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
S2 EP 2: Famines & Starvation
What drives today’s famines? What role does armed conflict play? And to what extent does international law address these challenges? Engaging with such questions, in this episode of Beyond Compliance: In Conversation, Katharine and Florian speak with Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and Yousuf Syed Khan, Investigations Manager at Legal Action Worldwide.
Cited Documents:
de Waal, Alex, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power, Wiley, 2015.
de Waal, Alex, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, Wiley, 2018.
de Waal, Alex, New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives, Polity, 2021.
Khan, Syed Yousuf, Reframing Medical Deprivation Within the Starvation War Crime Paradigm, Tufts University, Fletcher School of Global Affairs, World Peace Foundation, forthcoming January 2026.
Khan, Syed Yousuf, Gaza Arrest Warrants: Assessing Starvation as a Method of Warfare and Associated Starvation Crimes, Just Security, 2024.
Kather, Alexandra Lily and Khan, Syed Yousuf, The Nexus Between Starvation Crimes and Sexual Violence: Indicia of On-going Extermination in Tigray, Ethiopia, Opinio Juris, 2023.
Guest Bios:
Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on famine, conflict, and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union on Sudan and South Sudan in various capacities. He is the recipient of the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute for 2024.
Yousuf Syed Khan is the Investigations Manager at Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) in Geneva, overseeing international criminal investigations across multiple conflict-affected regions in support of strategic litigation. He is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project, and an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. Khan has over fifteen years of legal experience in complex conflict situations, with expertise on UN atrocity inquiries. Khan spent several years working in active conflict zones across Asia, Africa, and Europe.
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 second season is funded by UK International Development, while the first season was 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.
