S1 EP 12: Civilian Agency in the Digital Realm

How are civilians in Ukraine exercising agency in the digital realm? And what are the consequences of their digital engagement, both politically and under international law? In this episode, Katharine and Florian bring together Oona Hathaway and Taras Fedirko (experts from law and political and economic anthropology) to shed light on this new dimension of agency during armed conflict.

Cited Documents:

Hathaway, Oona A. and Vera, Catherine and Pe'er, Inbar, Crowdsourced War (March 21, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5188908 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5188908

Hathaway, Oona A. and Donilon, Sarah and Squires, Carter, War Hazards Compensation for Civilians (March 28, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5197392 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5197392

Candea, Matei, Heywood, Paolo and Fedirko, Taras. Modalities of Free Speech, Annual Review of Anthropology, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-071423-115444 

Candea, Matei, Fedirko, Taras, Heywood, Paolo and Wright, Fiona. Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487552978

Guest Bios:

Oona A. Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, Professor of Political Science at the Yale University Department of Political Science, Faculty at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, and Director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges. She is president-elect of the American Society of International Law and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the US Department of State since 2005 and in 2014-2015 she served as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Taras Fedirko is a lecturer (assistant professor) at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is a political and economic anthropologist studying how social movements organise to transform war economies; states; and capitalist labour and value regimes. He is currently leading a collective research project exploring crowdsourcing in Ukraine’s war economy.

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 first series of this podcast series is also 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.