Revkin and research team awarded £1.5 million for research on civilian harm in Iraq and Gaza
A key focus will be on the practice of the UK, the US, and Israel and the impact of past and current armed conflicts on civilians.
Mara Revkin
Associate Professor of Law and Political Science Mara Revkin is part of a research team that has been awarded a £1.5 million grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop an evidence-based law and policy framework to reduce civilian harm in war. The research team is led by Noam Lubell (University of Essex) and includes Janina Dill (University of Oxford), Mitt Regan, David Luban, Anna Cave, and Todd Huntley (Georgetown University), and Amichai Cohen (the Israel Democracy Institute).
The problem motivating this project is that international law, despite its prohibition on disproportionate casualties for individual attacks in war, fails to account for “cumulative civilian harm” resulting from repeated attacks over time in protracted armed conflicts. In addition, international law does not recognize the indirect effects of prolonged exposure to conflict, such as infrastructure collapse, societal trauma, or socio-economic decline. A key focus in the research will be on the practice of the UK, the United States, and Israel and the impact of past and current armed conflicts on civilians in Iraq and Gaza.
Revkin recently published a related working paper on civilian harm during the battle to recapture the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) coauthored with Associate Professor of Law Jonathan Petkun and Benjamin Krick with the Households in Conflict Network: https://hicn.org/working-paper/402/.