Beyond Compliance Symposium – Strategies to Reduce Harm and Need in War Through a Decolonial and Intersectional Lens

Editors’ note: This post forms part of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, featured across Articles of War and Armed Groups and International Law. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the conceptualisation of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and legal and extra-legal strategies that can effectively address harm and need. 

Despite myriad humanitarian organizations, policymakers, and armed actors making efforts to reduce harm and need in war, unnecessary suffering persists in armed conflicts globally. In light of this reality, research is needed to uncover the most effective interventions to reduce the negative impacts of armed conflict on local communities. This overarching question sits at the crux of the Beyond Compliance Consortium’s research program.

As a first step in answering the question, this post maps current interventions and intervenors and evaluates their limitations resulting from the conceptual frameworks to which they are tethered. It also proposes a decolonial and intersectional approach to reducing harm and need that better reflects and responds to the lived experiences of armed conflict.

Intervention Strategies

Intervenors in armed conflict employ a diverse array of strategies to prevent, reduce, and mitigate harm and need. Common interventions encompass a range of political, diplomatic, and legal actions. They can be both proactive (e.g., harm mitigation training for armed actors) or reactive (e.g., provision of humanitarian aid or imposition of sanctions), direct (e.g., an arms embargo), or indirect (e.g., financial support for local actors).

In terms of their focus, some interventions concentrate on addressing the harm or need itself through directly alleviating the suffering of those impacted and supporting their survival, for example via the provision of humanitarian aid or development assistance or through community self-protection. Interventions can also address different types of harm. The majority target physical harm, whereas some respond to mental wellbeing, and fewer still target cultural and spiritual harm. Other interventions address the source of the violence causing the harm or need, such as early-warning mechanisms, regulating arms exports, or encouraging and supporting peace mediation.

A significant cluster of interventions focuses on addressing armed actors’ behavior through knowledge sharing. Such interventions include capacity-bridging initiatives, training, providing expertise on international humanitarian law (IHL), and humanitarian dialogues to encourage conflict parties’ legal compliance and restraint from violence and abuse. Dialogues can encourage and facilitate the adoption of internal regulations, codes of conduct, special agreements, deeds of commitment or action plans to address specific humanitarian (and at times, human rights) concerns.

A range of strategies seeks to secure accountability for causing harm and need in war. This includes legal accountability pursued through international or domestic courts, public or political condemnation at local, regional or global levels, including through naming and shaming perpetrators of harm, and punitive policies such as sanctions. Although controversial, sanctions can serve both as an accountability mechanism and a deterrent for violations or violence.

A final category of interventions focuses on support of, capacity-bridging for, and engagement with local actors. For example, this can include financial support to humanitarian organizations, humanitarian dialogues with individuals and communities who carry influence or authority with the armed actor(s), and capacity-bridging initiatives with local communities on international law, self-protection, and military or armed group engagement.

While this analysis classifies interventions according to their focus, it is important to note that there are no rigid distinctions in practice. Although an initiative may primarily pursue one of the foci discussed above, it does not exist in a vacuum. In reality, interventions are overlapping and intertwined. The humanitarian-development-peace nexus requires a collaborative approach whereby strategies for preventing, reducing, and mitigating harm and need in armed conflict recognize this complex environment and seek to achieve complementary protection. A decolonial and intersectional lens invites (and could achieve) integration of these intervention categories, including by challenging assumptions about who is, and should be, intervening.

Intervenors

The broad spectrum of interventions is implemented by an equally broad range of intervenors. For example, humanitarian dialogues with armed actors to generate compliance and restraint can be led by international humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross or Geneva Call, by UN entities such as the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict (SRSG-CAAC), or by non-belligerent third States through humanitarian diplomacy. Local actors may also intervene, such as religious, tribal, and community leaders, community-based civil society organizations, and civilian or political wings of non-State armed groups (NSAGs) or militaries.

Similarly, accountability can be instigated domestically by affected individuals and communities using domestic legal or traditional justice mechanisms, and by non-State armed groups and armed forces themselves by means of internal disciplinary procedures. Regionally and internationally, individuals or States can make use of relevant provisions in human rights treaties to submit individual or State complaints to UN treaty bodies and regional courts. Non-belligerent third States can rely on universal jurisdiction to prosecute perpetrators in domestic courts, and where jurisdictional clauses are met, belligerent States and third States can also appeal to the International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court remains an avenue for criminal accountability including through a referral by the UN Security Council.

A Decolonial and Intersectional Lens

The majority of conflicts being fought in the Global South inflict harm and need upon communities who have been historically marginalized and oppressed by predominantly colonial, white, male powers. To the present day, the humanitarian regime perpetuates legacies of oppression, as do the discourses used by humanitarian, human rights, academic, and military actors. The aforementioned harm reduction strategies are inextricably linked to dominant framings of concepts such as civilian harm and humanitarian need and compliance and restraint (as discussed here and here) which carry inherent assumptions that impose limitations upon interventions built within those framings. Many of these limitations stem from a legacy of colonialism and marginalization that is embedded within the foundations of mainstream humanitarianism.

“Western” Concepts, Framings, and Interpretations

De-colonial and intersectional scholarship exposes how exclusionary approaches are championed explicitly or inherently by dominant Western stakeholders and States, fueled through Western funding. They result in harm and need reduction strategies that reflect the international humanitarian community’s interests more than the reality of armed conflict on the ground.

Strategies to reduce, prevent, and mitigate harm and need are often designed or implemented in line with colonially-imposed assumptions and structures. These transplant predominantly Western concepts (or indeed Western-appropriated concepts), framings, and interpretations in non-comparative contexts without adequate considerations for social, cultural, or political circumstances or gender and other intersecting identities. This transplantation is a form of colonization of the mind which serves to alter cultural priorities. The utilization of a Western narrative can raise barriers to delivering the type of support that those living through the conflict most need.

For example, the dominant framing of harm and need is a narrow one (civilian deaths, injuries, and destruction of civilian objects). As a result, strategies are mostly designed to respond to physiological harms (e.g., life and limb) rather than harms to mental or emotional wellbeing (p. 238). The dichotomy between the body and the mind—the Cartesian dualism—is itself a Western construct which can be traced back to French philosopher Descartes. The fact that colonial powers utilized mental and emotional harm as a tactic of conflict against colonized peoples further compounds the neo-colonial nature of our current landscape of harm reduction strategies that overlook non-physical harms.

Even where intervenors address mental harm, it is overwhelmingly done from an over-medicalized Western-diagnostic approach (p. 452) such as the standard delivery of mental health and psychosocial support in response to a conflict. International psychosocial interventions have been critiqued as a form of cultural imperialism for imposing a Western therapeutic paradigm on other societies (p. 490) and demeaning indigenous coping strategies (p. 493). Furthermore, they can disempower individuals, corrode family and community intimacy (p. 492), and cause social stigma (p. 175). To design or implement mental health interventions through a Western perspective of what mental harm is and how it ought to be treated is to view the context “through imperial eyes” (p. 49).

Other aspects of the negative lived experiences of war are largely overlooked, including spiritual, cultural, and environmental harm which hold enhanced importance among indigenous communities. Despite a rich and growing knowledge-base on spiritual protection practices, the range of actors working in this field seldom engages with such practices and communities. The neglect of spiritual harm reflects what Kenneth Nunn terms “desacralization” whereby the universe, when perceived through a Eurocentric lens, is despiritualized (p. 337). Similarly, while the environment is included conceptually and even legally within the frame of harm and need, it remains on the periphery and as a result, the majority of strategies insufficiently addresses environmental protection.

An additional critique of how Western framings constrict the conceptualization of harm and need is the lack of consideration of intersectionality. Instead of acknowledging how various identities such as race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, ability, and class compound one’s experience of harm and need, the mainstream catalogue of harm reduction strategies favors a white, heteronormative, able-bodied, and often male perspective. Yet, or as a consequence thereof, marginalized identities and injustices are exacerbated during times of conflict as existing power dynamics are reinforced. To come full circle, interventions are seldom designed or implemented through an intersectional lens.

For example, strategies of intervention largely perpetuate gendered distinctions and hierarchies that are deeply embedded in Western languages (p. 52-53) and fall short of a gender-sensitive approach. While a gender binary falsely assumes a homogenous experience of war among people of the same gender, in general, gender can inform how people experience conflict. Men may be presumed to be combatants and targeted with violence, and they are less likely to receive mental health support; whereas women are greater targets for gender-based and sexual violence and some endure greater caretaking responsibilities. The experiences of boys and girls differ again. In addition to harms specific to their genders, they experience war in a nuanced way because of their age.

If they are cognizant and considerate of gender and other intersecting personal identities, intervention strategies will be better equipped to address the manifestation of harm and need on an individual basis instead of treating all individuals of a shared identity in an identical way.

Quantification: A Methodological Distortion of Harm and Need

Humanitarian, human rights, academic, and military actors largely favor approaches to monitoring harm and need that are easily quantifiable (likely to facilitate quantitative analysis, monitoring and evaluation), such as casualty counting, number of displaced citizens, or GDP per capita. The flaws of quantification for observing social phenomena have been widely critiqued (by Sally Engle Merry among others). For example, quantification relies on categories that reflect the interpretations, socio-cultural realities, and regimes of power and governance in which they are constructed (predominantly the Global North). It also strips social life of context and meaning, not to mention its inaccuracy and inconsistency. Intersectional critiques note that classification into humanitarian categories for purposes of quantification encourages simplified, stereotypical, and singular axis identity labels and neglects compounding identities that may impact how an individual experiences harm and need. As Merry notes, those who “aspire to measure the world … create the world they are measuring” (p. 21).

This emphasis on quantifiability stems from a desire to objectify and rationalize the world neatly, a trend observed in “Eurocentric societies” (p. 336-7). Postcolonial international relations scholars advocate for methodological approaches that are qualitative and postpositivist, noting that harm and need that is non-quantifiable can still have a profound impact on the lives of civilians and ought to be acknowledged and documented (p. 1345). To perpetuate quantifiability in our observation of harm and need risks concealing or distorting lived experiences of war. There is a balance to be struck between, on the one hand, measurability of harm and need for the purpose of estimating risk and designing evidence-based interventions and, on the other hand, faithfulness towards the lived reality on the ground in all its complexity, non-homogeneousness, and contextuality.

International “Saviors”

Another remnant of neo-colonialism visible in intervention strategies is a resounding overemphasis on international intervenors. The diverse array of intervenors occupying the operational space often tends to be (but should not be) overshadowed by seemingly dominant and archetypal (often Western) actors who reflect the “Red Cross ideal” and who Sutton argues are given false precedence. As a result, local or grassroots actors are overlooked.

The privileging of international actors neglects both local actors, such as religious and community leaders, andcommunity-led, often collective strategies for harm reduction, such as civilian self-protection initiatives. Where local actors are engaged, they are seldom invited into programming decisions but utilized merely to implement pre-designed interventions. Consequently, interventions are often insufficiently contextualized to local circumstances. A varied humanitarian landscape which embraces rather than “others” local humanitarians or actors who are societally proximate to parties to conflict adds more strings to the collective humanitarian bow, and should be encouraged, not dampened through an artificial hierarchy of actors.

Concluding Observations

A decolonial and intersectional critique of strategies to reduce harm and need in war would be remiss if it did not acknowledge the colonial roots of the international legal framework itself. Not only did international law emerge as a Western institution (influenced heavily by European Christianity) through colonialism, but it was also employed to legitimize colonialism. Its neo-colonial nature persists through narratives of “compliance” with IHL, a central strategy for the protection of civilians. While such an approach has and will continue to prove pertinent in addressing harm and need, it is not enough. We must look beyond the legal framework and consider non-legal norms or concepts that might have equal if not more influence on armed actors such as religious or cultural norms.

Among practitioners, there are those who contest the international legal framework as exclusionary and call for change. They argue that the framework accepts a Western-imposed hierarchy of needs and de-prioritizes harms relevant in many conflict contexts, thereby overlooking a range of profoundly adverse lived experiences of armed conflict. Third World approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and feminist scholars have made significant efforts to expose and redress international law’s paternalist blind spots.

As part of these same efforts, it is vital that strategies seeking to faithfully address harm and need should not be tethered exclusively to IHL, or even international human rights law. Instead, they should acknowledge a panoply of experiences, a plurality of norms and values to address them, and recognize that humanitarianism is done now, and might be done more effectively in the future, with equitable support provided locally by local actors.

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Samantha Holmes is a Research Associate at the Centre for Applied Human Rights (CAHR) and York Law School. She is also a member of the Beyond Compliance Consortium’s research programme “Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors.”

Photo credit: USAID in Africa