The Board of the Henry Dunant Prize Foundation is pleased to award the Henry Dunant Prize – Research for the year 2026 to Alexandre Miliani for his dissertation « La famine comme méthode de guerre. Pour une lecture transitive de l’interdiction et de sa répression pénale en droit international » (Starvation as a method of warfare: towards a transitive reading of the prohibition and its criminal repression in international law; our translation).
The Prize was presented on 15 October 2026 in Geneva, at the Humanitarium of the International Committee of the Red Cross, at the same ceremony as the 2026 Henry Dunant Field Prize, awarded to Maryam Idris Abdulkadir.
Read the laudatio (in French), written by Professor Marco Sassòli and delivered by Ms Claudia Seymour, and Alexandre Miliani’s acceptance speech (in French). The dissertation is freely available (in French) from the Paris-Panthéon-Assas University digital library. Watch the ceremony in English or in French.
Biography
Alexandre Miliani is a funded doctoral candidate in international law at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, affiliated with the Institut des hautes études internationales (IHEI) and a member of the Research Centre on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (CRDH). He wrote his prize-winning dissertation at Paris-Panthéon-Assas under the supervision of Professor Julia Grignon.
Since 2025 he has been preparing a doctoral thesis entitled “International Criminal Justice Confronted with International Humanitarian Law” (« La justice pénale internationale confrontée au droit international humanitaire »), supervised by Professors Sébastien Touzé and Julia Grignon. His research lies at the meeting point of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international criminal law.
Summary of the dissertation
The prohibition of starving civilians as a method of warfare protects civilians in many of today’s armed conflicts, yet it is often violated and its scope remains contested. The dissertation examines the prohibition both as a rule of IHL and as the objective element of the corresponding war crime.
The author observes that the dominant reading of the prohibition, among States and scholars, has been shaped by international criminal law. That reading makes the unlawfulness of conduct depend on proof of a specific intent, primary or at least incidental, to starve civilians. The dissertation argues against interpreting IHL through the lens of criminal law in this way.
Based on the text of the treaties, the author proposes instead a transitive reading of the prohibited conduct under IHL. Starvation is understood as a process of deprivation: what is prohibited is the conduct of starving civilians, not only a given result. For the war crime, the dissertation places the emphasis on the perpetrator’s knowledge of the consequences of his conduct. A detailed analysis of the elements of the crime, in the light of the rules on treaty interpretation, supports this approach.
The work shows that the protection of war victims can be strengthened without new rules, through a rigorous and innovative interpretation of existing law.
From his acceptance speech
At the ceremony, Alexandre Miliani summed up his argument with a point of grammar: “The law does not prohibit famine as a state; the prohibition targets the act of starving” [our translation]. Rereading A Memory of Solferino, he found Dunant already describing the deprivation of objects indispensable to survival, and he stressed the researcher’s duty to engage in the face of disinformation. He dedicated his prize to the memory of his Algerian grandfather, Hassen Miliani, a pharmacist, and to those for whom starvation is a daily reality.