Nadia Murad on Bearing Witness and the Long Road to Justice

Our fall 2025 Buffett Symposium on youth-led peacebuilding brought together activists, politicians, NGO leaders, and negotiators from across the world to explore how youth are transforming the future of conflict resolution and justice.

This conversation brought together Nadia Murad, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Northwestern University political science professor Wendy Pearlman for a wide-ranging discussion on survival, justice, and the responsibilities of bearing witness. Drawing on her experience as a survivor of the ISIS genocide of the Yazidi people — during which she lost her mother, six brothers, and other family members, and was herself taken into sexual slavery — Murad reflected on what it has meant to transform personal trauma into advocacy, and on the long road toward accountability for crimes against humanity that the international community continues to fail to prevent.

Panelists included:

• ⁠Nadia Murad⁠, human rights activist, author, and founder of ⁠Nadia's Initiative⁠, and recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize

• ⁠Wendy Pearlman⁠, Jane Long Professor of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

  
  

Key Takeaways

• Survivors who share their stories do so at enormous personal cost, and those who document or investigate conflict-related sexual violence have an ethical obligation to treat them with care. Murad described how survivors in displacement camps were repeatedly interviewed without informed consent, had their faces shared against their wishes, and were asked to relive their trauma by multiple interviewers in a single day — experiences that led many women to stop sharing their stories altogether. In response, Murad helped develop the Murad Code, a set of ten principles for anyone documenting rape as a weapon of war, co-created with more than 1,000 survivors. The Code has since been translated into multiple languages and adopted in conflict zones, including Ukraine.

• Justice is not a complement to peace — it is a precondition for it. Murad described how, after escaping captivity, she deliberately sought an alternative to the cycle of revenge that has long characterized conflict in her region, finding it in international legal accountability. She has since pursued cases against individual perpetrators across multiple countries, as well as a lawsuit against the French cement company Lafarge for funding ISIS operations. While she acknowledged that the number of ISIS members held accountable remains far smaller than the losses her own family has suffered, she emphasized that each case delivers hope to survivors and communities — and that without accountability, minorities in Iraq have little basis to trust they will be protected in the future.

• In a moment of moral crisis, doing nothing is also a choice. Murad reflected on the family that risked their lives to help her escape, and on the many more who turned fleeing Yazidis over to ISIS. She argued that bravery does not require being a victim — it requires using whatever tools one has, whether education, voice, or passion, to act against injustice rather than look away. On the nature of courage itself, Murad was clear that being brave does not mean being unafraid. She described her own fear as a constant companion throughout her journey — from her captivity, to the decision to go public with her story, to the ongoing work of pursuing justice — and said that what matters is not the absence of fear but the willingness to act in spite of it. She also insisted that bravery takes many forms: those who share their stories publicly are brave, but so are the survivors who carry their trauma privately, protecting themselves and their families in the only way available to them.