Beyond Compliance in a Chaotic World: Achieving Fuller Protection in Armed Conflict

On 14 October 2025, Fight for Humanity, together with the Beyond Compliance Consortium (BCC), the University of York, the Centre on Armed Groups, Utrecht University and the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), hosted a peace panel at the Geneva Peace Week.

The discussion, moderated by Anki Sjöberg from Fight for Humanity and joined by over 100 participants, looked at how using a harm + needs approach — one that reflects the real experiences of people and communities affected by conflict — can help shape  legal and extra-legal strategies to promote respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL), encourage restraint from violence and abuse, and ultimately strengthen the protection of civilians in armed conflict.

Dr. Katharine Fortin from Utrecht University presented the BCC’s research programme. She highlighted the importance of the BCC’s approach: starting with a socio-legal analysis of people’s everyday lived experiences in armed conflict — a harm + need analysis — and then mapping the identified harms and needs onto international law. This approach, she explained, enables a more nuanced understanding of which specific legal and non-legal strategies are best suited to address those realities.

Prof. Ioana Cismas from the University of York elaborated on the BCC’s core concepts whilst drawing on fieldwork conducted in Myanmar and Northern Thailand with armed and governance actors, local community actors and international humanitarian and human rights groups. She noted: "The BCC concept of harm + need invites openness in terms of the material, personal, temporal and geographic scope. It allows us to see and make visible realities of conflict, actors, timeframes and structural dynamics that the law does not capture or fully regulate, but which are deeply important to those experiencing conflict.”

Consortium researchers leading the work in Ukraine and Somalia shared early findings from interviews conducted in these countries with key actors, including armed and political actors, civil society organizations, and international agencies. Khrystyna Kozak, the CIVIC researcher leading the BCC work in Ukraine noted: “There was a broad consensus: harm is not just physical. It’s also psychological, economic, cultural, and ecological. People spoke of the invisible harm of occupation.” 

On the question of what motivates restraint among armed actors, Kozak added: “Restraint and compliance are not just about law—they’re about morality, identity, and belonging. In this case study, restraint doesn’t come from fear of punishment, but from the understanding that protecting civilians means protecting oneself.”

Rahma Abikar, a fellow at the Centre on Armed Groups leading the BCC research in Somalia, highlighted the different perspectives on harm and need between senior members of armed groups and junior members, civil society, and local communities. Senior members often cited formal rules—such as military codes of conduct, UN standard operating procedures, and accountability mechanisms—as the main sources of restraint. In contrast, junior members and community actors emphasized that, in practice, restraint is more often driven by tactical considerations, clan loyalties, or public image.

Abikar also emphasized that junior actors, community members, and civil society — as was the case for all interviewees in Ukraine — tend to have a more holistic understanding of harm and need. Their perspective goes beyond immediate physical harms, considers the longer-term impacts, and necessarily includes concerns about justice and structural change.

The peace panel provided an important opportunity to showcase the diversity of findings emerging from the BCC research. It revealed that harm + need as well as compliance + restraint take on different meanings in different contexts. Ultimately, the discussion reinforced that compliance with IHL is essential in all contexts, and that in pursuing other legal strategies (compliance with IHRL) and extra-legal strategies (e.g., political, diplomatic, development) IHL is not left behind but rather reinforced.

Finally, the panel noted that a harm + need approach does not necessarily mean ‘going broader’, but that the assessment of harm + need and prioritization of responses must be done with the affected stakeholders, if we are to truly address the complex and multifaceted realities of armed conflict.

To view the video of the event you can click here.

Fight for Humanity is part of the Beyond Compliance Consortium, a co-productive, socio-legal research partnership that traverses the fields of international law, conflict studies, humanitarian protection work and human rights policy, and brings together these communities of scholarship and practice with people with lived experience of conflict. Funded with UK International Development from the UK government, it is a three-year theoretical, empirical, and operational research programme “Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors.”