Quantifying Compliance: Challenges of Measuring Compliance with International Humanitarian Law
5 December 2024
Authors: Christoph Dworschak and Hyunjung Park
Understanding patterns of compliance with International Humanitarian Law (IHL) requires comparative research to measure compliance in an accurate and consistent way. In this post, Dworschak and Park explore the challenges and nuances that comparative research on IHL encounters when trying to measure compliance, and their implications for understanding behavioural patterns of armed actors. The post gives a brief overview of how comparative research has advanced the understanding of compliance and discusses existing approaches to measuring compliance. Based on the most-used indicator of non-compliance — the number of civilian killings — Dworschak and Park highlight potential sources for error and their wide-ranging implications. The authors conclude by emphasising the importance of matching concepts and measurement in the study of IHL compliance, both for drawing appropriate conclusions about patterns of compliance and for engendering a better understanding of the scope constraints of IHL.
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/Daniele Volpe (28/01/2016, V-P-GT-E-00239) Guatemala, Quiquil. The ICRC helps relatives of missing persons give them a decent burial. The setting for the burial, located two kilometres away from the village, was chosen by the members of the community themselves. It is the place where, five years before, one of the graves was found, with mortal remains of people killed by soldiers in 1982.
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