Beyond Compliance: In Conversation
What does everyday life during war and armed conflict look like? How do ordinary people engage with armed actors? And how can the law contribute to protecting civilians? Join Katharine Fortin and Florian Weigand in their discussions with leading academics, researchers, and practitioners working and conducting research in this area, shedding light on armed groups, civilian protection, and international law.
Beyond Compliance: In Conversation
S1 EP9: Gender & Civilian Agency
How are women in India’s violence-affected Manipur State shaping not only conflict dynamics, but also trade and mobility? And how do ideas around gender influence, produce and challenge understandings of the principle of distinction under IHL? In this episode of Beyond Compliance: In Conversation, Katharine and Florian talk to Shalaka Thakur and Helen Kinsella about the synergies between their research.
Cited Documents:
Kinsella, Helen, Settler Empire and the United States: Francis Lieber on the Laws of War, American Political Science Review, 2023.
Kinsella, Helen & Mantilla, Giovanni, Contestation before Compliance: History, Politics, and Power in International Humanitarian Law, International Studies Quarterly, 2020.
Thakur, Shalaka & Mampilly, Zachariah, Rebel Taxation as Extortion or a Technology of Governance? Telling the Difference in India's Northeast, Comparative Political Studies, 2024.
Guest Bios:
Helen Kinsella is a Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She holds affiliate faculty positions in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center at the Law School, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. As of June 2023, she is also a Visiting Scholar, at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a BA in Political Science and Gender Studies from Bryn Mawr College.
Shalaka Thakur is a postdoctoral researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) on the project 'Trade-based statecraft: the new spatial logic of the state' (TRADECRAFT), which explores the role of checkpoints and transit taxes in state-making. Her fieldwork focuses on the borderlands between India and Myanmar, analysing how checkpoints, civilians and authorities interact to shape order and the economy. She holds a PhD in International Relations / Political Science from the Graduate Institute, Geneva, and an MSc in Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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).
Katharine Fortin is an Associate Professor in human rights law and international humanitarian law at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, Utrecht University.
Florian Weigand is the Co-Director of the Centre on Armed Groups.
