Lead by Lauren Gould (principal investigator) in collaboration with Linde Arentze (PhD candidate), this research project investigates how, and importantly why the “Dutch and NATO way of warfare” has evolved during two decades of interventionism in Afghanistan and beyond. Informed by an assemblage approach, we zoom in on why and how particular discourses, actors, technologies, practices, and effects (re) assembled as conduits of war in Afghanistan between 2001-2021. In addition, we zoom out to understand how this process was informed by previous wars (e.g., Bosnia and Kosovo), mutated into parallel war assemblages (e.g., Iraq and Libya) and (re)-assembled in current theatres of war (e.g., Ukraine and Gaza). 

Data will be be gathered through open source documents, archival research, participant observation, and interviews conducted during fieldwork in the Netherlands, among key NATO allies,  Afghanistan, and neighboring countries. Our analysis will result in a theoretically informed peer-reviewed book that - through studying how warfare was assembled and reassembled in Afghanistan and beyond - reflects on the changing character and nature of 21st-century war. 

This research project is commissioned by the Dutch government, conducted under the KNAW and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, it is one of four large sub-studies on Dutch and NATO military engagement, diplomatic activities and non-governmental involvement in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021.

• Linde Arentze

From an inter- and transdisciplinary perspective, this research project engages with the realities of increasing autonomy in warfare through artificial intelligence. From a Conflict Studies, International Relations, Media and Cultural Studies, and Law perspective, we explore how integrating algorithms into existing military technology paves the way for more autonomy, ludification, and remoteness in war, changing the dynamics of the battlefield and posing serious risk to civilians, as well as to fundamental democratic principles like transparency, accountability, and the rule of law.

The Realities of Algorithmic War project engages in in-depth research on the innovation, deployment, and impact of AI systems in the military domain and reflects on how this affects civilian harm, security, human rights, and democratic principles. By engaging with a variety of stakeholders crossing disciplinary thresholds, we collectively contribute to bringing the academic and policy debates forward on topics related to the lived realities of increasing system autonomy in war.

See here for more information and here for our latest research and impact output.

• Linde Arentze
• Jessica Dorsey LLM

• dr. Marijn Hoijtink

The Intimacies of Remote Warfare is an evidence-based research programme that aims to inform academic, public and policy debates on the intimate realities of remote wars waged by advanced militaries.

The programme investigates the politics, operations, technologies, and political economy of remote warfare, as well as its impact on civilian harm and blowback. IRW engages with key stakeholders to participate in expert round tables, co-create knowledge, and formulate policy recommendations. It shares its findings through academic journals and books, op-eds, podcasts, documentaries, public events, a summer school, and (social) media outlets.

See our website The Intimacies of Remote Warfare for an overview of past and current research and impact activities and output.   

• prof. dr. Jolle Demmers
• Linde Arentze

For the After the Strike research project (2020-2022) dr. Lauren Gould (principle investigator) and Prof dr. Jolle Demmers teamed up with NGO Pax for Peace and Iraqi NGO Al-Ghad to conceptualize and investigate the civilian harm effects of a 2015 Dutch airstrike in Hawija, Iraq. This airstrike was one of the 35.000 mission carried out by the US-led Coalition against ISIS across Syria and Iraq. 

Combining OSINT and interviewing 159 respondents in Hawija, this project was the first to clearly define the direct and reverberating civilian harm effects of this airstrike, highlighting the compounding impact of remote bombing in rebel-held urban centres more broadly. After the release of the report, it is now officially recognised that 85 civilians were killed by the blast and many more injured.  

The research culminated in journal articles, a research report, popular science book, documentary, numerous podcast episodes and public events, and the research findings are central evidence in a civilian court case of the Hawija victims vs the Dutch state.

From 2020 -2024, Lauren also led a consortium of civil society partners (including Amnesty, CIVIC, Pax and Airwars) in a Transparency Road Map process with the Dutch Ministry of Defence (MoD). This process has led to the establishment of a Protection of Civilian team and Civilian Casualty Reporting Portal at the MoD, and new transparency and accountabilities policies vis-à-vis civilian harm in the Netherlands. 

• prof. dr. Jolle Demmers

• Erin Bijl and Saba Azeem
• Pax for Peace

Since the 1990s a rising number of academic accounts on remedies for serious and grave injustices have been published. Each year numerous new books and articles on tribunals, financial compensation, apologies and truth commissions find their way to academics from a broad range of disciplines that each from their own perspective deal with the question how to repair grave injustices from the past as effectively as possible. A serious problem however continues to be that broad interdisciplinary accounts that not only focus on either retributive measures (punishing the perpetrator) or restorative measures (restoring the victim) so far are not available or are completely outdated. 

The objective of this project is to develop a new extensive text book that critically assesses all available remedies for serious and grave injustices, ranging from criminal tribunals to financial compensation and commemorations. 
Differently than many other accounts in this field this book can be regarded as truly interdisciplinary in the sense that it puts the increasing use of instruments of transitional justice and their functioning in their proper legal, socio-political and historical contexts. Furthermore, the book not only wants to describe, but also wants to raise questions by alternating short historical overviews with in-depth articles on topical issues. The first part of the book examines specific difficulties and challenges that all available remedies are confronted with. (When do historical injustices become genocide? What to do with bystanders and victims that also have become perpetrators?) The second and third part of the book pay attention to both positive as well as well as negative aspects and characteristics of available instruments. (Politicization of tribunals; Balancing the rights of perpetrator and victim; Inevitability of apologies; Educational powers of statues and monuments from the ‘dark past’.) 
The book ends with four still pending cases and issues ranging from the effectiveness of the ICC to the continuing debate on the legacy of colonialism/slavery, the Armenian ‘genocide’ and the drama of Srebrenica. These case studies can be used as stepping stones for further discussion on the functioning of specific instruments and the opportunities to deal with delicate issues that either have reference to a distant or more recent past. 
Because of its all-encompassing and interdisciplinary character, its clear structure and its question raising approach this text book may be regarded as a perfect introduction to the topic of transitional justice for students from different academic domains. 

• dr. Peter Malcontent

While Uganda is one of the most researched “post” conflict areas in Africa, most of the raw data collected and reports written have not been brought ‘back’ to the people and is not easily accessible for students, scholars and practitioners that are interested in learning more about the impact of war and interventions on people’s day-to-day lives. This lets a lot of valuable data go to waste. With our eyes set on memory and remembrance; post conflict reparation and transitional justice; creating a dialogue where past human rights abuses can be discussed; and creating a forum for interdisciplinary learning, the Centre for Conflict Studies (CCS) in partnership with the leading Ugandan research institute, Refugee Law Project are in the process of creating a (online) War Documentation Archive within a larger framework of a War Memorial Centre. Both institutes have independently worked on the idea of a War Documentation Archive since early 2009, but in October 2010 the CCS and the RLP decided to combine their expertise and make the creation of a War Documentation Archive a joint effort. 

• Moses Chrispus Okello
• Refugee Law Project

Since the end of world war two, wars have increasingly been waged within states instead of between states. Such internal wars have characteristically been fought with the active and widespread involvement of the civilian population. Herein, identity and identity groups have become crucial mobilizing factors. This poses profound challenges at war’s end for such antagonistic communities to find once again a way to co-habit and coexist in their national territory. This requires erstwhile warring parties to address the injustices that have taken place, while also moving towards a relationship that they believe to be minimally acceptable. The recent proliferation of transitional justice instruments, such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the International Criminal Court (ICC), attest to the widespread recognition of the crucial nexus between justice, reconciliation and sustainable peace.However, unfortunately the booming growth of this transitional justice and reconciliation industry has outpaced a careful development of empirically based theory and analysis on what reconciliation entails and how different transitional justice instruments contribute to this process.

Using the case study of northern Uganda, this collaborative research, proposed by experts within the field of conflict studies and international law, aims to fill the empirical and theoretical knowledge gap that exist within and between the field of transitional justice and reconciliation. To this end, the following central research question is posed; How do different types of local, national and international transitional justice instruments relate to each other and are they an effective. 

To contribute to this central research objective, the CCS will focus its expertise on answering the following question: What war constructed social identity boundaries exist within northern Uganda that need to be addressed for reconciliation to occur? What traditional instruments are already being utilized by the grass-roots society to address these boundaries? What retributive vs. restorative justice instruments are being implemented at a local, national and international level and what are their objectives and tools? Do these instruments build on the existing traditional instruments and are they an effective and legitimate mechanism towards reconciliation? What general lessons can be learned and applied to other (post) conflict settings?

Answers will be sought through literature research and conducting grass-roots research in northern Uganda. Building on data already collected during previous fieldwork, methods such as direct observation, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions will be utilized to gain a local perspective on the effectiveness and legitimacy of different transitional justice instruments, including the ICC, a national Truth Telling Commission and Traditional Justice Instruments.

ISEP in conjunction with the research programme Human Rights in a World of Conflict and Diversity Perspective will concentrate on the following question: how could international and national justice mechanisms most effectively contribute to societal reconciliation and the entrenchment of the rule of law in a victimized society as Uganda’s? To that end, it will be ascertained (a) whether international and domestic criminal tribunals somehow believe that criminal justice and accountability solutions can meaningfully contribute to national reconciliation in Uganda, and whether they decide cases accordingly; (b) whether justice for gross human rights violations/international crimes should be dispensed at the domestic (Ugandan) level, or rather at the international level (ICC, or even by a ‘bystander State’ exercising universal jurisdiction for that matter), in accordance with the principle of complementarity as enshrined in Article 17 of the ICC Statute. To that effect, the ICC’s relevant admissibility decisions will be thoroughly analyzed in light of relevant on-going and planned investigations and prosecutions in Uganda. In addition, interviews will be conducted with staff of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor in The Hague on the one hand, and Ugandan prosecutors on the other, with a view to seeking answers to the questions (a) how the ICC could best encourage local investigations in Uganda (in keeping with the principle of ‘positive complementarity’), (b) what cases should still be dealt with at the international level, (c) whether the broader impact of retributive justice solutions is taken into account in the design and implementation of those solutions; (d) how the interplay with non-penal transitional justice systems in Uganda is conceived

For this project I conducted three months of field research in northern Uganda and wrote the following articles;

Ryngaert, C.M.C. & Gould, L.M. (2011). International Criminal Justice and Just Post Bellum - The Challenge of ICC Complementarity: A Case-Study of the Situation in Uganda. Belgian Review of International Law, 44 (1-2): 91-121. 

Gould, L.M. and C.M.J. Ryngaert. 2012. The Interface Between Transitional Justice and Reconciliation in the Wake of Civil War: A Case Study of Northern Uganda. In L. Boerefijn, L. Henderson, R. Janse & R. Weaver (eds). Human Rights and Conflict. Essays in Honour of Bas de Gaay Fortman. Cambridge, Antwerp & Portland: Intersentia.

International criminal justice tribunals were established to investigate and prosecute gross violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law, in particular genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. These tribunals not only aim to judge individual crimes, but they also strive for reconciliation, including retribution and redress for victims, as a prerequisite for future peace and stability. 
These are high expectations and objectives. However, the chance of success is largely dependent on and influenced by – amongst other factors – domestic expectations and participation, the visibility and transparency of international criminal justice proceedings and their outcomes, and the acceptance of the proceedings and results as legitimate and just. Various aspects of these issues are the central theme of this symposium and edited volume: an insider perspective from of the Office of the Public Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Office, the lessons to be learned from the experiences with transitional challenges in (post-) conflict societies and the role of the media in international criminal law will be discussed in relation to fundamental questions of the legitimacy of transitional justice, one of which concerns its transparency

For this project I conducted 2 months of field research in Uganda and wrote the following chapter:

Gould, L.M., Brants, C.H. & Brants, K. (2013). Selling the ICC: Imagery and Image Building in Uganda. In C Brants, A Hol & D Siegel (Eds.), Transitional Justice Images and Memories (pp. 143-160) (18 p.). Londen: Ashgate.

In her PhD dissertation, Gould empirically traces and coins the concept ‘global justice assemblage’ to define how a range of actors, with different interests and discourses, cooperated and contended with each other on the pressing questions of how to secure and bring justice to the violent conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government of Uganda. For instance, she analysed why the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against the LRA top-commanders. Subsequently, she presents rich empirical evidence illustrating how the ICC forged alliances with the Ugandan and US military to arrest its key suspects and what effects this had on the ICC's legitimacy and achieving security and justice in the region. She independently designed and conducted her PhD project from September 2009 to March 2016, including 12 months of field research in East Africa. It culminated in 7 publications in international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.