Using nonviolent strategies to protect civilians: Ellen Furnari interview
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
15 July 2024
With large and small wars, and the threat of violence, common features within and between nation states, it's widely believed the threat of even greater violence, or armed peacekeepers, are the best ways to protect civilians.
US-based researcher and consultant Ellen Furnari has a different take. As the co-editor of the recently published edited collection Unarmed Civilian Protection: A New Paradigm for Protection and Human Security, Furnani tells Ian Sinclair what Unarmed Civilian Protection/Accompaniment (UCP/A) is, how it works and why it has some advantages over armed peacekeeping.
Ian Sinclair: Can you set out the main types of UCP/A that have been carried out?
Ellen Furnari: UCP/A is the protection of civilians by other civilians in situations of imminent, ongoing, or recent violent conflict without the use or threat of violence.
Human beings have been using unarmed, nonviolent strategies to protect themselves and others since time immemorial. So UCP/A is nothing new. While efforts to protect people have often been focused on the use or threat of violence, in reality nonviolence is endemic and effective. The oldest and most traditional forms of UCP/A occur in local communities when people do things like give each other early warnings when armed actors are on the way, or women accompany each other to gather wood, rather than going out alone, to decrease the incidence of rape and other attacks.
More recently, beginning in the 1980's organisations such as Peace Brigades International (PBI) and Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT) began working in areas of active conflict where it was perceived that internationals could provide protection specifically through their international status, often called protective accompaniment. The presence of internationals accompanying human rights defenders and other activists who received death threats due to their work, dramatically decreased the risk of harm for these activists, supporting their continued work. Accompaniment has also widened to include the practice of accompanying whole communities, where internationals live in a community that is threatened with violence and provide protection from attacks. Psychological and legal accompaniment supports people in specific contexts, not necessarily facing direct physical threats.
Other forms of UCP/A have included working directly with armed actors – whether national military, police or non-state armed actors. Through relationships developed over time, UCP/A efforts have often focused on encouraging these groups to respect international laws, behave in ways that are beneficial to the communities they purport to serve, and in other ways encourage or pressure them to desist from harming local communities.
Over time it has become clear that while international organisations often provide a particular kind of protection, much of the work is carried out by local people. International organizations have a particular role to play in terms of protective presence but of equal importance, enhancing the capacities of local efforts, connecting local groups to larger networks such as the protection cluster for that region, and drawing international attention to the violence. However, local people protecting their own communities is more sustainable and more rooted in local culture and knowledge.
While there are many contexts, types and methods, at core UCP/A is about using relationships, presence, and networks as vehicles for protection.
One of the contributors to the book, John Reuwer, notes "The thought that unarmed practitioners could offer protection in the physical sense might seem ridiculous to most people because they have little exposure to anything other than physical force when it comes to managing threatening situations." Can you explain how UCP/A is thought to work?
Relationships are the core vehicle and method for preventing violence. Research has demonstrated that this is recognised by both military and UCP/A actors. In local communities there are already webs of relationships in existence before violence begins, and often these relationships are essential for protective purposes – calling relatives and neighbors to give warnings, knowing who to include in a process to develop a peace community, knowing relatives in an armed group to talk with to prevent violence, involving religious leaders across divides for dialogue and problem solving, as examples.
National and international organisations must develop relationships across many, if not all, sectors. While some organisations eschew relationships with armed actors, others include government, militia, guerilla, rebel, and other armed actors in their networks. Felicity Gray notes "UCP practitioners use relationships as a protective mechanism. In contrast to using the threat of violence to compel a particular kind of behaviour, UCP practitioners develop and sustain relationships in order to encourage, deter or otherwise shape decisions made by those who have the potential to do harm to civilians."
And while it may sound naïve, relationships have been used by UCP/A organisations to pause fighting so civilians can get out of harm's way, prevent attacks on human rights defenders, pressure armed actors to engage in and respect ceasefires, achieve the release of forcefully recruited youth, prevent youth from engaging in retaliatory violence that would fuel further cycles of violence, protect women in IDP [Internally Displaced Person] camps from rape and attacks, protect farmers so they can work in their fields, prevent attacks on peace communities etc etc... This list could go on.
What are some successful examples of UCP/A in action?
In Palestine for many years several UCP/A organisations have accompanied children to school, to protect them from attacks and to help them cross checkpoints. Israeli women have been present at checkpoints to pressure Israeli soldiers to be nonviolent with Palestinians. Israelis and international volunteers have protected homes from demolition and helped farmers access their fields. While enormous violence continues, the presence of others in Palestinian communities has both prevented some violence and provided solidarity and encouragement.
In Anglophone Cameroon, recent research found that people in their communities protected themselves and each other in many ways including through early warning and early response efforts – that is warning each other about the movements of armed actors; developing plans ahead of time of where to run, what temporary shelter might be available. People use WhatsApp and other cellphone based systems, social media, as well as traditional methods such as a town crier. They have developed systems to investigate rumours so their actions are based more on facts, sometimes preventing displacements and others helping people know where to flee. And they have developed unarmed 'vigilante' groups to pressure others to be nonviolent and to protect their communities.
In the book's introduction you note that while UCP/A has never been undertaken at the scale of military peacekeeping, at its current size it still has several advantages and strengths compared to armed peacekeeping. What are these?
Because UCP/A is nonviolent and nonpartisan, it is more likely to be allowed (if not actually welcomed) by governments that resist foreign intervention. Because it is carried out by people living in communities (whether local or there temporarily) it is based on local analysis and is more flexible and responsive to changes in context. Being unarmed means being less or no threat to those who are armed, thus not inciting more violence. And being carried out by smaller organisations, it doesn't have the rigidness and bureaucracy of larger organisations and institutions.
What are the limitations of UCP? What is stopping UCP/A being scaled up to the numbers required for large peacekeeping operations?
The most fundamental barrier to expanding the use of UCP/A is the belief in the efficacy of violence. Despite the evidence that armed peacekeeping has many limitations and mixed effectiveness, it seems nearly universal to believe that violence is prevented by imposing the potential for greater violence. This belief blocks funding UCP/A to expand. And many of the large international organisations that fund peacekeeping are heavily influenced by the agendas of dominant global powers. The independence and nonpartisanship of many UCP/A organizations aims to support sufficient safety for local people to work out their conflicts, rather than impose agendas. And most basically, UCP/A depends on some regard for human life and the reluctance to kill unarmed civilians. As demonstrated in many contexts, not all armed groups have this restraint.
Unarmed Civilian Protection: A New Paradigm for Protection and Human Security is published by University of Bristol Press, priced £27.99.
No comments:
Post a Comment