S1 EP4: Negotiating with Armed Actors

Beyond Compliance: In Conversation

How do civilian communities negotiate with armed groups? What do people try to achieve in these negotiations? And what enables them to negotiate with an armed actor? In this episode, Katharine and Florian talk to Riyad Anwar, Ashley Jackson and Abellia Anggi Wardani about their novel research on civilian agency during the armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Myanmar.
Cited documents:

Jackson, Ashley (2021) Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan, Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2021.
Widiatmo, D. & Wardani, A.A. (2023). Chinese War in Southeast Asia's Frontier: Contesting Kokang's Chinese Identity on Myanmar-China Border Conflict. Small Wars and Insurgencies, 34 (7).

Guest bios:
Abellia Anggi Wardani is a lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia, previously Executive Director of Knowledge Hub Myanmar and principal investigator for Exploring Community Perceptions and Coping Strategies on Violence in Rakhine State - Myanmar, funded by Creating Safer Space project - University of Aberystwyth. She received her PhD in Culture Studies from Tilburg University, the Netherlands. She was a fellow at the University of Sydney Southeast Asia Center, Center for Comparative Studies of Civil Wars at the University of Sheffield, and part of the Myanmar expert working group Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA) Sweden. She became interested in peace and conflict issues when she joined the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue from 2015 – 2021 working on conflict-affected areas in eastern Indonesia.
Riyad Anwar is a Human Rights Impact Assessment Research Consultant at the Centre for Advocacy and Legal Consultation at the University of Hasanuddin. His research focuses on protection of displaced communities in Southeast Asia. In his previous position as Research Manager at the Knowledge-Hub Myanmar, his works prominently addressed the everyday violence and nonviolent protection of local ethnic communities in Rakhine State, Myanmar
Ashley Jackson is a Co-Director of the Centre on Armed Groups. She has written widely on negotiating with armed groups and advised various UN agencies, NGOs and governments on humanitarian access and conflict mediation. Her first book, Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2021), focuses on life under Taliban rule and the nature of civilian agency in wartime. Ashley holds a PhD from the War Studies Department at King’s College London, an MSc in Gender and Development from the London School of Economics.

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.