Beyond Compliance in a Chaotic World: How a Harm and Need Approach Can Achieve Full(er) Protection in Armed Conflict

Event details

2024 was notable due the dire empirical reality of war - 2025 is not proving any better. With over 130 conflicts fought across the world, efforts to generate armed actors’ compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) remain a central strategy for addressing the impacts of war. Yet, as the UN Secretary General noted in his protection of civilians report, compliance strategies are not enough! This is so, because even when States and non-State parties claim to be compliant with the law, individuals still experience serious harm and need. The everyday lived reality of contemporary conflicts compels us to reflect on both what it means to protect civilians in contemporary and future armed conflict and what the most effective strategies to do so are.  

The panel presents ongoing research by the Beyond Compliance Consortium. It focuses on three main domains of civilian harm and humanitarian need: conduct and theater of hostilities, governance and access to goods and services (including in contexts controlled by non-State actors), and the humanitarian landscape (i.e., policies, processes and structures dominating this space). The panel will engage the audience in a conversation on how a “harm + need” approach necessarily takes us “beyond compliance”, and “beyond the law”, but not “without the law” within a wider toolbox of responses. The panel explores how efforts aimed to enhance legal compliance, to generate restraint from violence and abuse, and other legal and extra-legal strategies can be leveraged towards full(er) protection in conflict.   

Speakers

Ioana Cismas

Professor Ioana Cismas is the Principal investigator on the Beyond Compliance Consortium’s research programme “Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors”. She is a Professor at York Law School and the Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York. 

Prior to joining the University of York, she lectured at Stirling Law School (2015-2017), was a Scholar-in-residence at Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice of the New York University School of Law (2014), and a Research fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights (2009-2013). 

Ioana consults for international, non – and governmental organisations. In 2013, she served as consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence at the OHCHR in Geneva. From 2009-2012, she was legal advisor to a member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council.

Her publications explore the intersection between legal accountability and legitimacy of various state and non-state actors; they include Religious Actors and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Ioana holds a PhD in international law (summa cum laude) from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Khrystyna Kozak

Khrystyna Kozak is a Researcher at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) Ukraine Country Office. She holds a Master of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame with a concentration in International Peace Studies and holds an L.L.M. in Human Rights. Khrystyna has over seven years of experience working with NRC, UNHCR, and WFP, specializing in protecting civilians and accountability in armed conflict. She recently worked with the Register of Damages for Ukraine in The Hague as a research fellow. 

Katharine Fortin

Dr. Katharine Fortin is the Co-Investigator on the Beyond Compliance Consortium’s research programme “Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors”. She is an Associate Professor at Utrecht University where she teaches international humanitarian law (IHL), international human rights law (IHRL) and public international law. She is the author of The Accountability of Armed Groups under Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2017) which won the 2018 Francis Lieber Prize from the American Society of International Law. She is co-editor of Armed Groups and International Law: In the Shadowland of Legality and Illegality (forthcoming, Edward Elgar 2023). She has written widely on non-State armed groups, law-making, rebel governance, sources of law, legal personality and the relationship between international humanitarian law and international human rights law. She is the founder and co-editor of the Armed Groups and International Law blog and the Editor in Chief of the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights.