Growth in military roles in protection of civilians

The evolution of protection strategies within the humanitarian community has also been echoed in militaries, particularly those deployed under UN auspices. Since 1999, when the UN Security Council first authorised peacekeeping troops to use force to protect civilians under imminent threat of violence, the Security Council has increasingly mandated peacekeepers this right.1 The language of ‘civilian protection’ is now embedded in the majority of peacekeeping mandates2, either as an implicit or explicit function, and UN peacekeeping missions have often innovated creatively in establishing viable concepts of operations (O’Callaghan and Pantuliano 2007).

The concept has also become increasingly important within other international organisations with crisis management roles, such as NATO, the African Union (AU) and the European Union. NATO’s operations in both Libya and Afghanistan have raised the significance of POC as a specific objective (i.e., rather than as a component of regime change or a counter insurgency strategy) and states like the United States and United Kingdom have increasingly placed the emphasis on conflict prevention in their national security strategies.

As a consequence of these trends, the military protection of civilians in armed conflict has increasingly become both more important and complex. The protection elements in the mandates of peacekeeping missions (UN and other international forces) extend beyond IHL obligations placed on the military to uphold distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. Such mandates focus more on establishing a safe environment, linking military conceptions of ‘protection’ to notions understood by humanitarian organisations and potentially creating ‘new areas where the lines between humanitarian and military [action] are blurred’ (SCHR 2010: 6). The practical challenges of ensuring the physical protection of people have also combined with normative shifts such as the increasing acceptance of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) to transform the problem from an essentially humanitarian one into one that is perceived to require a complex mix of political, humanitarian and often military responses, particularly in the context of integrated mission approaches.

Military Doctrinal Adaptation

Broadly speaking, military doctrines have tended to touch on protection in a piecemeal fashion, treating it as an obligation of arms bearers to draw distinctions between, on the one hand, combatants and military objectives and, on the other, civilians and civil objectives (Beadle 2010: 7). Counter-insurgency strategies routinely advocate separating civilian populations from insurgents and creating conditions for the extension of government authority and enablement of economic growth. It also features as an element of stabilisation doctrines’ promotion of the extension of host nation governance and the protection of key persons and institutions (Gordon 2010). Whilst practically all military counter-insurgency and stabilisation doctrines enshrine elements of a POC strategy, there is remarkably little on the mechanics of how this would translate into a broader POC doctrine.

Several of the more recent publications described below have begun to frame protection as a more discrete component that is key to both stabilisation and counter insurgency, often in terms borrowed from the concept of human security. Nevertheless, its generally fragmentary treatment makes it difficult for POC to crystalise into a coherent framework - a concept of operations - that is readily understood by soldiers and politicians alike.