Anastasia Shesterinina
Ioana Cismas
This summary forms part of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, featured across Articles of War and Armed Groups and International Law. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the conceptualisation of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and legal and extra-legal strategies that can effectively address harm and need. This piece was published by the Lieber Institute ; the original publication can be read here.
Behind the 120 wars currently being waged around the world are human stories. How we understand these stories, and therefore how we build protection frameworks to respond to them, will depend on our own positionality. Recognizing that professional identities, disciplinary lenses, and lived experiences shape our narratives of conflict, this post evaluates two dominant protection frames: compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL); and restraint from violence and abuse. In emphasizing the frames’ respective limitations and potential, the post demonstrates that the concurrent application of “compliance + restraint,” alongside other approaches in the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, might go some way towards achieving a full(er) protection framework that centers a “harm + need” approach in conflict.
Compliance with IHL as the Guiding Strategy
International humanitarian lawyers, military lawyers, and humanitarian practitioners focus primarily on the behavior of State and non-State armed actors and those that can exert an influence on them. Their goal is to foster compliance with IHL so as to mitigate the impact of armed conflict on affected populations. This has obvious advantages.
First, compliance and non-compliance, understood as respect for and violations of IHL norms, respectively, are observable and able to be monitored. Second, the concept of compliance denotes that adherence to IHL obligations requires parties to an armed conflict to refrain from certain behaviors and to carry out certain actions. Third, the IHL framework provides a natural entry point for humanitarian engagement through top-down and grassroots initiatives. Yet, while compliance with IHL is a fundamental strategy in the humanitarian protection toolbox, “it may sometimes be the case that IHL is simply not enough” (p. 10).
Compliance with IHL is not Enough
The use of compliance with IHL as the guiding strategy is complicated by the complex reality of contemporary conflict and the inherent limitations of the law.
Compliance with IHRL is a complementary strategy that can respond to (some of) the experiences of differently situated groups in complex conflict spaces where, in addition to the fighting parties, a panoply of other actors creates everyday harm + need. Human rights organizations and humanitarian actors increasingly rely on arguments for compliance with IHRL in both international and non-international armed conflicts.
However, neither compliance with IHL nor compliance with IHRL get at the complex relationships within armed organizations and between these organizations and other actors that underpin organizational decisions around restraint from violence and abuse more broadly. How armed groups secure their resources, control their members’ violent behavior, including the role of ideology in this process, and adapt to the evolving dynamics of conflict are part of the story.
Concluding Thoughts on Full(er) Protection
This complex reality of armed conflict suggests that the two dominant frames of compliance (with IHL and with IHRL) and restraint (from IHL violations and violence and abuse in the broader sense) do not function in isolation from one another. Armed actors are unlikely to neatly categorize these framings in their engagement with civilians or with humanitarian practitioners, or to do so uniformly. Factors that affect behavior associated with one frame are also likely to shape behavior associated with the other. The Beyond Compliance Consortium therefore focuses on the concurrent application of compliance + restraint to advance an understanding of full(er) protection in conflict that centers on a harm + need approach.