. It brings together scholars and practitioners across the humanitarian, human rights, development and security sector fields to reflect on the conceptualisation of everyday negative lived experiences of armed conflict.
Understanding the personal, material, temporal and spatial scope of (civilian) harm and (humanitarian) need, as well as the characteristics and motivations of actors experiencing, causing, and exercising protective agency in relation to harm + need, represent crucial first steps in articulating effective responses. Contributions to the symposium also include reflections on legal and extra-legal strategies to prevent, reduce and redress harm + need, including through promotion of compliance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law and efforts aimed at generating restraint from violence and abuse.
Photo credit: © ICRC/Boris Heger (06/2010, V-P-CO-E-01953) Mountains in the Valle del Cauca region. Daily life of FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) combatant.
Latest blog posts
Newsletter
Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with our research and activities