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

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 that 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.