Episodios

  • Complying with IHL in large-scale conflicts: movement, mass displacement and family links

    Complying with IHL in large-scale conflicts: movement, mass displacement and family links
    Apr 16 2026
    By the end of 2024, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 123.2 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order. If a large-scale conflict erupts, the intensity, scale and tempo of military operations will only worsen this trend, impacting not only those displaced but also receiving communities, and potentially those staying behind. International humanitarian law’s (IHL) rules seek to prevent displacement due to armed conflict – while respecting people’s agency and genuine will to move – and to reduce harms to civilians, including displaced populations. In this post, part of the “Complying with IHL in large-scale conflict” series, ICRC Legal Advisers Matt Pollard and Helen Obregón explore the humanitarian challenges related to movement, mass displacement and the rupturing of family ties that would inevitably arise in such conflicts. It also looks at some of the practical measures that states can – and should – take to be prepared to meet these challenges and to comply with their obligations under IHL and under other relevant bodies of international law. Advance planning, already in peacetime, is essential for IHL to provide effective protection if such a conflict breaks out.
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    18 m
  • Why Nordic governments must uphold the global ban on anti-personnel mines

    Why Nordic governments must uphold the global ban on anti-personnel mines
    Apr 2 2026
    As security concerns intensify across Europe following the escalation of the international armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, several states – including Finland, Poland, and the Baltic countries – have moved to withdraw from the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (APMBC), while similar calls have emerged in other Nordic countries. These developments reflect a growing perception that existing humanitarian disarmament commitments may constrain military effectiveness in a deteriorating security environment. Yet they also raise fundamental questions about the continued relevance of these commitments at a time when they are most needed. In this post, the Secretaries-General of the Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish Red Cross Societies argue that withdrawing from the APMBC would not enhance security but risk weakening civilian protection and eroding long-standing humanitarian norms. Drawing on legal, operational and humanitarian considerations, they show that anti-personnel mines remain inherently indiscriminate and of limited military utility, and that their prohibition is fully compatible with modern military cooperation frameworks. They call on the remaining Nordic governments to remain committed to the Convention even – and especially – in times of heightened insecurity.
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    14 m
  • Restoring education after armed conflict: an IHL-guided framework

    Restoring education after armed conflict: an IHL-guided framework
    Mar 26 2026
    When armed conflict ends, education does not always return with it. In many post-conflict settings, schools remain closed long after ceasefires, while children stay at home, enter work, remain displaced or navigate unsafe environments. Education systems remain constrained by destroyed infrastructure, militarization, unexploded ordnance, trauma and fear. Although international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) require the continuity of education even during armed conflict, schooling is frequently disrupted in practice, raising questions about how education can be safely restored after conflict. IHL regulates the conduct of hostilities and contains important protections for children and access to education during armed conflict. Lessons drawn from these protections can help inform recovery decisions as societies transition from conflict to peace, including after the cessation of hostilities, when recovery begins but IHL may still apply. In this post, as part of our Emerging Voices series, Geeta Mahapatra proposes a framework to facilitate children’s safe return to education, centred on child-specific harm assessments, safe access and inclusive recovery. It contends that stronger compliance with IHL rules protecting schools and children during armed conflict helps preserve the conditions necessary for restoring education in post-conflict settings.
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    16 m
  • When the perpetrator is the climate

    When the perpetrator is the climate
    Mar 19 2026
    Climate change and armed conflict increasingly intersect in humanitarian settings. While the sector is now alert to climate-related risks – particularly in disaster response, resilience programming, and displacement governance – the ways these risks are interpreted and operationalized vary across institutional mandates and operational contexts. In protection practice within conflict-affected settings, climate impacts are still often framed primarily as “conflict multipliers” rather than direct drivers of civilian harm. This narrow lens risks overlooking the very insecurities communities experience most acutely: displacement, restricted movement, isolation, and livelihood collapse. In this post, researcher and former ICRC delegate Lina Aburas argues that our current conflict-centered analysis has a dangerous blind spot. Drawing on her experience in northeast Nigeria, she explores how communities define their own insecurity amid climate and conflict pressures. Practitioner and community perspectives reveal how climate-related hazards reshape mobility, access to livelihoods and assistance, and exposure to protection risks in ways not fully captured by prevailing conflict-centered analyses. Centering these lived experiences reveals that adapting humanitarian action isn’t about mission creep or expanding mandates; it’s about fundamentally shifting how we interpret and prioritize the risks already in front of us.
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    15 m
  • Deciding under algorithms: artificial intelligence and the protection of civilian infrastructure in armed conflict

    Deciding under algorithms: artificial intelligence and the protection of civilian infrastructure in armed conflict
    Mar 12 2026
    Artificial intelligence (AI)-based decision-support systems are increasingly embedded upstream of the use of force, shaping how military actors plan attacks, assessing effects, and anticipating harm. In contemporary urban warfare, where civilian infrastructure forms complex and deeply interconnected systems, these tools are increasingly used to guide decisions with far-reaching humanitarian consequences. This raises critical questions for international humanitarian law (IHL), which requires parties to anticipate and mitigate foreseeable civilian harm when applying the principles of proportionality and precaution, including indirect, cumulative and systemic effects on civilian infrastructure. In this post, independent legal researcher Yéelen Marie Geairon argues that while AI-enabled decision-support systems do not alter the legal rules governing attacks, they significantly reshape how foreseeability is operationalized in practice. By structuring what decision-makers are able to anticipate, compare and justify ex ante, AI systems recalibrate the factual basis of legal judgment, while also introducing new risks linked to data gaps, opacity and over-reliance on technical outputs. The protection of civilian infrastructure in AI-enabled warfare therefore depends less on technological performance than on the legal discipline, transparency and human judgment with which these tools are embedded in decision-making processes.
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    15 m
  • Engaging non-state armed groups on the protection of missing people and their families

    Engaging non-state armed groups on the protection of missing people and their families
    Mar 5 2026
    The ICRC continues to witness unacceptable levels of suffering when the law designed to protect families, prevent people from going missing, and ensure the dignified and respectful treatment of the dead is disregarded. At the same time, we have also documented countless, daily efforts by parties to armed conflict to prevent family separation, clarify the fate and whereabouts of missing people, and treat the dead with dignity and respect. This is a humanitarian imperative, a legal obligation that should be a priority of any party to an armed conflict. In this post, ICRC Legal Advisers Tilman Rodenhäuser and Ximena Londoño present key findings of a recent ICRC study, “Non-State Armed Groups and the Separated, Missing and Dead: Obligations Under International Humanitarian Law and Examples of How to Implement Them”. Drawing on the doctrine and practice of 64 non-state armed groups (NSAGs) across the world, the study offers unique insights into practical measures that NSAGs can take to implement IHL and protect missing people and their families. This post provides a snapshot of the study’s main findings and operational relevance.
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    14 m
  • The adoption of the 1949 Geneva Conventions: a humanitarian break and colonial continuity

    The adoption of the 1949 Geneva Conventions: a humanitarian break and colonial continuity
    Feb 26 2026
    More than seven decades after their adoption, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 remain foundational to contemporary international humanitarian law (IHL). Efforts to update their Commentaries testify to both the resilience of the Geneva Conventions and their enduring relevance in modern armed conflicts. Yet the story of their making is inseparable from the longer history of the law of armed conflict, which developed in the late nineteenth century within a deeply hierarchical international legal order. From the perspective of colonized states and territories, that history reveals a persistent divide between European and non-European worlds, a divide that shaped not only general international law but also key features of the Geneva Conventions themselves. In this post, part of a joint symposium on the updated Commentary on the Fourth Geneva Convention with EJIL:Talk! and Just Security, Associate Professor Srinivas Burra revisits the adoption of the 1949 Geneva Conventions against the backdrop of the Second World War, the creation of the United Nations, and the onset of decolonization. Focusing on the Fourth Convention’s regime of occupation and on Common Article 3, he examines these developments from a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) perspective, accounting for the structural legacies of empire in international law. He argues that while these provisions marked important advances, they also carried forward earlier exclusions embedded in colonial conceptions of sovereignty. Read in this light, the Conventions represent both a decisive break in humanitarian protection and a continuation of hierarchies inherited from the nineteenth century.
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    17 m
  • Islamic law and the right to life in armed conflict

    Islamic law and the right to life in armed conflict
    Feb 24 2026
    Islamic legal traditions and the modern framework of international humanitarian law (IHL) emerged from different contexts and traditions, but they share many underlying values – such as restraint, humanity, and the protection of those not (or no longer) participating in hostilities. Islamic law therefore offers a distinct but complementary perspective to IHL on the sanctity of life (ḥurmat al-nafs), particularly in contexts where international legal frameworks lack traction, understanding, or perceived legitimacy. In this post, and as part of our Emerging Voices series, legal researcher Alannah Travers explores how Islamic law, as its own coherent and longstanding legal tradition, offers a parallel framework of moral constraint during armed conflict. She argues that better understanding these Islamic legal norms can provide stronger grounds for compliance with protective norms, deepening our collective understanding of the right to life in war.
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    16 m