Military Humanitarian Protection

The slow evolution of civilian protection as a shared objective between international military and peacekeeping forces and humanitarian actors presents both opportunities and challenges. The challenges include, above all else, the need to develop synergies to ameliorate civilian suffering in situations of armed conflict whilst also limiting the potentially harmful consequences of full integration. This presents real dilemmas for humanitarian organisations seeking to maximise protection outcomes for the civilian population whilst also maintaining the perceptions of neutrality and impartiality that are so vital to their broader assistance strategies. Clearly this difficulty is most apparent in situations where the international military forces are perceived to be party to the conflict.

However it is essential to interact with armed actors not only to advocate for compliance with their duties as arms bearers and responsibility holders under international law, but also to maintain an understanding of mutual roles and mandates. It is also possible to manage the risks of engaging military or peacekeeping forces in protection strategies alongside humanitarian actors; saving lives requires a more coordinated approach. Elsewhere Metcalfe (2012) argues that the key to this is consistent and transparent dialogue that explains the appropriate parameters for interaction. Similarly it is vital that humanitarians are included from the earliest stages of the military or peacekeeping deployment in order to shape the military understanding of the nature of protection threats as well as the limits and potential of action. Even in situations where humanitarian principles are compromised by direct interaction between humanitarian organisations and military, she suggests there is still scope for interaction, arguing that ‘contact may be made indirectly through interlocutors such as OCHA, the protection cluster or working group on the ground, and more detailed guidance on information-sharing, confidentiality and informed consent would help minimize risks to sources and victims.’

In terms of trends in the military contribution to civilian protection, one of the most significant challenges lies in converting civilian protection from a low-priority objective to an operational-level priority. In terms of the development of doctrine and guidance on this, it is clear that civilian protection is gradually insinuating itself into a range of military doctrines, although progress has been remarkably slow. The United Nations leads the development both of an operational concept as well as efforts to promote civilian protection as an operational priority.

NATO and NATO member states have been slow to produce doctrines that operationalises the concept, although fragments of a viable approach, combining restrictions on arms bearers and support to the civilian population, could be fashioned into a viable operational concept. However, the challenge is to produce greater coherence between the disparate elements and to make civilian protection a more central component of doctrine - in other words to provide a unifying idea around which a concept of operations can coalesce. Whilst the British doctrine appears to go further than that of other NATO states in producing an operational concept, it lags considerably behind the UN approach.

More positively, most military doctrines are part of a firm consensus that civilian protection requires a ‘whole of mission’ or ‘comprehensive approach’ - in part due to its multifaceted nature and also to develop synergies between scarce mission resources. Equally, there is almost universal recognition that civilian protection planning and civilian agencies need to be incorporated early in the mission planning cycle, particularly if it is to offer an approach that is anything more than reactive.