Beyond Compliance Symposium: [ADD title]
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
29 October 2024
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Beyond Compliance Symposium: Systemic impacts of war in protracted conflicts
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
22 October 2024
In this post Joshua Niyo highlights the systemic impacts of protracted armed conflicts which are often overlooked by narrow conceptualisations of civilian harm. He asks whether international humanitarian law (IHL) is suited to address the systemic effects of armed hostilities and calls for a paradigm shift to acknowledge the broader systemic impacts of war within IHL norms. In particular he advocates for the inclusion of systemic harms in IHL’s principle of proportionality to ensure armed actors consider how their military operations affect the long-term functioning of civilian infrastructure and services. Niyo observes that empowering armed actors to move beyond a narrow focus on immediate casualties would enable a more holistic approach to civilian protection that addresses the full range of harms inflicted during armed conflict as well as after the guns fall silent.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: War is not skin deep – International Humanitarian Law and mental health
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
15 October 2024
Narratives of the negative impacts of war—particularly those centring ‘civilian harm’—are dominated by physiological harms and often reduced to casualty counting; yet, life and limb are not all that is threatened in armed conflicts. In this post Samantha Holmes observes war’s profound and pervasive impacts on mental health and wellbeing in order to contextualise the need for greater law and policy protections. She critiques the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) framework—and its interpretation and implementation—for imposing a hierarchy of harms that deprioritises the mental health impacts of war. Holmes praises some progressive interpretations of IHL that consider civilian mental harm, but warns against the installation of a Western depiction of mental harm that undermines culturally and spiritually diverse experiences.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: Armed Groups, Compliance and International Law: There is more than meets the eye
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
10 October 2024
Marking 75 years since the adoption of the Geneva Conventions, Dr Ezequiel Heffes explores how the landscape of armed conflicts has changed and with it the degrees of compliance exercised by non-State armed groups. He explores the motivations for armed groups to comply with international law and seeks to unpack some of the complexity surrounding their conduct. Heffes calls for the continued studying of the practices of armed groups that comply with international humanitarian law in order to inform the design and implementation of context-specific strategies aimed at improving compliance, and ultimately, the protection of individuals.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: A rights-based approach to addressing harm and need in armed conflict?
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
9 October 2024
In this post Rocco Blume explains the development of a rights-based approach for understanding and addressing conflict. Juxtaposed to a traditional needs-based approach, a rights-based approach uses the international human rights framework and the rights holder-duty bearer relationship. The fundamental contribution of a rights-based approach is that it does not merely see people through the lens of their needs and the services they lack. It sets out a vision of what ought to be, and of the conditions necessary for all human beings to live in dignity and thrive. Blume acknowledges that an exclusive focus on rights is inadequate to illuminate the complex factors generating harm and need and motivating the behaviour of powerholders; however, he argues that a rights framework serves as a compass to help stakeholders, activists, and civil society to steer through the chaos of conflict.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: Practical Measures to Prevent and Mitigate Conflict-induced Food Insecurity
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
3 October 2024
Conflict (or rather the actions of armed actors) is the primary driver of acute food insecurity. Nevertheless, thin conceptualisations of ‘civilian harm’ overlook food insecurity as a lethal consequence of conflict. Katherine Kramer discusses a new toolset which has been launched, providing guidance on practical measures armed actors can take to prevent and mitigate conflict-induced food insecurity.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: Redressing Civilian Harm and Going Beyond International Humanitarian Law Compliance
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
2 October 2024
In this post Luke Moffett considers how remedies, in particular reparations, for civilian harm can move beyond compliance with International Humanitarian Law and better reflect the lived experience of harmed civilians. He proposes a harm-based approach (as opposed to a violation-based one) to reparation programmes, centring factual causation of harm rather than legal responsibility and thus expanding the scope of eligibility for reparations beyond strict interpretations of serious or gross violations of law. Moffett argues that this approach can improve transparency and accountability for targeting and military operations, including for cases of incidental harm.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: Strategies for reducing harm and need in war through a decolonial and intersectional lens
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
26 September 2024
In this post Samantha Holmes maps current intervention strategies that are frequently employed to prevent, reduce, and mitigate harm and need in armed conflict and the broad spectrum of intervenors. She goes on to evaluate the limitations of these interventions resulting from the conceptual frameworks to which they are tethered. Acknowledging the legacies of colonial oppression and marginalisation that are perpetuated through the humanitarian regime and the discourses used by humanitarian, human rights, academic and military actors, she proposes a decolonial and intersectional approach to harm and need reduction that better reflects and responds to the lived experiences of armed conflict.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: Why armed actors should pay more attention to civilian self-protection efforts
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
25 September 2024
While some civilians at the very outset of a new conflict or escalation of violence might temporarily freeze – being at a loss for what to actively do, many, if not most, very quickly transform and become pro-active, expert agents in their protection and the protection of the vulnerable. In this post, Marc Linning explains dimensions of how civilian self-protection efforts can look in practice and where there are touchpoints and linkages with efforts by armed actors to protect civilians.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: Ambiguous boundaries between actors in non-international armed conflicts
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
24 September 2024
In this post Anastasia Shesterinina takes a dyadic perspective of 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.
Civilian Agency in Violent Settings
Beyond Compliance: In Conversation Podcast
20 September 2024
More than half the world’s population are living in settings where they are regularly exposed to violence, whether from armed actors, gangs, community defence forces or criminal groups. What do civilian communities do to protect themselves and others in these settings? And what can we learn from them about civilian protection? In Beyond Compliance: In Conversation, Katharine and Florian look at these questions with Juan Masullo and Emily Paddon Rhoads, who are two of the editors of the new book ‘Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings: A Comparative Perspective’ (Oxford University Press).
Beyond Compliance Symposium: Compliance + Restraint Towards Full(er) Protection in War
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
18 September 2024
In this post Ioana Cismas and Anastasia Shesterinina evaluate the limitations and potentialities of two protection frames that are dominant in legal and political science literature and in humanitarian practice: compliance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law and restraint from violence and abuse. They seek to demonstrate that the concurrent application of ‘compliance + restraint’, alongside other approaches in the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, might go some way towards achieving a fuller(er) protection framework that centres a harm + need approach in conflict.
Beyond Compliance Symposium: What’s in a Frame? Understanding Everyday Lived Experiences of Armed Conflict Through a Lens of ‘harm+need’
Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict
18 September 2024
In this post, Katharine Fortin and Rebecca Sutton explain the Consortium’s novel approach to the study of harm and need in armed conflict, articulating the logic of employing a combined ‘harm + need’ framework. They outline the challenges that arise in applying the qualifiers ‘civilian’ (harm) and ‘humanitarian’ (need), and explain why we must look beyond the law as we seek to understand and reduce the negative lived experiences of armed conflict.
Launching New Blog Symposium
17 September 2024
The Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict, invites reflection on the conceptualisation of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and on legal and extra-legal strategies, including legal compliance and restraint from violence and abuse, that can effectively address harm and need. Hosted across the Armed Groups and International Law and Articles of War blog from September 2024 onwards, the contributions draw on expertise across the Beyond Compliance Consortium member organisations and other stakeholders providing a conceptual foundation for our research programme on Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors. The introductory post is out now.
Launching New Podcast
Beyond Compliance: In Conversation
5 September 2024
The Beyond Compliance Consortium’s Katharine Fortin and Florian Weigand are hosting the new podcast Beyond Compliance: In Conversation. Series 1 of the podcast focuses on ‘Civilian agency, armed groups and international law’.
In the first episode, Katharine and Florian are joined by Tilman Rodenhäuser and Matthew Bamber-Zryd, two experts from the International Committee of the Red Cross, to discuss Engaging Armed Groups.
New blog contribution
‘Assessing the Civilian and Political Institutions of Armed Non-State Actors under International Law‘
22 July 2024
BCC Co-Investigator Katharine Fortin examines in a new blog article the civilian and political institutions of armed non-State actors. The piece is part of a symposium hosted by the Just Security and Armed Groups and International Law blogs. It builds on the book volume Armed Groups and International Law. In the Shadowland of Legality and Illegality, edited by Fortin together with Ezequiel Heffes (Edward Elgar, 2023).
Fortin observes that there is an:
“intense and urgent need for a much better legal understanding by politicians and lawyers in militaries and counter terrorism of the realities of civilian life in territory under armed group control. It calls for a much more careful use by lawyers and policy makers of the term “organized armed group,” “non-State party,” and “members” so that armed groups’ military wings and civilians wings are not conflated. At an academic level, it calls for more interdisciplinary research on the daily lived experiences of the 64 million people currently under the exclusive control of armed non-State actors exercising State-like control and government functions. The new Beyond Compliance Consortium which the author is a part of is an example of such an endeavor.”
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New blog contribution
‘Lieber Studies Making and Shaping LOAC Volume – Between War and the Text: The Pedagogical Life of IHL’
3 July 2024
BCC Co-Investigator Rebecca Sutton articulates in a new blog article a new way of thinking about International Humanitarian Law (IHL) pedagogy. The piece is based on a chapter in the recently-published Making and Shaping the Law of Armed Conflict, the tenth volume of the Lieber Studies Series (Oxford University Press, 2024),
Sutton begins:
“When international lawyers and scholars think about how international humanitarian law (IHL) works in the world, we tend to juxtapose implementation “on the ground” with the rules “in the book.” Yet a further site lies between war and the text. This is the pedagogical realm, a domain in which IHL rules are taught, learned, and brought into question in teaching and training spaces. While a deeper appreciation of pedagogy stands to enrich our understanding of the everyday life—or lives—of IHL, this dimension is foregrounded in IHL-related inquiries all too rarely.”
Photo credit: Alyona Synenko © ICRC (26/12/2022 V-P-UA-E-01099). Donetsk Oblast, Sviatohirsk. A resident shows the damage to her house caused by the fighting.
Report contribution ‘Final Report of the International Law Association Comittee on Human Rights in Times of Emergency‘
July 2024
BCC Principal Investigator, Ioana Cismas contributes to the International Law Association Committee on Human Rights in Times of Emergency Final Report: Assessment of State practice in respect to times of emergency (July, 2024). The report “critically examines selected State practice on emergency situations with a focus on the last three decades. States have pursued emergency measures in increasingly numerous and diverse contexts. They have done so with or without formally declaring states of emergency and/or notifying relevant United Nations or regional bodies. As such, the following three types of states of emergency that can be observed in practice will be the focus of the report: declared and notified (derogation), declared (de jure), and non-declared (de facto) emergencies.“
Public Launch Event Recording
15 May 2024
The Public Launch of the Beyond Compliance Consortium’s Research Programme took place on 15 May 2024. Watch the recording which includes a presentation about the programme and fireside chat with Consortium members.
Consortium Workshop
14 May 2024
Members of the Consortium met for the kick-off meeting of our research programme. We discussed the conceptual framework of our co-produced practitioner-academic research project on harm and need in armed conflict.
The work begins
12 March 2024
Members of the Consortium attended the first day of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) Conflict Cadre conference and hosted a stand on behalf of the Consortium and the exciting work to come.