International Community role in adapting military doctrine

The United States, the United Kingdom and NATO are not alone in producing doctrinal approaches to POC. William Durch and Allison Giffen (2010: 21–84) suggest that both the European Union and the African Union have made some progress in developing guidelines and operationalising POC. The European Union has produced a range of guidelines and has also gained some experience of POC in peacekeeping with deployments in both Congos and in Chad whilst in 2009–2010 the African Union developed its ‘Draft Guidelines for the Protection of Civilians by African Union Peace Support Missions.’

Whereas NATO has tended to address civilian protection either in terms of IHL or as a component of a broader political and military strategy, the United Nations has taken a different approach, focusing more on civilian protection as a discrete aim in itself, although this is a relatively new development. Historically the UN Security Council, even in the course of enforcement action, has generally sought to end wars or force compliance with a political objective rather than ‘to intervene directly to save civilian lives’ (Holt and Berkman 2006: 6).

The first landmark Resolution was UN Security Council Resolution 1270 (1999) authorising peacekeepers in Sierra Leone to use force to protect civilians ‘under imminent threat’ of physical violence. In 2006, the Security Council passed Resolution 1674, ‘committing it to take action to protect civilians in armed conflict.’ It also increasingly established civilian protection elements in the mandates of specific missions: MONUC/MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), UNAMID and UNMIS in the Sudan and ACRO in Afghanistan. Eight current missions are explicitly mandated by the UN Security Council to protect civilians. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO)/Department of Field Support (DFS) Concept of Operations (2010) describes protecting civilians as ‘perhaps the single largest contribution a mission can make’, and the UN Security Council has asserted that civilian protection must be considered a priority in the allocation of capacity and resources (UN Security Council 2009).

Despite these developments civilian protection has not been without controversy, particularly through its linkage with the R2P agenda. Whilst several authors argue that civilian protection and R2P are different, the concept of civilian protection has ‘become deeply associated with R2P which has ‘polarised the UN community with strong opposing views between the North and the South’ (De Coning et al. 2008: 5). The association has also risked creating a sense of growing militarisation in civilian protection approaches. These differences are mirrored within the UN Secretariat, where DPKO staff themselves tend to link R2P and POC - echoing the position of states supportive of R2P such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. In contrast, Lie and Carvalho suggest that the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) staff ‘are highly reluctant to R2P due to its strong militaristic and political connotations. To OCHA staff there is a concern of conceptual equation between R2P and POC, while they also understand the proliferation of R2P and its reception at DPKO being due to its framing as militaristic and interventionist and thus presumably easier to operationalize than POC’ (Lie and Carvalho 2009). Interestingly, OCHA staff interviewed for this project did not accept such a difference within the UN Secretariat.

Despite the tendency to presume linkages, several authors seek to establish clear differences between civilian protection and R2P. The Asia Pacific Centre, for example, draws a distinction between two types of situations in which the protection of civilians occurs. The first is where ‘[c]ivilian protection [is] an important, but not primary, mission objective operation’ whilst the second is where protecting civilians is ‘clearly the primary objective where missions are mandated to use all necessary means to prevent or halt genocide, ethnic cleansing or systematic and widespread abuses.’ The former is characterised as civilian protection whilst the latter is characteristic of R2P norms. Charles Hunt draws a slightly different distinction, arguing that whilst civilian protection and R2P may rooted in the same principles, they remain distinct, ‘in essence, R2P focuses on preventing and stopping the most horrendous crimes (genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity) whether they occur within the context of armed conflicts or not. The concept of civilian protection focuses on the broader list of specific threats, vulnerabilities and needs of civilian populations in armed conflicts, from physical security to food security and other humanitarian needs’ (Hunt 2008: 1–4).

The controversies arising from the perceived linkage of R2P and civilian protection extend to peacekeepers’ rules of engagement governing the use of force. When UN unofficial policy became ‘that when peacekeepers saw violence perpetrated against civilians, they should be “presumed to be authorised to stop it, within their means”’, this was viewed by many as invoking Chapter VII enforcement provisions through the back door as well as potentially impacting overall mission impartiality and state sovereignty (Blatter 2011: 3).