The 1990s and 2000s were decades in which the international community more explicitly committed to the protection of civilians as a normative and policy imperative. This embrace of protection stemmed from a variety of factors, including a political context in the United Nations (UN) Security Council that enabled unified action, a distribution of power that supported the international application of human rights norms and an acknowledgement of the changing character of armed conflict and its intensifying lethality for civilian populations. Whether through formal, thematic agendas at the UN, such as the Protection of Civilians in peacekeeping and the Responsibility to Protect, or more operational shifts from needs-based to rights-based models of humanitarian assistance, many national governments, inter-governmental bodies, and humanitarian organisations re-cast and re-organised their activities in explicit support of civilian protection.
For much of this period, international protection programming was largely ‘top-down’, focusing on direct action by external actors, such as national militaries, peacekeepers, humanitarians and human rights advocates. More recently, however, scepticism about this ‘international first’ approach has set in. This was in part due to the perceived failures of military interventions to protect in contexts such as Afghanistan and Libya – where the challenges and risks of direct external protection were on full display (Peksen Citation2012, Kuperman Citation2013, Menon Citation2016); but also due to criticisms from local communities and organisations about approaches that continued to privilege international actors in policy design (Firchow Citation2018, Pincock et al. Citation2020, Autesserre Citation2021, Mac Ginty Citation2021). The calls at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit to ‘localise’ the design and delivery of humanitarian aid, as well as the UN Secretary General’s acknowledgement in his 2023 New Agenda for Peace that there are significant limits to what UN missions can actually deliver, reflect a growing tendency of international actors to see themselves as ‘second best’ actors, who need to instead empower local players in meeting the complex needs of civilians.
Our edited volume, Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings, reflects and contributes to this desire to better understand ‘bottom-up’ approaches to protection. The volume came together over a period of nearly five years, in which we (the four editors) wove together and advanced our intersecting interests on civilian protection, drawing from different sub-fields of International Relations and Political Science. Two of the co-editors, Emily Paddon Rhoads and Jennifer Welsh, are International Relations (IR) scholars who were seeking to deepen their work on civilian protection (Paddon Rhoads and Welsh Citation2019, Paddon Rhoads and Sutton Citation2020), specifically through engagement with and advancing the growing literature on ‘civilian self-protection’ – that is, the actions taken by civilians during armed conflict in response to ‘direct threats to [their] physical security’ (Jose and Medie Citation2015, p. 516). We (Paddon Rhoads and Welsh) had observed a variety of humanitarian actors – including the International Committee of the Red Cross, Oxfam, and a range of refugee organisations – reconfiguring their programmes to respond to and support civilian self-protection (CSP). We had also studied the changing practices in UN peacekeeping at the field level, with policy guidance explicitly calling for peacekeepers to support the self-protection strategies and capacities of local communities (UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations Citation2017, Citation2023).
In the autumn of 2018, as part of an ongoing project funded by the European Research Council, along with another Co-Editor, Juan Masullo, we sought to bring our emerging ideas into conversation with a set of scholars from the field of civil war studies who were focused on understanding the agency of civilian populations, and how they seek to engage with armed actors and protect themselves in civil conflicts. This first exploratory workshop, held at the European University Institute in Florence, highlighted the rich body of work from this sub-field of Comparative Politics that has analysed and categorised civilian individual and collective responses to conflict dynamics and begun to theorise the conditions under which different strategies are adopted (Baines and Paddon Citation2012, Barter Citation2014, Arjona Citation2015, Citation2016, Kaplan Citation2017, Masullo Citation2017, Citation2021, Schon Citation2020, Krause Citation2018, Jentzsch Citation2022).
A further co-editor, Jana Krause, had long studied civilian agency and resilience-building in communal conflicts and the gender dimensions of such agency (Krause Citation2018, Citation2019). Building on this, and funded by the Folke Bernadotte Academy and the European Research Council, her subsequent research in South Sudan and Myanmar sought to map the repertoires, impacts and legacies of protective civilian agency in order to understand the consequences for local resilience and international peacebuilding actors. Krause had observed how international NGOs, such as Nonviolent Peaceforce, implemented Unarmed Civilian Protection programming in South Sudan and Myanmar, learning how women groups broadened the very notion of protection but also how complex conflict dynamics severely limited civilian protective choices.
Drawing on their previous research insights, co-editors Krause and Masullo decided to design a comparative project that would empirically explore how civilians protect themselves in diverse violent settings, why they choose certain forms of protection over others and what might be the immediate and longer-term consequences of their actions.
At a subsequent workshop at McGill University’s Centre for International Peace and Security Studies in January 2020, co-sponsored by the University of Amsterdam and the Folke Bernadotte Academy, we convened a set of leading scholars from different academic domains to share initial drafts of their papers and situated them in a broader dialogue with practitioners from non-governmental organisations and the United Nations, who were actively working with civilians in their self-protection strategies. One of the most striking aspects of this larger workshop was the range of methodologies and perspectives used to study and understand expressions of civilian agency in contemporary conflict and the benefit gained from sustained fieldwork. The COVID-19 pandemic prevented a second in-person meeting to refine the papers, but through a virtual meeting in October 2020 the four of us were able to share with contributors our emerging conceptual framework – particularly our definitions of ‘civilian’, ‘protection’ and ‘agency’ – and to engage them in identifying forms of civilian protective agency that we would showcase in the volume. The volume is the outcome of these research interests and academic exchanges.
We are grateful to Ashley Jackson for her insightful review of the book and for supporting our belief in the need for an organised collection of interdisciplinary research on civilian agency, protection and violent dynamics that is easily accessible to scholars and practitioners. As Jackson notes, the volume is diverse, reflecting both the process of its creation and our conviction that a deep understanding of civilian protection practices required including a broad range of violent contexts and geographical spaces. As she aptly notes, embracing a complex and nuanced understanding of ‘civilians’ and their agency is also essential to avoid ‘romanticising’ civilian actions. This is perhaps most evident in the book’s section on violent/armed civilian responses, detailing the formation of vigilante and militia groups as expressions of civilian protective agency. While civilian armed initiatives, such as community-initiated militias, can offer effective protection to communities, they risk exacerbating armed conflicts and even collusion with the armed actors that initially threatened civilians (Ben HamoYeger and Masullo Citation2023, Jentzsch Citation2023). However, some of the volume’s contributors also highlight how even non-violent forms of civilian protective agency can put other civilians at risk, such as when they align with dubious protection providers who profit from selling ‘protection’ to one category of civilians but not others (Verweijen Citation2023).
As Jackson points out, including armed mobilisation in our scope of civilian agency ‘fundamentally challenges, and destabilises, the definition of civilian as we understand it in international law’. This is an important observation because the legal definition of ‘civilian’ (or non-combatant) provides civilians with a circumscribed range of protection: those who do not directly participate in hostilities as non-combatants cannot be intentionally targeted under the laws of war but may be injured or killed (through so-called collateral damage) and endure destruction of their livelihoods and infrastructure. However, as several chapters in the volume show, civilians may still resort to armed resistance when they deem it the most effective or the sole protective strategy for survival – in part because of the absence of other sources of protection. As Jackson thoughtfully notes, our line of argumentation opens up new research questions on the definition and role of the ‘civilian’ and related notions of ‘civility’ and ‘citizen-ness’, thus challenging traditional distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. Even if engaging in forms of armed protection might challenge their status as ‘civilians’ under some definitions, these choices are of key analytical importance for the study of civilian agency and the range of protection strategies as they are made by civilians uninvolved in the hostilities.
In theory, as Jackson observes, international efforts to protect civilians ‘would be much more effective if protection actors were to understand local survival strategies and build on them’. However, cultivating a deep understanding of civilian experiences, preferences, and needs is not an easy task and all too often remains a ‘radical act’ as several of our contributors underscore. Our volume, therefore, offers relatively few positive examples of effective external or international support to local civilian protective agency – but see our last section ‘The Role of External Actors’. Similarly, beyond exploring the gender dimensions of civilian protective agency (Braun and Stalone Citation2023, Zulver Citation2023), the volume also does not fully capture the intersectional expressions of civilian protective agency. This is an area that we highlight in the Conclusion as ripe for further research and one that requires a more conscious effort to collect and analyse disaggregated data.
We hope that the volume lays a strong foundation for broader and design-based comparative research on civilian protective agency, focusing not only on the causes of civilian actions and the consequences for their well-being and conflict trajectories but also on understanding the meanings that civilians themselves attach to their protective actions. We also hope our interdisciplinary study of civilian protective agency can inform international actors’ search for alternatives to ‘top-down’ protection that, aware of risks and potential unintended consequences (Welsh et al. Citation2023), will truly empower local actors and more effectively respond to the pressing protection challenges that civilians continue to encounter in their everyday lives.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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