‘This is how we survived’: Civilian agency and humanitarian protection

Abstract

The security of civilians in contemporary conflicts continues to tragically elude humanitarians. Scholars attribute this crisis in protection to macro-structural deficiencies, such as the failure of states to comply with international conventions and norms and the inability of international institutions to successfully reduce violence by warring parties. While offering important insights into humanitarianism and its limits, this scholarship overlooks the potential of endogenous sources of protection – the agency of civilians. On the basis of a case study of northern Uganda, we identify and discuss several civilian self-protection strategies, including (a) attempts to appear neutral, (b) avoidance and (c) accommodation of armed actors, and argue that each of these is shaped by access to local knowledge and networks. We illustrate how forced displacement of civilians to ‘protected villages’ limited access to local knowledge and, in turn, the options available to civilians in terms of self-protection. Analyses of the intersections of aid and civilian agency in conflict zones would afford scholars of humanitarianism greater explanatory insight into questions of civilian protection. The findings from our case study also suggest ways in which aid agencies could adopt protection strategies that empower – or at least do not obstruct – the often-successful protection strategies adopted by civilians.

Understanding Why and How Civilians Resort to Self-Protection in Armed Conflict

“…He also found that physical characteristics of the area, operationalized as the presence of a motorable road, increased the probability that people would flee and that political affiliation also affected the decision to flee the site of conflict. Baines and Paddon (:238) also describe how “tens of thousands of children and youth” would flee to urban centers to escape rebel attacks and abduction during the height of the Ugandan civil war. They argue that Ugandan civilians' access to local knowledge was critical to their use of self‐protection strategies and state that forcible relocation into camps caused them to lose access to this “vital” information and, consequently, weakened their ability to self‐protect (:241).…”

Beyond the ‘RtoP’: Responsibility as doing, being and sharing

“…Chandler (2012) prefers human security on the basis of non-coercive practices that bolsters the resilience of both the state and society through empowerment and capability building. Similarly, Baines and Paddon (2012) suggest that civilians should be empowered in their adoption of self-protection activities.…”

“…Scholars belonging to the critical school also expose how the RtoP is linked to power, more specifically to Western domination and interventionism (Cunliffe, 2010;Weinert, 2011;Baines and Paddon, 2012;Chandler, 2012;Abboud and Muller, 2013). Bulley (2010) problematizes the morality of doing responsibility by ways of RtoP, arguing that forceful intervention is inhumane.…”

Evaluating the United Nation’s Agenda for Atrocity Prevention: Prospects for the International Regulation of Internal Security

“…In doing so, such models also de-emphasise the benefits of alternative approaches to prevention through empowering local agency and resilience of populations where history has proven that local strategies of escape and survival have prevented the greatest numbers of deaths from mass atrocity crimes (Mayerson, 2014). Indeed a number of scholars have begun to focus on agency where selfprotection strategies are demonstrated to be crucial for survival well before international assistance is forthcoming (Baines & Paddon, 2012;Kaplan, 2013;Mégret, 2009) The implications of a relational approach to mass atrocities for assessing the current UN atrocity prevention strategy is to question the general "nature" of a state as prone to such crimes based on an assumed causal relationship between given state structures with the likelihood of atrocity crimes. A relational understanding of mass-atrocity crimes is to some extent counter-intuitive to the central thrust of the UN's current approach to mass-atrocity prevention, as it argues for the need to recognise that both resistors and participants of violence are found in the same society, that violence ebbs and flows with peaks, and that broad social participation (alliances/coalitions) are needed for such extensive violence to take place.…”