How does a community’s relationship with the land they live on feed into their experiences of harm? What solutions do they find to protect themselves? Katharine and Florian speak to Dr Piergiuseppe (Pier) Parisi and Dr Marwan Darweish about their research on the different ways in which civilian communities resist against armed actors in Colombia and Palestine.

Cited Documents:

Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University (UK), On Our Land (video), 2021.

Darweish, Marwan, Popular Resistance in Palestine, in Decolonizing the Study of Palestine, Indigenous Perspectives and Settler Colonialism after Elia Zureik, I.B.Tauris, 2023.

Parisi, Piergiuseppe, Beyond Compliance Symposium: Security beyond the physical – Addressing the Nasa indigenous people’s spiritual harm in armed conflict, Armed Groups and International Law Blog, 2024.

Safety and dignity: Enhancing unarmed civilian protection amongst Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills (Masafer Yatta), Civil Protection to stay on our land, Palestine (video), 2024.

Guest Bios:

Dr. Marwan Darweish, is Associate Professor in Peace Studies at the Center for Peace and security at Coventry University, UK. His research is multidisciplinary and focuses on nonviolent resistance, cultural resistance, unarmed civil protection, conflict transformation cultural heritage and gun crime violence among the Palestinians in Israel. He is former Director of the MA in Peace and Conflict Studies at Coventry university.

Dr. Piergiuseppe Parisi Piergiuseppe (Pier) Parisi is a lecturer in international human rights law at the Centre for Applied Human Rights and the York Law School (University of York, UK). Currently, his research focuses on several articulations of the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the right to Indigenous education, Indigenous justice mechanisms and their intersection with international humanitarian and human rights law, as well as Indigenous conceptions of security and protection in armed conflict. Pier was the Principal Investigator of the

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.