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Promoting information sharing and community building between individuals and organisations working on issues related to armed groups and international law. Providing updates on news stories and publicize academic journal articles and seminars, talks and conferences on issues related to armed groups.
What is ‘civilian harm’, and how should it be understood in contemporary warfare? Why do definitions matter, and who gets to shape them? In this episode of Beyond Compliance: In Conversation, Katharine and Florian speak with Lauren Gould from Utrecht University and Janina Dill from the University of Oxford about evolving approaches to defining and addressing harm to civilians.
Listen here:
Cited documents:
Gould, L., Demmers, J., Bijl, E., & Azeem , S. Investigating Remote Warfare as the Radical Undoing of Life: The compounding civilian harm effects of US-led coalition bombings in Iraq. Antipode. 2025.
Gould, L., & Stel, N. (2021). Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare: The Hawija bombardments. Security Dialogue ,53(1), 57 74.
Dill, J., Myers, E., Schubiger L., A Matter of Principle: How Local Consent Affects U.S. Support for Military Interventions. International Security 2026; 50 (3): 55–85.
Dill, J., Sagan, S., Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other, Security Studies, 34(5), 833–867.
Guest Bios:
Lauren Gould is Associate Professor in Conflict Studies and the principle investigator and project leader of the Realities of Algorithmic Warfare programme and Intimacies of Remote Warfare programme at Utrecht University. She also leads the project ‘Assembling the Western Way of War in Afghanistan and Beyond’ at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. From a critical conflict and war studies perspective her trans- and interdisciplinary research programmes trace and conceptualize the changing character of the Western way of war and its impact on civilian harm and democratic accountability.
Janina Dill is the Dame Louise Richardson Chair in Global Security at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, a Professorial Fellow of Trinity College Oxford, and Co-Director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC). Her research on law in war has been published in major journals of both International Law and Political Science. In 2021, she won a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She currently co-convenes studies on cumulative civilian harm in war, funded by the UKRI and the National Science Foundation, and on the concept of military objectives in IHL, in collaboration with the ICRC. She is a frequent public commentator on laws and ethics of war.