Launch of the Stockholm Manual: A Practitioner’s Guide to Conducting IHL Assessments and Advocacy
24 September 2025Today, the IHL Centre is proud to launch the Stockholm Manual: A Practitioner’s Guide to Conducting IHL Assessments and Advocacy. The Manual is an innovative, practical tool designed to help humanitarian actors, journalists, and other key stakeholders including policy makers, the media and civil society organisations in their humanitarian, diplomacy and advocacy efforts.
The Stockholm Manual helps users to:
- Understand the relevant provisions of IHL and apply them to their context;
- Assess whether parties to conflict are likely to be failing to carry out their legal obligations;
- Incorporate IHL-based analysis into advocacy, reporting, and humanitarian action to influence the behaviour of armed actors and reduce harm to civilians.
Around the world, from Sudan to Gaza to the DRC, we are witnessing the dire consequences of armed actors disregarding the provisions of IHL, with especially devastating consequences for civilians. The ripple effects of these IHL violations, such as attacks on hospitals and schools, forced displacement, and the denial of humanitarian relief, extend across generations. Faced with these challenges, the need for the humanitarian community to promote respect for IHL has never been more urgent.
The Stockholm Manual can be used without any prior legal training or background. Structured around categories of civilian harm, it starts with practitioners’ own observations in the field and provides step by step guidance to help them link these observations to IHL standards and advocacy messaging. This approach bridges the gap between legal frameworks and the realities of conflict settings.
The Stockholm Manual has also been developed using an inclusive lens, ensuring that civilian harm is understood to encompass a wide range of different demographic groups, who may be affected in disparate ways by violations of IHL. The Manual is the result of years of research, reflection, and collaboration, developed with the generous support of the European Union (European Commission Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), alongside extensive input from humanitarian and academic organisations worldwide.
You can download the full Manual here:
For any feedback, comments, or suggestions on the Manual, or to request a training session, please contact: sm@ihlcentre.org
