Lawfare Daily: Investigating Atrocities in Post-Assad Syria

Running isn't enough anymore. With PWC's managed services, your operations don't just run, they evolve continuously,

powered by AI embedded directly into your workflows. So instead of maintaining yesterday's model, you're building tomorrow's advantage. PWC's managed services, we run your operations with tech and talent, so you can run faster, scale smarter, lead stronger.

“And I think what's unusual about UN fact finding bodies is in the absence of domestically”

your processes that can make legal determinations. We are in fact establishing facts that would

would otherwise be hugely contested by both state non-state actors and potentially victims too.

It's the Lafaire podcast. I'm Natalie Orpatt, Executive Editor of Lafaire, with Phenulani Aeline, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, who has also worked in several capacities for the United Nations, focusing on human rights and counterterrorism. By moving things into the box of counterterrorism, we move things into boxes of exceptional legal and policy regimes,

“and exceptionality has always, I think, across legal systems and across time, in effect insulated itself”

from the kind of regular business of good governance assessments that we find in most other policy arenas.

Today we're talking about the UN's Commission of Inquiry on Syria, which has been investigating instances of mass violence and atrocities, even as the political situation in Syria underwent a seismic change with the end of the Assad regime. We talked about the Commission's findings, the effect of Syria's transition to a new government, the international community's response, and what it all says about global counterterrorism strategies today. So Phenulani, I've invited you on because you are a true expert in counterterrorism,

“and you have a unique perspective, I think, based on your role as an academic, but also as a commissioner and a special rapporteur for the UN.”

And many other things, but if I restate your whole resume, it will take much too long. So I want to talk today about your recent work in Syria, and then I want to use that as a lens through which we can talk about the current state of counterterrorism more broadly. So starting with Syria, your part of the UN's Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria, can you just tell us about the Commission? Why was it created? What is it charged with doing? Sure, and so yeah, I joined or was appointed to the Commission of Inquiry in December 2025.

It's an appointment from the President of the Human Rights Council. So it's a political appointment, and the Commission has been in place since 2011, so it dates right back to the post-Arab Spring moment and the moment of repression in Syria, actually, where that attempt by the Syrian people to engage with the then Assad regime about a better fairer, more rights-bearing representative Syria was responded to with extremity and a systematic kind of extreme violence that sort of made the international community feel like investigation was required.

So a Commission of Inquiry is a fact-finding investigative mechanism. It's made up of at its height. We had almost 30 investigators and forensic experts. We're now much smaller commission, just under 10 investigators and military and political and legal experts on the team, and three appointed commissioners who are geographically diverse. So our chair was from Brazil. We have a commissioner who is from Tunisia, a former judge, and we have me who is an academic and former special reporter.

Okay, and can you talk a little bit about what the investigations look like? Because you're of course also a lawyer and a law professor, but it seems to me that the project of a commission of inquiry is somewhat different than the sort of evidence gathering and

That is fair, and I think one of the things that really I suppose personally and professionally attracted me to

“being a commissioner on the commission of Inquiry was that I recognize that there was a skillset about”

investigating large-scale atrocity crime that I taught about. I've written about large-scale atrocity crime and I've participated in legal proceedings, but from the ground up investigating being part of a mechanism whose job it is to identify the evidence. We have a system of gathering evidence of verifying evidence and of building patterns and identifying patterns of systemic violence, and then categorizing them in a--and it's not a judicial body, but categorizing them as

war crimes crimes against humanity or genocide and serious violations of international law.

That's not something I've done before. So you know that it really starts. The investigation is to the standard of effectively a civil standard. It's not a criminal standard,

“and but nonetheless requires a verification that happens in multiple ways. We of course interview”

survivors and victims of violence. We use open source data. We use satellite imagery. We work with governments who sometimes share data with us, and the goal is to build a picture. So I'll give an example that last year just after I joined the commission we were issuing a report on the

Obserge of Violence in Sueda, Syria. This was a violent eruption of the took place last summer.

Involving the state, new state of Syria using its course of power against the Druze minority in a part of Syria, which is inhabited by a Druze majority, and the Druze then turning violence against a much another minority, the Bedouin minority in Syria. And our goal was literally we were tasked to go in and investigate on the ground. What happened right after that eruption. We identified over a thousand killings and many of which we classified as war crimes. We identified disappearances.

We identified torture. We identified looting and other forms of pillaged that took place. So it's that kind of micro-identification of both violations and crimes that's new and different of a fact-finding body. And I think what's unusual about UN fact-finding bodies is in the absence of domestically go processes that can make legal determinations. We are in fact establishing facts that would otherwise be hugely contested by both state non-state actors and potentially victims too.

Yeah, so I'd actually love to hear a little bit more about that particularly because you do have experience with the more case-building, legal infrastructure way of doing this. And as you say, the purpose here is more to document and tell a story and gather information and it's unrestricted by the types of considerations that one might need to have if planning to bring this evidence into a courtroom, particularly in service of a criminal prosecution where there are just so many

“evidentiary roles and you have to expect cross-examination and things like that.”

Can you just talk about the process of, for example, conducting these interviews gathering the data from other governments, et cetera, and how it looks and how it would compare to more of a legal framework? I mean, I think I would probably say it is within a legal framework, right, meaning that of course these are not, we are not doing the prosecution of these crimes once established. But the Commission of Inquiry has data sharing and evidence sharing agreements with many

governments and legal systems, as well as with individual prosecutors who are in fact building cases. So since 2011 or data, we have over 15,000, for example, testimonies on our on our database have been used actually as the basis for building cases in and particularly in countries like Germany and European states where there were large Syrian diaspora and where those legal systems were interested in and charged with the responsibility under particularly universal jurisdiction

statutes to build and cases against other individuals on their territory who may have committed offenses, but to take it back. So the product often results in the use of our evidence and our reports as a basis for prosecution, for proceeding to do further investigation towards prosecution

that's if you want one of the downstream consequences. But the purpose is to establish a factual

“record of and the commission of serious violations of international law. So to give an example,”

Suede is probably a really good example and it's the one I'm most familiar with because I was a commissioner when we issued the report and helped, of course, write draft and agree that report. So the lead-up is, of course, is sending in teams of investigators and in the Syrian context, what's unusual about the commission of inquiry is that we have currently after 2024 when the Assad regime fell. The revolution was successful as it were. Assad is now in a suburb of Moscow,

not able to return to Syria or leave. We have had the cooperation of the Syrian, the new Syrian government, which has given us access to Syrian territory. Up until 2024, we didn't have that access. All of our work was done in the diaspora and then working on these open source and other materials that were coming out of Syria. But we weren't physically on the territory of Syria. So in Suede with agreement by the government, which was complicated, because remember, we're investigating

them and their security forces action in Suede. They gave us access to Suede, but we also had to negotiate access to the physical, like geography of Suede, through the Druze leadership. So it's not just that we were negotiating with the state, the state gave us access, but then in order to let us in, we and to get access to bodies, to morgs, to places where there had been active hostilities, so we could assess the nature of those hostilities. And we had to negotiate with the authorities

on the ground, and that's complicated. We could probably say more about that. And then once we're physically on the ground, we have teams of investigators and again, you know, at the starting point

“is witness evidence and testimony and you have to get people to agree to give their evidence”

and their testimony to you. And that's always complicated. There's fear of reprisals,

right, if they're giving information that informs them either the government or the non-state actor. And also to be honest, and this is my own people are often too traumatized to give evidence. And the evidence they give can sometimes not be good evidence in the sense that people's memory and this kind of fracture of memory that occurs when someone's been subject to a really extreme human rights violation can often make that really core exercise of gathering information about what

happened when your son was taken from your house or when your house was destroyed or whether when something happened to you, can you give a linear fact-based account of that? That's actually the heart of the work that we do, but is often really difficult to do when you have either ongoing hostilities, insecurity, and a traumatized population. And all of those things are true and more true in Zoyaida and remain true in other parts of Syria today.

Yeah, it sounds like an incredibly difficult task. And I'm curious how you are able to encourage people to speak, particularly being there in your capacity as a representative of the

“one, do you talk to them about justice, do you talk to them about accountability, about truth-telling?”

I mean, what sorts of messages are you bringing with you and when trying to encourage people to to speak and work with you? May I say several things? One is we have an the commission of inquiry has a long track record in Syria. We have been there since 2011 through every step of this brutal civil war. We have reported on all actors that's the government of Syria, the former regime, Assad, and those military intelligence, but also civilian parts of that regime that we're

engaged in systemic violence and brutality. But we've also reported without fear or favor on all the non-state armed groups. I still, of course, but including others, including for example the non-state armed groups that now make up the government of Syria. So I think one of the things that really

surprised me as a new commissioner, when I first, I'd been to Syria before during the Assad regime,

but surprised me when I first went as a commissioner, was the level of trust across different groups, allowites, truths, and Sunni Muslims, Christians. All of them had a certain faith in the work

which is generally accepted as the gold star reporting on what happened during this conflict,

“not just what happened, but who did what and to whom. And I think that's not true for all of the UN,”

you know, the UN has had a complex reality in Syria. We had political negotiations that failed over and over again. We had, for example, the current constellation of political representation was not, which is the government of Syria. It wasn't included in Geneva track negotiations. It wasn't part of various attempts to quote "solve the conflict." And so the UN is having to rebuild trust with this new government, and also with Syrian people, I mean, in reality, the international community,

meddled in this conflict, we had different states backing different parties. The U.S. was a part of that, and has been a part of that from the very beginning, arming different groups, washing the country with different kinds of weapons and capacities, often much of that weapon re-ending up in the arms of either the repressive government or the non-state armed groups. So there's a trust deficit. I feel we've been extraordinarily lucky that we just because we reported without

fear or favor having an enormous amount of trust. So you walk in with that trust. But you know, it's often not enough, right? Because, I mean, if anyone who's ever interviewed the victim of a traumatic human rights or humanitarian law violation will know that, you know, people have very limited faith as they should in Syria that there will be justice. I mean, what do we mean by justice when Basat Al-Assad sits in Moscow with having taken a sizable amount of the country's

fortune with them and has the protection of a P5 member state? And so doing why should people believe that countries that armed non-state armed groups are bona fide actors who have the best intentions of the Syrian people at the heart of what they do even in the new Syria? So, you know,

“I think people want a record of what happened to them and their families. I think this is that the”

core of what we offer. But I think many people simply do not believe that justice in its pure sense will be delivered to them. It's really extraordinary work, particularly as you say in this broader context of the many different ways that the UN and the international community has engaged with Syria. And I want to sort of turn to that now while still talking about the commission's work and what you found and the process of finding it, you know, this is all in the context as

you've mentioned of these incredibly dramatic changes in Syria. And I think for people who were not

very close Syria watchers, it felt like one day Assad was never going to leave and the next day

there was a new government. And people were scrambling to figure out who this guy was. He has some sorts of problematic origins. What is this new government going to look like? And all of this is happening as your investigation is going on and as you are looking into an incident that happened sort of in the context of this broader picture. Can you just talk about the findings and this

“broader context a bit? Yeah. So I mean, I think it's fair to say and if we go back to November”

2024 and I actually remembered, I was teaching an international law class at the end of November and I was talking about my work in Syria. It's about a week before we start to see the military

advances by the HTS that ultimately lead to the overthrow of the Assad regime. And one of my

students like like many observers I just said I like I think the Assad regime is going to stay. I had I had seen it firsthand when I visited Syria in 2023. One of my observations at the time in 2023 was that even though and we took a truck we took a UN vehicle from Beirut to Damascus because we couldn't fly into Damascus but then we took an internal flight from Damascus to Cummeshly to Northeasternia. And I remember fronting up at Damascus Airport in July of 2023 and seeing a list of flights going to

Doha, Tehran, Moscow and having this epiphany where I thought oh we the West think that Syria is

them but we were certainly isolating them from the West but they weren't isolated from many many

other parts of the globe and many other centers of power and so that made me feel like they would that Assad despite the tenuous hold on some territory that he was pretty firmly entrenched and wasn't going anywhere so many of us as you rightly say Natalie were really surprised and then we have this effectively largely none it's not that it was a non violent overthrow of the Assad regime but it went out with a whisper and not with a bang right and the scale of violence which brought about

the overthrow of the regime was relatively speaking given the bloodlust of the years before

“quite small and I think there was this sort of breath that drawing in Syria and people I know”

and and civil society actors and human rights advocates I've talked to talk about wandering

around Damascus in those days after the fall of the Assad regime and like wondering with enormous trepidation what this group this group that had been a designated terrorist group and it's leader equally so would bring to Syria and this sense of both relief and trepidation and coexistence as we had a relatively smooth political transition we had the declaration and a constitutional declaration and fairly quickly we saw an exercise of and security control that almost instantly

lured the temperature of violence across the country now that doesn't mean Syria has no violence

“there's been and we'll talk about the eruptions but relatively speaking and I had square brackets”

around that we saw a relatively unexpectedly unexpectedly managed transition to this new government

and we also have seen this new government negotiate a set of relationships with very diverse external actors many of whom have been meddling in the conflict from the very beginning the Russian Federation the United States Iran Turkey the European Union I could go on right and we've seen this sort of balancing act of moving through to again a degree of political stability and I mean not to say as I was leaving Damascus just ten days ago the day that manual

Emmanuel Macron was visiting there was a significant terrorist attack and loss of life in Damascus but you know I walk around Damascus and have coffee and coffee shops when I'm in Damascus like there we do things that we wouldn't believe imaginable two years before and that has been done through this exceptional kind of set of political moves and balances that this new government has unexpectedly delivered us and I was also in Syria during the outbreak of war between

when Israel and the United States attacked Iran and it was quite extraordinary to be in Damascus and for Damascus to be the safest place in the Middle East like quite literally so so there is this profound change and you know there's lots of uncertainty but the series of moves that we've seen in the last year and a half have just been quite extraordinary

“and I think we're all still processing what they mean yeah and then can you situate the”

violence that you all negotiated in the commission and and wrote your report which I believe was released last month about in that timeline because I think that piece of it is is particularly interesting given this bigger picture you just described yes and I think we saw you know this shift which was unexpected from the former regime to a new government but we also had two I would say three if we include the hostilities against the SDF in northeast Syria last January we had two major

disruptions deeply violent eruptions does not do justice to what happened we had what the commission of inquiry described as massacres the massacres that took place in Zweta last summer and those massacres were significant we were able to verify in Zweta this significant loss of life over 1,400 deaths a significant number of persons disappeared and the commission of what we the commission

violence had occurred before that which was the violence that took place in the coast largely directed

at the alawite community and the alawites as some of the listeners will recall were the community with which the ousted political leadership of the Assad family belong they were at they are a minority community which had ruled Syria before Bashar al-Assad his father Hafiz al-Assad for almost 50 years

“and so these two huge violent eruptions I think shook and continued to shake this transition”

meaning I think many Syrians wondered whether this was in fact a repetition of the pattern of sectarian violence that defined the conflict itself and more particularly were concerned that it spoke to an inability of the new state to properly control its military forces and the new military power course of power under its control because bear in mind you have a government which is made up of different kinds of factions and groups that were all essentially many of them designated

non-state terrorist groups for the decade and the half before that and now that set of actors and groups are the military and police and intelligence power of Syria and many I think observers but

“also just ordinary Syrians wondered what will life look like under these people now to say positively”

and doing these investigations in that context was really complicated but I do want to give credit to the new Syrian government in two ways one was that they allowed the commission of inquiry access to both the coast and so on to undertake investigations that were clearly going to find that there was both responsibility and violations committed by the Syrian government and in both cases they gave us access and in both cases they didn't argue with our findings and I find that

not notwithstanding we are still pressing them to implement our recommendations I find the fact of accepting the full recommendations including the commission of war crimes by their own forces as a marked shift in a conflict that up to that point was simply like non-accepting of responsibility

and non-engagement with accountability in any way it's really amazing and I just want to clarify

the timeline for people so the Assad regime fell in about December of 2024 yes and the incidents that you studied and so way to the violence in particular happened in July 2025 is that right so way to was July 2025 and then before that we had the first eruption of violence was in and the coast which was several months prior to that and then I should say the third we have just completed a set of investigations in northeast Syria because this January January

2025 the state forces moved against the control of territory exercised by the Syrian democratic forces over large swathes of northeast Syria so we've really had three major military campaigns or eruptions of violence in the post Assad era. Do your current managed services really help run your operations or are they just running in circles running isn't enough anymore with PWC's managed services your operations don't just run they evolve continuously powered by AI embedded

directly into your workflows so instead of maintaining yesterday's model you're building tomorrow's advantage PWC's managed services we run your operations with tech and talent so you can run faster scale smarter leads stronger so it's really interesting because if you're

“imagining this this new government has just come into being in what I think we've pretty clearly”

established was a pretty unimaginable way even shortly before it happened and the country is reeling from trying to figure out what a new government even looks looks like who's going to be

involved all of this it's only a couple of months until that first outbreak of violence I believe

of the transition to the government of president Al-Shura and then then we have July and then we

have again in January 2026 only about a year so we have these three outbreaks in a year during the same period that the government is sort of sorting itself out and meanwhile things are totally shifting on the world stage as governments of other states are trying to decide how to acknowledge the change in regime and how to re-establish relations but before we talk more about other countries responses I'm curious for your take on why the new government chose to or and

is choosing to cooperate with the investigation investigations and grant access and knowing that

the government itself would be found accountable for some of the atrocities that are happening

“yeah I mean I think there are several there's both a highly utilitarian answer to that question”

and maybe a more optimistic kind of transformative answer wrapped into that I mean in suede I just checked my numbers we found 1,700 people were killed and over 200,000 were forced from their homes right so this is scalar violence when we looked at the coastal violence of March 2025 again we were looking at the dismerter torture inhumane acts the displacement of hundreds of people these are pretty big violations for a new government to stomach I actually think that one of the reasons

I sort of think that there's a moment of sort of self-recognition in the decision to allow the commission of inquiry to undertake its investigations which is that they needed us right in some sense this is a government determined to prove its legitimacy determined in some ways if we listen closely to the statements of President Dalshara we hear a real emphasis on a break

“and a rupture from the prior regime and that language I think leads to if you have a system in”

place in Syria that you know unlike for example what the United States did in Iraq after it toppled Saddam Hussein the government of President Dalshara didn't fire everybody it didn't decide that everyone who had previously worked for the Assad regime could no longer serve in any capacity right so you have a legal system you have a court system you have a government structure that is dominated by people who were affiliated to the former regime so you don't actually have the capacity

to do that kind of investigation yourself at least not in a way that will be viewed as credible independent and authoritative by the people of Syria so in some sense the decision to allow the Commission of inquiry in is a legitimizing decision for the government it's like affirming that it is not the same as the prior regime and it's also a recognition of a very sort of reality that there

isn't confidence nor capacity in the domestic legal system and I suppose the third thing I would

“say is I think the Commission of inquiry and you and despite all of the criticism we hear of”

U.N. bodies and U.N. human rights many states I mean the Commission of inquiry was pulled into the roadmap for suede by the U.S. government and the establishment of a roadmap precisely because when domestic legal systems don't work the international community wants an insurance policy on what's happening inside a country that it is deciding whether it will or it won't support economically politically diplomatically and so we also play I think this role for the international

community I mean we have this role for the Syrian government in this transitional period but we also play a really important role for the international community in telling if you want the truth of what's happening on the ground and in a way that's consistent and verified over so many years that there's no doubt and nobody disagreed with our findings on the co-store on suede and I think everyone who's betting on Syria needs us right now actually they need that legitimization but they

also need the process of the rule of law as it applies through the work of a Commission of inquiry applying international law and these verified fact-finding standards it's a kind of a mutually

It's such an interesting phenomenon and it strikes me as really what the UN has always aimed to

achieve which is just to be there to be you know however problematic and criticized it might be to just continue to be a presence that is legitimate by virtue of its work and as you say is legitimate to different observers maybe for different reasons but it is an interesting position to be in and it strikes me that the existence of the Commission on the ground having done inquiries for many years giving credibility to the Syrian people and allowing for the investigations to happen and for the

government to lend their support or at least their accommodation and then the willingness of the broader international community to take the data and information and sort of oversight role that the

“Commission is playing as an important data point as as each of these international community”

members by their organizations or individual states are rethinking their relationship with Syria

and let's talk a little bit about that second point which you raised as you have said as we have

talked about the UN is unfortunately much aligned in certain circles particularly in the U.S. I tend to think for what it is worth that a lot of that is rhetoric and there is a lot of reliance on the UN and on its functions including things like this just the ability to no things achieve results in gathering information and facts and I'm curious what your view is on the extent to which other states whether the United States or others are really relying on that

work as you said the world is trying to figure out how different is this new government is this moment when we can really change can we take down all these sanctions can we start looking to invest can we you know look into security agreements is this a whole new are we starting from scratch in thinking about our relations with Syria and how much do you think your work is factoring into

“that calculus yeah I mean I do I think there are many dimensions one is the recognition that the”

meddling of many states western and other in the civil war in Syria actually produced a zero sum outcome they cancelled each other out right that in fact the continued better on different parties including about that as that would survive and didn't actually was a fundamental failure of international and it kind of multilateral behavior by states I think if we could states would sit back and recognize the folly of these overlapping in self-canceling out actions over the course of

the 14 years civil war in Syria and the moving targets of support by different states and there would be a lesson learned in the kind of folly of this kind of intervention which we are seeing

“in other countries Sudan being a prime example I think the second lesson is the folly of counterterrorism”

which I know we're going to talk about which is that in fact when we talk about these sanctions what we're talking about our counterterrorism sanctions aimed at individuals and groups who were designated as terrorists under our both national and international legal regimes and here we are funnily enough 2026 and those people are now running Syria and I think that requires a moment of sober reckoning on both the value of and the the cost of sanctions and whether and I think that's

that's a longer conversation I think the third thing is is just a recognition that Syria matters

I mean sit stability in instability in Syria produced the largest refugee flows that we've seen and particularly refugee flows not just into the neighboring countries of Lebanon and Jordan which absorbed extraordinary numbers and enormous generosity to the Syrian people by accepting them and at some generosity particularly in Germany significant generosity in Germany and other European states but like the cost of this war was brought in civilian displacement of a massive scale that

engage to address the causes of conflict you absorb the cost of that conflict domestically

so we're seeing this tentativeness but also like embrace of Syria and the commission of

“inquiry and I have said you know you have to bet on Syria but bet on the rule of law in Syria”

bet on building not just the security guarantees like joining the global coalition and dash that matters so much that's bet will be for nothing if you don't bet on the rule of law and good governance in Syria because what we have learned over the last I don't know 20 odd years post 9/11 but certainly since the collapse of the regime in Iraq and the war and again

initiated by the US is counter terrorism without effective investment in the things that produce violence

in society on does all of your counter terrorism work it's just it's just I think not a good not a good bet and not a good spend and for the COI like I agree with humanity I think this language of you know people it's sort of a really easy and lazy move intellectually and in policy terms to criticize the UN I mean it's not by accident for example that we see even as that's happening simultaneously reliance on the UN to both establish facts to deliver the

“food to put up the tents to ensure that things do not fall apart on the ground and I think the”

robustness of that with stands this kind of US hyperbola it's not that it doesn't strain it of course

that kind of US unilateralism strains it but my experience of working with member states day in and day out across multiple mandates or several years is that actually the CO if the UN didn't exist you'd be inventing it you'd be trying to create if the commission of inquiry didn't exist in the aftermath of these eruptions of violence you would be trying to create something that reproduced the same kind of information and legitimacy so I think the criticism is both

overblown and somewhat lazy because it fails to recognize the work that's actually done

“and the reliance of states on it I will editorially say that I totally agree and I think you're right”

to say that it is intellectually lazy there's plenty to criticize but a lot of the work that the UN does is deeply unglamorous and no one is going to celebrate it but everyone is going to rely on it I want to come back to something that you mentioned which is about the way in which counterterrorism has anything to do with us and I think one piece that is that I'm finding really interesting right now as there is all this discussion about how we should understand Syria this new government the ways in

which the international community is going to realign and response and all of that is that there's sort of a revisionist history going on here with respect to the structures that have been set up that are now being dismantled and you touched on this some but I'd love for you to talk about it a bit more directly for example I think a prominent example is there's this multi-tiered sanctions regime designation as terrorist individuals as terrorist organizations that the

United States at least and this is happening in Europe as well is taking a part now in response to the existence of this new government but they were built as counterterrorism tools not as mechanisms to try to for example encourage the Assad regime to change tack in a governance sort of sense or to impose the role of law more effectively or any of that it's sort of feels to me like the conversation is treating these structures as foreign relations tools rather than counterterrorism

tools and I'm just curious how you think about that. I mean you know in my prior role as UN special rapporteur and I think we have discussed this previously the use of counterterrorism sanctions which were built into the al-Qaida sanctions of the 1990s then augmented and extended through UN Security Council resolutions after 2001 and resulted in the committee of the creation at the global level of these global sanctions regimes and running out of the UN Security Council I think they've been an

what they have done I think is disabled or capacity to and I go back to this to address the causes

of conflict to address what is producing violence in these geographies and spaces and actually more particularly has prevented us from engaging with so the consequence for example of many of these sanctions regimes is you can't even negotiate or engage with the actors that you're targeting or designating as terrorists because the fact that their terrorist means that you can't talk to them it has also meant humanitarian catastrophe at certain points in many places where

for UN or other multilateral or even civil society actors to provide aid and support communities

who live in geographies controlled by non-state armed groups who are designated terrorist groups

that you can't supply those communities in ways with basic human human needs whether that's

“food housing shelter and so on and that I think has profoundly disabled our capacity to solve”

conflicts to address the fact that you are going to have actors I mean I acutely know this from the place I grew up in then live in which is built fast and northern Ireland that you can't actually solve conflicts unless you engage with the actors who are the violent actors these are often unpalatable actors they are actors who have committed serious violations of international law but we've seen again what I think is both a lazy intellectual and policy move which is to treat

many in many complex conflict situations to treat individuals who are engaged in hostility the lazy move is just to designate them all as terrorists or use the language of counterterrorism to box the violence rather than addressing the thornier questions of whether or not we are in effectively situations of non-international armed conflict where we have a range of actors many of whom do commit acts of terrorism which is covered of course by international humanitarian law and

that within that framework we have a possibility of engaging with de-escalation ceasefires end of

“conflict sequences so I think that's a big box to put the sanctions measures in but that's the”

box they rightly belong in which are tools that have been both ineffective and actually disabled our capacity including in Syria to engage with a range of actors that we should have been engaging with fire earlier to address the causalities and ending sequences of the conflict and you're right what we now see states doing the sort of pretending the origin story doesn't exist right pretending that the

roots of these kinds of tools are not in fact an an ultimately our counterterrorism tools which we

actually don't spend enough time assessing their competence or adequacy for the task to which we assign them to yeah and I'm I'm curious about that piece of it in particular because it seems to me that when thinking from a counterterrorism lens and for example using sanctions as a tool of counterterrorism the theory is that that will help to deter or disable terrorism and it seems to me you're saying that that is too narrow of of you and that the main problem is that the very mechanism namely this

tool of sanctions in an attempt to deter disabled terrorism is also serving a purpose of disabling the possibility of treating the causation for the terrorism is that a fair description. Yes but also more than that which is I would say if we did monitoring and evaluation of sanctions tools in the same way we do with most with government policies in lots of ways we would ask the fundamental question and measure in fact whether they have contributed to the ending of violence

and if that's their stated goal or the marginalization of particular kinds of groups or the lessening of you know the global counterterrorism index in a particular site where they're applied and if you use those sort of simple M&E tools in so many of these sites Syria is a classic example what you would find is no and on these monitoring and evaluation assessments they would literally fail the test so it's it's both the sort of political cost but it's also the simple like

“could we measure these policies in ways that would actually which I think we can but don't do”

counterterrorism is a unique area where we tend not to apply the same kinds of good public policy

actually work on its own state of terms and why do you think that is because I think what it's

“the again I think this has been long been my scholarly arguments in a book I first wrote in 2005”

called Law in Times of Crisis which is that by moving things into the box of counterterrorism we move

things into boxes of exceptional legal and policy regimes and exceptionality has always I think

across legal systems and across time in effect insulated itself from the kind of regular business of good governance assessments that we find in most other policy arenas the result of which is that we don't apply those tools we simply we use the exceptionality itself is the rationale for continued justification of the use of the tool not the kind of classic public policy tools of effectiveness value for money delivery on the things that it says it's going to do and that's a

fondum I mean for people who care not just about security but like are there tax dollars being well

spent that is a question we should be asking consistently in counterterrorism domestic and international

“that we simply don't consistently ask or demand I think it's such a good point with the”

little bit of time we have left I do want to ask you about another thing that happened recently that I think though I would like to know your thoughts has something to say about broader strategies of counterterrorism and I don't think unfortunately that it speaks to the issue that you just raised but does seem to be speaking to perhaps a change in how people or how states are thinking about the wisdom of counterterrorism strategies in the past so the incident I'm referring to is the recent

adoption at the United Nations I believe last month as well of the I believe ninth counterterrorism strategy and an interesting vote that happened can you tell us what happened sure so you know one of the kind of fixtures on the global counterterrorism calendar is this thing called the United Nations global

counterterrorism strategy it was first adopted in 2006 by a general assembly vote and the idea was

in the aftermath of 9/11 in a kind of a consensus moment among states that they're needed to be global policy on counterterrorism that all states could agree by consensus that they would have a common strategy and operational approach to counterterrorism now that strategy has long been criticized by many including myself as being weak on rule of law strong on kinetic weak on rule of law and human rights but nonetheless it's been the global framework in many ways driven by the United States security

imperatives after 9/11 to adopt consensus-based approaches to counterterrorism and that strategy gets renewed every two years and it more recently has changed with three years cycle and every year without fail since 2006 it's been a consensus resolution and this year it was not and the outliers to the consensus where the United States Israel and Argentina they voted against the strategy

“and I think that tells us a couple of really interesting things one is they voted against the strategy”

the US had offered an alternative I would say half thought through late night written on the back of a handkerchief kind of alternative to the global counterterrorism strategy that states had spent years in and months prior negotiating and states rejected that the vast majority of states said no we're not going to accept this US alternative vision of counterterrorism which in fact was stripping out a lot of the work that had been done on pulling in human rights and rule of law standards

over the past 20 years into the global strategy but more particularly it speaks to a self-imposed isolation by the United States on counterterrorism and it speaks I think to the kind of folly I mean I have lots to criticize about a global counterterrorism strategy over the past 20 years but it is one of the few areas where we've had consistent consensus between the P5 between all kinds of big and small states and here the US is simply saying we don't want to do this

with you anymore we are going to disagree and not only are we going to disagree but we're going to vote against the global strategy so it's both an important moment in global counterterrorism discourse but it tells us something profound about the isolation of the United States on global security issues and is your sense that was the crux of the disagreements the notion that

with respect to how states should work together and coordinate their efforts on counterterrorism

“and that the divergence now that is being represented in this vote is just more of the same”

trend we've seen in other aspects of US foreign policy which is the sort of isolationist vein or is there more to the disagreement than that I mean it feels and again this is an observer is tense but I'd say two things one is that it feels like unfold through a reactionary kind of politics around if you have common kind of consensus documents at the UN and the value of consensus in the international order in those very very few places we have it we simply as a matter of

principle don't like consensus anymore right because consensus is always about compromise right

the consensus in the UN or multilateral system is that everybody has to give up a little bit of the thing they want Russia may not like certain parts of this strategy China certainly doesn't like parts of this strategy we've known that historically but they've ultimately compromised on a document that everybody gets a little bit of what they want and the US is I think for me saying no no we don't accept compromise as a kind of a defining sort of virtue of

global action and spaces where there's long been compromise and it's been useful to us

“so that I think is really important the second is just the kind of I think it's also an example”

of spoiler politics that you've also described which is there's a kind of a pleasure

in spoiler politics now I think that of course there's always momentary pleasure in being the

spoiler right that that's that one can imagine how the dynamics of that play out in a in a government but you know most states and our strategic both allies but as well as our strategic adversaries they play the really long game they understand that playing the spoiler means that you both outcast yourselves to use on a half-o-a's term but you're also limiting the range of options and partners you have in the moment so I also see this as sort of the short term

isn't that has defined the Trump administration's approach to international law and international relations is playing out in the global counterterrorism strategy it's this sort of the sort of momentary pleasure of being the spoiler and watching other states march off together as they have done they they agreed this consensus and the Europeans the Russians and the Chinese all stayed in and they have lots of things they're going to do together in the space and the US is going to sit on

the outside of that and the dangers of that the long-term security of the United States are infinite and of course under calibrated by the administration it does strike me as as you say another very sobering example of the United States choosing to be isolationist and the rest of the global community seeing what they're going to do in response and so far seeming to stick together quite a bit more than the underlying US strategy might have it I think we will have to leave it there

on that somewhat dire note but Finale I want to thank you so much for joining us and for your insights and for your good work thank you I really delighted to have the conversation what's

“appreciated the Lothar podcast is produced by the Lothar Institute if you want to support the show”

and listen at free you can become a Lothar material supporter at Lotharmedia.org/support supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else if you enjoy the podcast please rate and review us wherever you listen it really does help and be sure to check out our other shows including rational security allies the aftermath and escalation our latest Lothar presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine you can

also find all of our written work at Lotharmedia.org the podcast is edited by Jen Potia

with audio engineering by Cara Schellen of goat rodeo our theme song is from Alabama music as always

thank you for listening do your current managed services really help run your operations or are they just running in circles running isn't enough anymore with PWC's managed services your operations don't just run they evolve continuously powered by AI embedded directly into your workflows so instead of maintaining yesterday's model you're building tomorrow's advantage PWC's managed services