How does armed conflict affect the environment, and how does environmental harm affect communities? What role do armed actors play in governing and damaging the environment? And how can law and peace processes better address environmental harm? In this episode of Beyond Compliance: In Conversation, Katharine and Florian speak with Anki Sjöberg, Co-Director at Fight for Humanity, and Laura Baron-Mendoza, Colombian lawyer and international legal scholar specialising in environmental justice and transitional justice.
Cited Documents:
Sjöberg, Anki, Michalko, Ján and Davies, Gemma, Gender norms and protection: navigating agency, risk and backlash , HPG Working Paper, London: ODI GLOBAL, July 2026.
Sjöberg, Anki and Balci, Mehmet, In Their Shoes: Health Care in Armed Conflict from the Perspective of a Non-State Armed Actor, Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Spring 2023, pp.123-124.
Baron-Mendoza, Laura, Beyond the battlefield: leveraging rebel law for environmental protection and human rights, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, September 2026, pp.106-148.
Baron-Mendoza, Laura, The FARC-EP as environmental governance actors: shifting the ecological perspective on war, International Journal of Law in Context, November 2025, pp.177-199.
Guest Bios:
Anki Sjöberg is Co-Director at Fight for Humanity. Anki has over 20 years of experience from working in the non-profit sector on issues linked to conflict, security, armed groups, and gender. Her work has focused on research, methodology, and operational work at a senior level with and on non-state armed actors in a variety of contexts. She holds a PhD in International Relations focused on Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.
Laura Baron-Mendoza is a Colombian lawyer and international legal scholar specializing in international law, environmental justice, and transitional justice. She holds a PhD from McGill University and currently serves as Senior Environmental Justice & International Law Fellow at MADRE, as well as Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS), University of London. Her work bridges research, law, and practice, with experience advising the International Criminal Court, Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and peacebuilding institutions on environmental accountability in conflict and post-conflict settings.
The Beyond Compliance Consortium is a co-productive, socio-legal research partnership that traverses the fields of international law, conflict studies, humanitarian protection work and human rights policy, and brings together these communities of scholarship and practice with people with lived experience of conflict. It is funded by UK International Development. The second season is funded by UK International Development, while the first season was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Katharine Fortin is an Associate Professor in human rights law and international humanitarian law at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, Utrecht University.
Florian Weigand is the Co-Director of the Centre on Armed Groups.
