Why do we need a book looking at how we are protecting civilians from violence? Surely the desire and processes for protecting people from harm are good whatever they are, and necessary, and we should be celebrating that they exist and that we can say we care about people who need some extra help.

However, current protection mechanisms are insufficient, and with global health threats, climate change and ongoing political violence, the likelihood is that protection needs will increase, which requires learning more about what we do now, how to improve it, finding options for the future and thinking more broadly about civilian protection.

In this book, I propose thinking about protection as a contested concept, without a single agreed definition. By looking at protection as a contested concept, the book offers ways to generate new thinking and ideas about protection.

There is no way that current international efforts to protect civilians and prevent them from being harmed can reach anywhere near the scale of the demand. Realizing the scale of the need quickly reveals the crisis.

Civilian protection, or the ‘protection of civilians’ from violence (UN Peacekeeping, nda; Willmot et al, 2016), has become the framework and terminology used to attempt to limit the impact of direct attacks on civilians in armed conflict. We’ll explore the mechanisms and actors who work in this space, but before doing so we first need to understand the scale and complexity of the problem they are seeking to address.