Sep 16, 2026 · 42 min · 9 segments
International law is supposed to set the rules for how states behave in war and resolve conflicts, but that framework is under growing pressure. In this week’s episode, Zoe Swanwick speaks to James…
Kirsty SutherlandGuest
James CowanGuest
Zoe SwanwickHost
I mean, you could expand that argument to say there's been not nearly enough attention focused on what happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The 600,000 people who died in the 10 years of the Syria conflict very little public attention.
So I do think there's a sort of curious obsession with one particular situation namely Israel.
But what about those broader things? Don't all humans have the same value placed upon them? And why do we pay so little attention to those much, much larger sets in which far more people have died?
I don't think that there's a lack of attention being paid within the foreign office, for instance, on any of those.
I think that there's acute attention on all of those conflicts in my field.
I think that the media plays a strong role in determining what people are interested in.
And does that inform the international legal scrutiny on that as well? Does that public attention translate directly into the legal consequences?
It's the ability to make political interventions that I think is probably more influenced by public attention or the willingness to make political interventions.
But all of these activities come down to being confident in the information you're getting and the intelligence that's being shared and all these things.
sort of complicated webs of information sharing and I think there's a strong question as to At what level of confidence are politicians and diplomats willing to make a political intervention before we get to the kind of question of accountability down the line? But I'm very confident that all of these conflicts are being very, very closely watched by lawyers and by diplomats.
I mean, you could expand that argument to say there's been not nearly enough attention focused on what happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The 600,000 people who died in the 10 years of the Syria conflict very little public attention.
So I do think there's a sort of curious obsession with one particular situation namely Israel.
But what about those broader things? Don't all humans have the same value placed upon them? And why do we pay so little attention to those much, much larger sets in which far more people have died?
I don't think that there's a lack of attention being paid within the foreign office, for instance, on any of those.
I think that there's acute attention on all of those conflicts in my field.
I think that the media plays a strong role in determining what people are interested in.
And does that inform the international legal scrutiny on that as well? Does that public attention translate directly into the legal consequences?
It's the ability to make political interventions that I think is probably more influenced by public attention or the willingness to make political interventions.
But all of these activities come down to being confident in the information you're getting and the intelligence that's being shared and all these things.
sort of complicated webs of information sharing and I think there's a strong question as to At what level of confidence are politicians and diplomats willing to make a political intervention before we get to the kind of question of accountability down the line? But I'm very confident that all of these conflicts are being very, very closely watched by lawyers and by diplomats.
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