Beyond Compliance Symposium Booklet – March 2025
This booklet reproduces a selection of the 24 blog posts published during the first phase of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to prevent harm and need in conflict, hosted by the Armed Groups and International Law and Articles of War blogs between September 2024 and January 2025.
The 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.
Full references for the reproduced blog posts are hyperlinked within the online version of these posts. The full collection can be consulted on the Blog Symposium webpage.