Weaponizing the Body: Sexual Violence, Patriarchy, Power, and Justice

By Juliette Arlaud, Elisa Andreolli, Ana Maria Ionela Birsan, Joséphine Bon, and Noa Sara Lehmann

How effective are international law and aid efforts when sexual violence is used as a tool of war? This podcast explores the gap between global commitments and lived realities. Drawing on insights from Elisabeth Prügl, professor specialised in feminist international relations and gender politics in international governance, and Claudia Seymour, specialist on the Democratic Republic of the Congo with extensive experience as a UN child protection specialist, it argues that wartime sexual violence is not an anomaly but rooted in enduring patriarchal structures, militarised masculinities, and entrenched power hierarchies present in both war and peace.

Using Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Democratic Republic of Congo, it compares two differing international responses yet finds a consistent pattern: a stark disconnect between legal obligations, humanitarian aims, and lived experience. It questions the focus on punishment as a solution to conflict-related sexual violence. Real prevention requires structural change, survivor-centred support, community-based protection, and rethinking justice. Ultimately, without transforming gendered power relations, legal reforms alone cannot end sexual violence in war.

Feeling Adrift: Climate Refugees and the Law

By Lia, Shunya, Riddha, Allie, and Marcos 

This podcast examines the status of climate migrants under international law and argues that legal solutions alone are too slow for a rapidly unfolding crisis. Displacement is already occurring in places like Bangladesh, showing the need for both stronger legal protections and increased humanitarian funding.

We interviewed Professor Vincent Chetail, Director of the Global Migration Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, and Jerome Oberreit, Executive Director of BRAC Global, one of the world’s largest NGOs founded in Bangladesh that addresses poverty alleviation, development, and crisis response. Our podcast highlights gaps in existing frameworks and their real-world consequences. In Bangladesh, challenges include insufficient adaptation funding and the need for locally driven responses. While human rights law offers some protection, it remains limited by legal ambiguity and state reluctance.

The podcast concludes that meaningful action requires legal innovation, greater solidarity, and a dual focus on rights and humanitarian support, with displaced people at the centre.

Empire of Compassion: Humanitarian Dependency in the Congo

By Liliana Ray Bazzurro, Francesca Polano, Madeleine Fages, Kaia Jobin Lamothe, and Charis Riebe

Despite possessing some of the world’s richest reserves of cobalt and other minerals that power the global economy, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains in chronic humanitarian crisis. Billions in aid flow in, yet structural violence and inequality persist, raising the difficult question of how aid can reproduce dependency and imperial hierarchies.

Drawing on colonial history, Third World Approaches to International Law, and the lived realities of Congo, this podcast shows how humanitarianism can reinforce the inequalities it seeks to address. With insights from Dr Claudia Seymour, Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute and former humanitarian worker in the DRC, and from Congolese political scientist and professor Dr Guilain Mathe, it highlights how international interventions create parallel systems that weaken Congolese sovereignty. Drawing further on the perspective of Serena Musungu, a Congolese medical student, the episode argues for a decolonial shift toward Congolese-led governance, local knowledge, and co-leadership in humanitarian programming.

Nagorno-Karabakh: How Law Shapes (and Justifies) Violence

By Chloé Levrat, Elena Natali, Jeanne Rancoule, Linda Bartolozzi, and Yana Tucke

This podcast explores the paradoxical role of international law in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, where legal norms are invoked even as their authority appears to weaken. Drawing on Jean and John Comaroff’s concept of the “juridification” of politics, it shows how Armenia and Azerbaijan strategically mobilise key legal principles such as sovereignty, self-determination, and self-defence to advance competing claims to legitimacy and territory.

Informed by insights from Armenian lawyer Lusine Abovyan, the podcast highlights how sovereignty and self-determination are framed as mutually exclusive and operating on different planes, creating a legal grey zone that sustains the conflict. Similarly, the notion of self-defence is interpreted in ways that justify the use of force.

Ultimately, the podcast argues that this intense juridification process has the opposite effect of the one expected: it results in “dejuridification”, in which legal language ends up masking rather than preventing human suffering.

The Politics of Erasure: How Digital Hate Speech Contributed to the Dehumanization of the Rohingya

By Filippo Rastelli, Gargi Manek, Lucia Lopez, Sözeri Şahin, and Tin Lai Tsang

This podcast examines how online hate speech contributed to the dehumanisation of the Rohingya in Myanmar. While social media raised awareness, it argues that Facebook was also complicit in amplifying disinformation and silencing Rohingya voices through its algorithms and platform design.

Adopting a dialogue-driven approach involving a group of students, it shows how digital systems can transform legal erasure into real-world violence by reinforcing exclusion. Excerpts from an interview with Noor Azizah, a Rohingya activist and the Co-Executive Director of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network, are included. Her testimony links abstract concepts like statelessness, dehumanisation, and digital hate speech to real-life consequences of fear, violence, displacement and, most importantly, resistance.

The podcast ultimately argues that the Rohingya crisis is not only political and humanitarian, but also profoundly digital, revealing how online platforms shape violence, responsibility, and, more broadly, human rights.

Exporting Punishment: Human Rights, Security, and the Mega-Prison Model

By Abdullah Nazeri, Martina Maestri, Yoko Tanaka, and Carolina Riera San Emeterio

In March 2022, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador declared a state of exception. Since then, over 88,000 people have been detained, often without due process, alongside an expansion of security powers and the use of the Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT) prison. This punitive model has major domestic and international implications, including the use of CECOT by the United States to deport Venezuelan migrants, even those without criminal records.

Featuring insights from journalist Valentina Oropeza, the podcast examines how CECOT has become a site of systemic human rights violations and how US–El Salvador cooperation enables them. It argues that weakened legal protections in El Salvador facilitates the continuation of an imperial pattern imposed by the United States, allowing the US to externalise responsibility. The episode also explores whether this signals a wider “Bukele Model” across Latin America, normalising large-scale incarceration and the erosion of rights in the name of security and political or financial gain.

Israel’s Perversion of Humanitarianism as a Tool for Further Occupation and Genocide in Palestine

By Ema Torcato, Maryjoy Maningas, Molly Ryan, and Shannon Smith

This podcast examines humanitarianism in Palestine not through the concepts of “aid” or “compassion”, but as a system that can help stabilise and legitimise occupation, apartheid, and ongoing violence. The discussion draws on interviews with Sitara Jabin, the Strategic Communications Advisor for emergencies at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and Olive, a Palestinian living in Europe.

The episode moves beyond organisational narratives to explore how humanitarianism becomes entangled in political structures. Sitara highlights how even principled humanitarian actors like MSF face limits imposed by the occupying power, while Olive reveals how Palestinian suffering is often depoliticised and treated as a technical problem rather than a human-made one. Together, their insights challenge listeners to rethink the limits of humanitarianism, recognising it as both life-sustaining and system-sustaining, and to understand why meaningful change requires linking humanitarian concerns to broader struggles for rights, justice, and de-occupation.

What Are the Implications of South Africa’s Case against Israël at the International Court of Justice?

By Aya, Camille, Gabrielle and Lin

This podcast investigates the legal and political implications of South Africa’s case against the Genocide Convention of Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It examines what this case reveals about the functioning, limits, and legitimacy of international law in situations of prolonged occupation and mass civilian harm, rather than focusing on its cases’ legal “win” or “loss”.

The podcast analyses the significance of the ICJ’s 2024 Advisory Opinion on Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, based on an interview with Professor Fuad Zarbiyev and Dr Ardi Imseis. The interview not only emphasises how it clarified Israel’s obligations as an occupying power, but also addresses structural constraints on the ICJ, including enforcement gaps, political pressure, and procedural delay.

To conclude, the podcast considers whether South Africa’s case is another case of international law’s unfulfilled promises, or an intervention capable of reshaping political accountability and global norms surrounding justice and human rights.

Discover other podcasts produced by Prof. Billaud’s students:

• In 2024
• In 2023
• In 2022
• In 2021

Banner picture: Photo Gallarys / Shutterstock.