Dr Ghassan Elkahlout is Director of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and Associate Professor of Conflict Management and Humanitarian Action at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His research focuses on mediation, humanitarian diplomacy and post-conflict recovery. He is Chief Editor of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development and has published widely in leading academic journals. His most recent book is Gulf to Global: The Rise of Qatar in Conflict Mediation, which examines State-led mediation practices and diplomatic innovation in contemporary conflicts.

More than 17 million people volunteer and work in the Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) Movement.1 With more than 130 active armed conflicts in at least fifty countries, it can be estimated that at least 4 million RCRC volunteers and staff live and work in armed conflict settings;2 most volunteers and staff work in their own countries, delivering essential humanitarian assistance to their communities. In 2025, twenty-seven RCRC volunteers and staff lost their lives in the line of duty, with additional fatalities occurring off-duty.3 Extreme working conditions and constant exposure to suffering often cause long-term psychological consequences, and the mental health and psychosocial impacts occur in a wider context that can lead staff and volunteers to question their fundamental moral values.

This qualitative study seeks to explore the mental health and psychosocial4 experiences of national volunteers and staff by amplifying their voices and acknowledging the hardships that they go through. Through a lens of moral injury and trauma-informed approaches, the findings of the study shed light on the lived experiences of national staff and volunteers working and living in armed conflict contexts. Key themes that emerged from the study include a strong commitment to the RCRC Movement, exposure to harm, mental health impacts, and the need for support systems for staff and volunteers. These insights underscore the urgency of embedding trauma-informed approaches in Movement-wide policies and support systems to strengthen protection and well-being for staff and volunteers.

Dr Kubo Mačák is Professor of International Law at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. He is the author of Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-author of the Handbook on Developing a National Position on International Law and Cyber Activities: A Practical Guide for States (University of Exeter and NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2025), and has published widely in leading journals such as the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, International Review of the Red Cross and Journal of Conflict and Security Law. He serves as the General Editor of the Cyber Law Toolkit, an award-winning online resource on the international law of cyber operations. From 2019 to 2023, he was a Legal Adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva.

Mariana Salazar Albornoz is Adjunct Professor of Public International Law and of International Human Rights, Criminal and Humanitarian Law at IE University in MadridandatUniversidadIberoamericana in MexicoCity. Since 2023, she has been a member of the Board of the United Nations Register of Damages. Between 2019 to 2022 she was a Member of the Inter-American Juridical Committee, serving as Rapporteur on International Law Applicable to Cyberspace and on Privacy and Data Protection. She recently concluded her membership on the Editorial Board of the International Review of the Red Cross (2020–25). Among her previous roles, she was Coordinator of International Law and Director of IHL, ICL and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as Regional Manager of the Latin American Internet Association and Associate of the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities.

Mohamed Helal is a Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, and a member of the African Union Commission of International Law, where he served as Special Rapporteur for the Application of International Law in Cyberspace and oversaw the drafting of the Common African Position on the Application of International Law in Cyberspace. He is also a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. His scholarly work has appeared in the European Journal of International Law, Global Constitutionalism, Climate Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Harvard National Security Journal, the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, the Fordham International Law Journal, and the Emory International Law Review.

This article investigates the critical and often overlooked role of families of missing persons in peacebuilding when the hostilities of armed conflict cease. The unresolved fate of missing persons creates ambiguous loss, a state of chronic psychological and social uncertainty that structurally impedes communal recovery and undermines the fragile foundations of peace. While the issue of missing persons is typically framed as a humanitarian and legal challenge, this study argues that families of the missing are uniquely positioned to act as transformative peacebuilding agents.

Drawing on primary data collected across three distinct settings – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Nepal – the study employs a qualitative, comparative case study methodology. It analyzes how families of the missing, driven by the imperative of establishing the fate of their loved ones, actively engage across conflict divides and contribute to lasting social and political transformation.

Findings demonstrate that the search for the missing necessitates engagement with individuals and groups on the opposing side, effectively forcing the creation of cross-community relationships. Families of the missing successfully overcome deep-seated suspicion, hostility and sometimes political pressure from their own communities to forge solidarity, based on shared experience of loss, with other families. This process enables relational reciprocity and the cognitive reframing of former enemies, leading to the humanization of the “other”. These encounters produce profound personal and interpersonal transformation, which in turn can catalyze the challenging of antagonistic community-level narratives and support broader societal reconciliation.

Families of the missing leverage their legitimacy and humanitarian framing of the issue to become powerful agents of structural change. They challenge exclusive, one-sided interpretations of conflict, advocate for a universal and broad vision of justice, and demand truth-telling and accountability. By acknowledging victimhood on all sides and articulating an understanding of peace based on mutual recognition of suffering, families help to heal social divisions and address the root causes of conflict. Through their focus on truth-seeking and cross-community relationship-building, families of the missing can make an essential contribution to the prevention of renewed conflict and the establishing of a foundation for sustainable peace.

The ongoing war in Sudan, which erupted in April 2023 between the Sudan Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces, has generated one of the most significant humanitarian crises globally, with nearly 13 million people displaced and over 30 million requiring humanitarian assistance. Although the physical destruction and mass displacement have been widely documented, the mental health consequences, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, remain critically under-recognised and under-resourced. This paper situates the current conflict within Sudan’s political and health system history, examines the fragility of existing mental health infrastructure and reviews emerging population-level mental health needs. It further highlights ongoing emergency and community-led mental health responses and identifies priority gaps for coordinated, context-appropriate intervention.

Armed conflicts in biodiversity hotspots across Africa significantly threaten conservation efforts. The incursion of armed groups since 2017 in the W–Arly–Pendjari Complex in Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso poses a severe threat to conservation efforts in one of West Africa’s largest transboundary natural World Heritage sites. Local conservation managers often have no clear strategies to address such threats. A better understanding of the key drivers of the armed conflict would help them to respond quickly and effectively using adaptive management approaches. We used the participative Delphi technique to identify the factors driving the conflict, the key players contributing to security threats in the region and the stakeholders who could contribute to solving the conservation issues linked to the security crisis. A panel of 20 experts identified the main drivers of the insecurity to be political, economic and social, especially the vulnerability and marginalization of local communities as a consequence of weak government control and limited resources. Violent extremist groups, particularly Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, pose significant threats to conservation efforts in the region, which our results suggest would be best addressed through military action and regional cooperation to combat terrorism. We recommend that conservation managers adopt a community-focused strategy to reduce the vulnerability of forest-dependent communities and counter local alliances with Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin. Our findings contribute to a wider understanding of how the growing threat of violent extremist groups can negatively affect protected areas and what steps should be taken to counter this.

In this article, I consider the potential integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into resort-to-force decision-making from a Just War perspective. I evaluate two principles from this tradition: (1) the jus ad bellum principle of “reasonable prospect of success” and (2) the more recent jus ad vim principle of “the probability of escalation.” More than any other principles of Just War, these prudential standards seem amenable to the probabilistic reasoning of AI-driven systems. I argue, however, that this optimism in the potential of AI-optimized decision-making is largely misplaced. We need to cultivate a tragic sensibility in war – a recognition of the inescapable limits of foresight, the permanence of uncertainty and the dangers of unconstrained ambition. False confidence in the efficacy of these systems will blind us to their technical limits. It will also, more seriously, obscure the deleterious impact of AI on the process of resort-to-force decision-making; its potential to suffocate the moral and political wisdom so essential to the responsible exercise of violence on the international stage.

Armed conflict devastates children across all regions and ideologies – inflicting profound and lasting harm on their bodies, minds, and developmental trajectories. While all sides may commit atrocities, the experience of children is tragically consistent: they are the least responsible, yet often the most harmed. This article traces the evolving global understanding of war’s impact on children, charting a journey in modern history to present-day realities. It begins with the landmark 1996 UN report by Graça Machel, which exposed the wide-ranging and systematic nature of the effects of war on children – where violence, displacement, and severed attachments force children into premature adulthood. Building on this, the 2009 and 2013 UN efforts codified the “Six Grave Violations” against children in armed conflict, now central to global monitoring and advocacy. Despite these frameworks and legal protections, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the 2024 UN Secretary-General’s report shows violations have surged – up 21% in the past year alone. To bring these patterns into focus, the article concludes with a case study of Gaza. Chosen for its immediacy and visibility, Gaza is emblematic of the ongoing failure to shield children from war’s worst impacts. Similar suffering persists in Sudan, Myanmar, and Ukraine. The article calls for an urgent, universal imperative: end hostilities to protect children. A trauma-informed, attachment-sensitive approach – grounded in lessons from Rwanda, Bosnia, and Syria – is essential. Clinicians, humanitarians, and policymakers must place children at the heart of all post-conflict recovery and accountability efforts.

Many conflict-data projects are based on narrow or disjointed concepts of political conflict. They either cover only limited segments of reality or put distinct but related forms of conflict phenomena in conceptual ‘bins’ rather than integrating them into a more comprehensive concept. In addition, conflict intensity is frequently measured by only one indicator, the number of fatalities, which represents only part of the consequences and none of the means of violent conflict. Means and consequences, taken together, constitute the intensity of a conflict. They ought to be combined to arrive at a valid measurement. The Heidelberg approach to conflict research addresses both issues, offering a broad yet differentiated and integrative concept of conflict and a multi-dimensional and multi-indicator approach to intensity. This improves our abilities to recognise and classify conflictive phenomena; to capture conflict-transformation; and to arrive at a valid measurement of intensity. The approach is applied in the new DISCON dataset, comprising data on 155 violent and non-violent interstate, intra-state, and substate conflicts in Asia and Oceania from 2000 to 2014, disaggregated into more than 6300 region-month intensities.

As a nuanced and quite domain-specific subset of international humanitarian law (IHL), the law of naval warfare (LONW) occasionally differs from general IHL in terms of rule content, interpretation, and application. For example, the targeting regime in the LONW is primarily platform-based, while the concept of civilian direct participation in hostilities is significantly less relevant at sea. Similarly, the application of the common Article 2 threshold at sea does not always parallel its application in other battlespaces and domains. Such inconsistencies – when compared to IHL more generally – can appear to be archaic and obtuse, but fidelity to the historical provenance and differential interpretation and application of these specialist rules is both essential and, in the current geostrategic environment, worth recalling. Given this predisposition to difference, this article outlines five current risks attending the modern application and interpretation of the LONW: misinterpretation and misapplication of the LONW due to a failure to appreciate its often sui generis nature; the lure of application and interpretation by analogy from shore-based LOAC; the heavy reliance of the LONW on historical examples; the highly lex specialis nature of the LONW in relation to the non-fragmentation trends underpinning the modern international law interpretive endeavour; and the consequences often assumed to flow from the aged nature of the LONW’s main sources.

Water is essential to life, dignity and recovery in armed conflict. Increasingly targeted, manipulated or incidentally damaged, it has become both a casualty and a weapon of war, with impacts that are often undocumented or unattributed. While there are multiple protections for water under international humanitarian law (IHL), legal indeterminacies, operational constraints and weak implementation undermine their effectiveness. This article examines patterns, drivers and types of harm relating to water in armed conflict, including reverberating effects and cumulative impacts, alongside the relevant legal frameworks. It advocates a protective interpretation of IHL and proposes measures including the establishment of a collaborative inter-agency mechanism to link field realities with the law, strengthening civilian protection where survival is at stake.

“Hacktivists”, “patriotic hackers” and “civilian hackers” are today conducting cyber operations in several armed conflicts. While some of these groups work closely with State armed forces to support their operations and harm the enemy militarily, reports suggest that too often, civilian hackers have targeted – and damaged or disrupted – various parts of civilian infrastructures, such as banks, companies, pharmacies, hospitals, railway networks and civilian government services. The growing involvement of civilian hackers in digitalizing armed conflicts raises a number of legal questions. First, we must ask what limits international humanitarian law (IHL) imposes on civilian hackers. Second, it must be assessed what “status” these hackers and hacker groups have under IHL, and in what circumstances civilian hackers risk directly participating in hostilities and therefore losing their protection against attack. Third, the question arises of when a State is legally responsible for the conduct of civilian hackers operating under its instruction, direction or control, and what responsibilities States have to ensure respect for IHL by civilian hackers operating from their territory.

With the global proliferation of armed conflicts, children are among the most vulnerable, facing serious violations of their human rights, most notably the right to education. Although both international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) provide protection, schools continue to be attacked, educational infrastructure is destroyed, and millions of children lose access to learning. Against this backdrop, the present article examines the protection of children’s right to education under IHRL and IHL, and argues for a shift in how these existing norms are interpreted to better reflect the centrality of education to human dignity. Drawing on the established link between the right to education and human dignity under IHRL, the article proposes a novel interpretive lens that reframes the denial of education during armed conflict as a direct assault on the human dignity of the child, rather than merely a legal violation. Through this lens, education shifts from an ancillary social right to a core humanitarian concern grounded in the child’s dignity. The article argues that this human dignity-based understanding of education found in IHRL should inform the interpretation of IHL, as integrating this perspective would strengthen the normative coherence of IHL and offer stronger protection for children’s right to education in armed conflict. Recognizing schools as vital spaces for learning, stability and development, this approach emphasizes that access to education underpins children’s holistic growth, the realization of their rights and the safeguarding of their human dignity.

Interest in the use of chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) to support women and girls in conflicts and humanitarian crises, including survivors of gender-based violence (GBV), appears to be increasing. Chatbots could offer a last-resort solution for GBV survivors who are unable or unwilling to access relevant information and support in a safe and timely manner. With the right investment and guard-rails, chatbots might also help treat some symptoms related to mental health and psychosocial conditions, extending mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) to crisis-affected communities. However, the use of chatbots can also increase risks for individual users – for example, generating unintended harms when a chatbot hallucinates or produces errors. In this paper, we critically examine the opportunities and limitations of using LLM-powered chatbots1 that provide direct care and support to women and girls in conflicts and humanitarian crises, with a specific focus on GBV survivors. We find some evidence in the global North to suggest that the use of chatbots may reduce self-reported feelings of loneliness for some individuals, but we find less evidence on the role and effectiveness of chatbots in crisis counselling and treating depression, post-traumatic or somatic symptomology, particularly as it relates to GBV in emergencies or other traumatic events that occur in armed conflicts and humanitarian crises. Drawing on key expert interviews as well as evidence and research from adjacent scholarship – such as feminist AI, trauma treatment, GBV, and MHPSS in conflicts and emergencies – we conclude that the potential benefits of GBV-related, AI-enabled talk therapy chatbots do not yet outweigh their risks, particularly when deployed in high-stakes scenarios and contexts such as armed conflicts and humanitarian crises.

Guided by interviews with key protagonists and extensive archival research, this article reinterprets the escalation of the Colombian armed conflict during the critical period of the 1990s. It rejects conventional characterisations of the war as an ‘internal conflict’ and challenges dominant approaches based on state weakness and economic opportunity. Instead, the article situates the FARC’s rapid expansion against the background of the international political economy, linking the conflict’s escalation to changing social relations of production. Grounded in historical materialism, and particularly drawing on the concepts of uneven and combined development, passive revolution, crisis of authority, and war of movement, the article explains how the Colombian state’s reintegration into global capitalism deepened social fragmentation, displaced subaltern populations, generated new terrains of resistance, and provoked a spreading crisis of authority that the FARC strategically exploited. It is argued that the FARC’s expansion was not a symptom of criminal degeneration but a strategic political response enabled by Colombia’s passive revolutionary transformation within the uneven and combined dynamics of global capitalism. The article contributes to broader debates in security, international political economy, global development, historical sociology, and regional studies, inviting scholars to identify the underlying but not immediately visible dynamics shaping conflict and peace.