Revisiting Humanitarian Safe Areas for Civilian Protection

Orchard, Phil

doi:10.1163/19426720-02001005

Cited by 16 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…These issues require a more systematic discussion of why this politicization, manipulation and violence is instrumental in South Sudan’s conflicts, and thus what is creating the need for protection in the first place. Accordingly, researchers and practitioners continually grapple with the problems of the ‘underlying logic’ of safe areas and civilian protection: Like Hyndman (2003: 182), Orchard (2014: 56–57) notes that ‘warring factions ignore these consensual arrangements of humanitarian and conflict law, and peace-keepers [fail] to take into account the goals of these belligerents; in particular, the issue of direct civilian targeting’. More specifically, there are three lacunae to which scholars and practitioners alike need to pay attention: how local populations are perceived as a resource in warfare; the overt and strategic targeting of communities in personalized violence and proxy wars; and the historical blurring of lines between categories of civilians, rebels and state military actors.…”

Section: Civilian Protection and Targetingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who are the civilians in the wars of South Sudan?

Kindersley

Rolandsen

2019

Security Dialogue

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This longitudinal study explores the place of the civilian populations in the wars of what is now South Sudan. Using a broad range of empirical evidence, we trace the evolution of conflict practices and norms from the 1800s to today. Two main insights stand out: First, since the initial colonial incursions, local residents have been strategic assets to be managed and exploited, and thus populations are not just legitimate targets in conflicts but also key resources to capture and control. Second, violent governance structures and practices have been created and reformed through these generations of coercive rule and civil wars. These two issues have undermined, and redefined, the distinction between military and civilian actors. This analysis does not excuse the massive and systematic violence against the general population of these countries. However, without due consideration of these deeply engraved historical systems and logics of violent governance, today’s brutal conflicts become incomprehensible, and there is a significant risk that international approaches to mitigating this violence – such as Protection of Civilians camps – become incorporated into these systems rather than challenging them.

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Section: Civilian Protection and Targetingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who are the civilians in the wars of South Sudan?

Kindersley

Rolandsen

2019

Security Dialogue

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“…The spatialities of "intervention encounters" (Gilbert, 2020), for example, are shaped by international organizations' securitization policies, from the creation of separate compound infrastructures that are inaccessible to local residents (Smirl, 2008(Smirl, , 2015Weigand & Andersson, 2019), to the production of security zone maps (Higate & Henry, 2009;Lemay-Hébert, 2018) that dictate the circulation and behaviors of international staff (Wallis, 2020). Zoning, or the creation of zones, is a frequently deployed spatial practice, used by actors in a range of contexts, from peace zones developed by local communities in the midst of armed conflict (Hancock & Mitchell, 2007;Kaplan, 2017;Macaspac, 2018) to internationally designated safe areas or safe zones for civilian protection during war (Hyndman, 2003;Orchard, 2014;Yamashita, 2004).…”

Section: Spatial Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peace geographies and the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies: Integrating parallel conversations through spatial practices

Macaspac

Moore

2022

Geography Compass

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Scholarship on the dynamics of peace and conflict is in the midst of a geographic renaissance. Within the discipline there is growing interest among political geographers in theorizing and exploring "geographies of peace". At the same time, the interdisciplinary field of peace and conflict studies is experiencing a "spatial turn" whereby geographic ideas are increasingly engaged. This article provides an overview of these parallel conversations and proposes the concept of spatial practices as a framework for bringing them together.Elements of this framework can be seen within peace geographies and the spatial turn research, and they resonate with broader conversations taking place in the discipline of geography and beyond.

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“…In this article, the term "safe area" is used as an umbrella term for all phenomena and conceptions as long as they are covered by the aforementioned definition. It is however argued in Hering (2018) that within the "safe area" definition a distinction between the underlying logic of protection (belligerent's consent, credible force and international legitimacy, see also Orchard 2014) as well as between different sizes (large-scale "safe zones" and small-scale "safe havens", see also Posen 1996, p. 77 f.) can account for several other existing safe area variations (e.g.…”

Section: Defining the Phenomenon Of Safe Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Phil Orchard (2014Orchard ( , p. 55, 2018, for instance, places safe areas directly in a context of on-going debates regarding the protection of civilians and the responsibility to protect (R2P; also Jacob 2018 and Birnie and Welsh 2018, see section on migration studies, could be named here). Orchard also highlights that safe areas largely disappeared after Rwanda and Bosnia in the mid-1990s (ibid.).…”

Section: A Focus On the Protection Of Civiliansmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safe areas for the protection of civilians. An overview of existing research and scholarship

Hering

2020

Z Friedens und Konflforsch

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Safe areas for the protection of civilians remain a possible instrument in the foreign policy-making toolbox. Lately, this was highlighted by calls for a safe area in Syria by German chancellor Angela Merkel and defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. Yet, the subsequent debates demonstrated that many policy-makers, pundits and scholars lack a detailed knowledge about the concept. They further showed that various different perspectives on the idea of safe areas exist. This article therefore provides a comprehensive and inclusive account of the academic engagement with the topic of safe areas. It demonstrates that some arguments focus on the (geo)political dynamics of safe areas, whereas others emphasise the potential to protect civilians. It further presents the legal codification of consent-based safe areas in the Geneva Conventions as well as debates about the legality of enforced, post-Cold War safe area cases. Regarding the research on displacement and safe areas, the majority tends to focus on the containment effects, although some highlight the capacity of safe areas as an alternative to flight. Overall, however, the article concludes that recent and conceptual academic engagement with safe areas remains rare and that a safe area perspective is missing in relevant current empirical cases. More research that contributes to the conceptual development of safe areas or to the assessment of current empirical examples, for instance in South Sudan, is necessary.

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Revisiting Humanitarian Safe Areas for Civilian Protection

Cited by 16 publications

References 19 publications

Who are the civilians in the wars of South Sudan?

Who are the civilians in the wars of South Sudan?

Peace geographies and the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies: Integrating parallel conversations through spatial practices

Safe areas for the protection of civilians. An overview of existing research and scholarship

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