The use of violence is about exercising power through force and fear, and nonviolence is a cooperative power. Understanding and integrating power into protection research, as more than the cause of the threat, is necessary to understand how unarmed civilian protect (UCP) is an approach that reduces and prevents violence. UCP is based on nonviolence, which has its own understanding of power.

Debates in protection should include thinking about power. At the start of this book, evidence was introduced that showed there is a huge need for protection because levels of violence against civilians are so high, and behind this violence is the normalization of violence towards civilians, which emerges from the dominance of militarism and the belief that using violence works.

Power is sometimes thought of as a fixed or zero-sum game: for example, states sometimes behave as if a fixed amount of power (Eyben, 2009) can be lost by one and gained by another. In reality, the amount of power, and who has it, is fluid and dependent on the cooperative or coercive power (Powercube, 2011) of a large number of different stakeholders and influences.

This chapter brings together all the different ideas from the other chapters to look at how thinking about power informs many of the debates in protection. Power itself is contested through the many ways we think about it, and different forms of power challenge the military threat approach, which is responsible for the protection threats that we are trying to prevent.

Some components of power have already been discussed in this book, including the myths of protection, cycles of violence, nonviolence and oppression.