Presenter: Xin Tong

Animating Post-Civil War Peacebuilding: Exploring the Interactive Roles of International Humanitarian Law and Institutional Support (A Proposed Research Narrative)

Type of Presentation: Oral Presentation

Abstract

This oral presentation narrates the story of a proposed research project that grew out of a question I kept returning to: why does international support so often fail to prevent civil wars from restarting? Scholars like Mross et al. (2022) have documented how institutional aid can contribute to post-conflict recovery, yet this body of work tends to treat International Humanitarian Law (IHL), the set of rules governing conduct during and after armed conflict, as a separate concern rather than something that works alongside those institutional efforts. This proposed study focuses on that gap and asks: how does the relationship between institutional support and IHL compliance shape whether conflict recurs after a civil war?

To investigate this question, the project will draw on thematic analysis, a method for identifying patterns across texts, applied to UN and ICRC documents, and combine this with semi-structured interviews of ten to fifteen field experts. I expect the findings will show that governance support and IHL compliance tend to strengthen each other in ways that matter for lasting peace, but I will leave the details for the presentation. One limitation worth noting is that post-conflict environments differ so substantially from one another that this study can realistically offer shared thematic patterns rather than universal rules.

Biography

Xin Tong is an international undergraduate student at UBC Vantage College. Her research interests sit at the intersection of international relations, post-conflict stability, and the legal and institutional frameworks that shape how global organizations respond in the aftermath of war. Through this proposed project, she hopes to contribute to broader conversations about how international actors can better cooperate to protect civilian populations and support lasting peace.