Does war suspend our commitment to human rights or test it?

In this episode of Lawyering Peace, host Dr. Paul Williams speaks with Dr. Taras Leshkovych of the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine at OHCHR about documenting violations during active conflict. They discuss how the human rights landscape has evolved since 2014, the impact of the 2022 full scale invasion, conditions in occupied territories, digital evidence in reporting, and why rigorous documentation today is essential for future accountability.

In this episode of Lawyering Peace, Dr. Paul Williams sits down with David Crane, Senior Peace Fellow at PILPG, to discuss the evolving global order, the role of international law, and the future of accountability for atrocity crimes.

Drawing on more than 40 years of experience as a U.S. Army officer, Judge Advocate, and founding Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, David reflects on the post-WWII system, paradigm shifts in global power, and how a smarter, more effective UN could respond to 21st-century crises. He offers a practitioner’s perspective on the resilience of accountability norms and the possibilities for strengthening international institutions and regional cooperation in turbulent times.

In this episode of Lawyering Peace, Dr. Paul R. Williams speaks with Tyler Thompson about the future of negotiations and the role of artificial intelligence in complex high-stakes processes.

Tyler Thompson is a PILPG Peace Fellow, a peace negotiator, legal advisor, and senior government official with nearly two decades of experience advising on complex negotiations across both public and private sectors. At PILPG, he served as Legal Counsel, directed the Ceasefires Practice Area, and advised state and non-state parties in peace negotiations. He successfully opened PILPG’s office in Libya and led its office in Kosovo. He is now co-founder and Chief Negotiation Officer of Expeditionary, an applied AI research and advisory company reimagining negotiation design and execution.

The conversation explores how negotiation landscapes have evolved, the challenges of high-stakes, multi-stakeholder environments, and how AI can augment, but not replace, human judgment. Tyler walks through lessons from his career, including strategy design, stakeholder mapping, mitigating blind spots, and building trust in conflict-affected and corporate environments. The episode also highlights how Expeditionary, the AI research and advisory company he co-founded, supports intelligence synthesis, coordinated execution, and ethical decision-making in negotiations, while keeping humans central to the process.