Please note: This is an online event.

Please join us for another session of the Readings / Australian Red Cross book club on the laws and impact of war.

In this session we are joined by Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Oxford University to discuss his latest book, Solferino 21: Warfare, Civilians and Humanitarians in the Twenty First Century.Solferino 21 examines how the world is ‘passing from an age of industrial warfare to a new era of computerized warfare, and a renewed risk of great power conflict.’ Slim’s book draws on the founding moment of the modern Red Cross Movement– the Battle of Solferino– to demonstrate the changing nature of conflict in this century. Slim analyses the changing landscape of tech, politics, law, and the strategy of warfare, how civilians suffer and adapt during modern warfare, and then critiques today’s humanitarian system which needs to be less colonial and more locally led.

Dr Hugo Slim is a Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford, and also at the Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. His career has combined academia, policymaking, diplomacy and frontline humanitarian operations. Hugo has worked for Save the Children, the United Nations, Oxfam GB, hd Centre, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). His earlier books include Humanitarian Ethics: The Morality of Aid in War and Disaster (Hurst, 2015) and Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War (Hurst 2007). He is a Visiting Professor at Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University and Academic Director of the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights.

The ‘laws and impact of war’ book club is a partnership between Readings and the Victorian International Humanitarian Law Advisory Committee of the Australian Red Cross.

International humanitarian law (IHL), also known as the laws of war, is the body of law that applies during war to protect those who are not, or who are no longer participating in hostilities, and that seeks to limit the means and methods of warfare. Find out more by visiting the website of Australian Red Cross.

This event is free to attend but bookings are essential.

Please book here.

How to ‘attend’ a virtual event at Readings

This event commences online at 7pm using the video conferencing platform Zoom.

To book for this event, you must provide your email address.

To ensure the Zoom event stays private, participants will be emailed a unique zoom link and a password 30 minutes before the event begins on the day of the event. Please check your email.

All bookings for online events will be closed one hour before the event begins.

You do not need to have a Zoom account to join a meeting, but mobile users will need to download the Zoom app for their device. Desktop and laptop users can either download the Zoom application or access the event via their web browser.