Engaging Religious Leaders to Generate Respect for Humanitarian Norms in Armed Conflict

Event details

Co-organised by the Delegation of the European Union to the UN and other international organisations in Geneva, the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the UN and other international organisations in Geneva, and the University of York, the event seeks to engage academic, humanitarian, diplomatic and religious circles in a conversation about why and when engagement with religious leaders can be beneficial to humanitarian norm-compliance and how it can be pursued effectively.

The The Generating Respect Project team will present the findings of the three-year applied research Generating Respect for Humanitarian Norms: The Influence of Religious Leaders on Parties to Armed Conflict. Developed by the University of York’s Centre for Applied Human Rights and York Law School, in close partnership with Geneva Call and the Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Generating Respect Project aimed:

1. To provide empirical evidence for the influence of religious leaders on state and non-state parties to armed conflict;
2. To conceptualise why and how religious leaders exert influence on armed actors, how they interact with humanitarian norms anchored in international humanitarian law and human rights law, and how their influence can be leveraged for norm-compliance generation;
3. To operationalise the findings in the form of guidelines to enable effective engagement between humanitarians and religious leaders.

The research is based on extensive desk analysis and empirical data collected through online and in-country interviews with religious leaders, armed actors, humanitarians, scholars, and other key stakeholders from Colombia, Libya, Mali, Myanmar, Syria, and Yemen.

The programme and registration can be accessed on the conference website.