New AGIL Podcast: Episode 1 – Engaging with Armed Groups

About the author(s):

Katharine Fortin is an Associate Professor at Utrecht University where she teaches IHL and IHRL. Before joining Utrecht University, she worked at the ICTY, ICC and Norton Rose Fulbright. She is the author of The Accountability of Armed Groups under Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2017) which won the 2018 Lieber Prize. She has written widely about the framework of law that applies to armed groups in non-international armed conflicts and is one of the editors of the Armed Groups and International Law blog.

Some of our readers may have already realised that the Armed Groups and International Law blog has recently launched a podcast. The podcast is called ‘Beyond Compliance: In Conversation’ and is hosted by Florian Weigand (Co-Director of the Centre on Armed Groups) and me. The title refers to the fact that it is made as part of the Beyond Compliance Consortium, which is a three-year theoretical, empirical, and operational research programme on “Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors.”

In the first season of the podcast, Florian and I are exploring the theme of armed groups, civilian agency and international law. In the first episode we talk to two experts from the International Committee of the Red Cross about engaging with armed groups, civilian agency and current conflict trends:

The description of episode 1 is as follows:

Almost 200 million people live in areas controlled or influenced by armed groups, finds the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). How do armed groups govern these areas? What does the relationship between civilians and armed groups look like? And what are the obligations of armed groups under international law? To tackle such questions, Katharine and Florian are joined by two experts from the ICRC in this episode of ‘Beyond Compliance: In Conversation’. Matthew Bamber-Zryd is the advisor for armed groups located in the operations divisions at the HQ of the ICRC in Geneva. Tilman Rodenhäuser is a legal expert in the ICRC’s Legal Division, focusing on armed groups.

Cited documents:

ICRC engagement with armed groups in 2023, Humanitarian Law & Policy, ICRC, 10 October 2023, Matthew Zryd-Bamber

https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2023/10/10/icrc-engagement-with-armed-groups-in-2023/

Speaker information

Dr Tilman Rodenhäuser is a thematic legal adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross’ headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to joining the ICRC in 2016, Tilman has worked with the German Red Cross, DCAF, the NGO Geneva Call, and the United Nations, with missions in Africa and the Middle East.

Matthew Bamber-Zryd is the ICRC’s Adviser on Armed Groups, based in the Geneva headquarters. Prior to joining the ICRC, Matthew conducted research on armed groups in the Middle East and North Africa for a variety of governments and international organizations including the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Swedish MFA, UN and International Alert.

If you have any feedback or ideas for the podcast, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We have two more episodes published, but we’ll make separate posts for these. If you like the podcast, please leave a review on Spotify or Apple (or wherever you listen to your podcasts) as apparently it makes it easier for people to find us.

The Beyond Compliance Consortium is 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. It is funded by UK International Development. The first series of this podcast series is also funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of Katharine’s Veni project: Dangerous Liaisons: civilian agency, armed groups and international law.

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