Protecting people from harm is crucial if we are to establish a long-term peace and change existing structures of violence. If people feel safe, they are able to make their community stronger, resolve conflicts peacefully, work to protect human rights in their community, produce more food and create homes where children grow up, get schooling and recover from the trauma of experiencing harm.

Protecting people is important, but it's not a technical practice that is separate from everything else we do in the same space or to solve the problems causing the threats. We saw at the start of this book that protection doesn't sit neatly in a single space. Its contested nature emerges from different ways of thinking and mechanisms, is a component of several global debates and challenges and exists across multiple levels of society, which means protection is a complex system that sometimes produces unintended results and has the potential to play a role in reducing the causes of violence. Thinking and talking about protection requires that we think about the threats and sources of harm. Protecting civilians is only necessary because violence is endemic and widely accepted, and people are vulnerable due to systems of oppression. We cannot discuss protection or peace without really understanding and including the reasons why civilians need protection from violence. When we see the protection system, the causes are linked, and we include them as actors in the mechanisms and approaches.

This book has sought to demonstrate that unarmed civilian protection (UCP) works, and has become a catalyst for new thinking.