The previous chapter began looking at protection as a contested concept and practice because in order to address the crisis of escalating violence towards civilians, we need new thinking from multiple disciplines that recognize the challenge and reveal the underlying assumptions that constrain us. A crisis should prompt a re-evaluation. Doing the same thing that has failed in the past won't solve the problem. A community-led, nonviolent approach to protection is new thinking, and incorporating it enables us to bring in many more people to the conversation about how we protect civilians and reduce the harms they face.

In this chapter, I set out what is meant by unarmed civilian protection (UCP) and the current knowledge basis for it. UCP is a global practice, and introducing where UCP is currently documented and used, what activities happen and who does UCP is necessary groundwork for demonstrating that it works. The chapter explains how UCP works, shows that it is context specific to a range of threats and discusses how we know UCP works.

It may seem surprising that nonviolence can be used to protect people when they are threatened by violence. UCP may seem counter-intuitive because the narratives tell us that violence can only be countered by more violence and through military means. A key argument and message of this book is that it is not true that violence can only be tackled by the military. The reality is that civilians counter violence using peace and nonviolence across the world (Wallace, 2016; Julian, 2020; Furnari et al, 2023; Creating Safer Space [CSS], 2024a; UCP/A Community of Practice [UCPACoP], 2024).

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.

Introduction

What does it mean to ‘localize aid’? And what, following Khan, is the ‘local aid’ that already exists? The previous chapter highlighted how the voluntarization of aid has opened up space for those who are not ‘professionals’. Beyond this lies the more fundamental question – whether the concept of ‘localizing aid’ overlooks basic patterns of care which are woven into the fabric of societies, independent of a formal aid sector. This chapter takes a closer look at these patterns. While questions of how local knowledge and local actors matter in development have been discussed before, debates specifically on ‘localizing aid’ have become more prominent, prompting talk of a ‘local turn’ in humanitarianism and peacebuilding (McGinty and Richmond, 2013).

The importance of the ‘local’ has been part of development efforts from the start. As Kothari (2006) reminds us, colonial administrative officers and missionaries often possessed more in-depth knowledge and understanding of ‘local’ matters than contemporary international aid staff, who may frequently rotate between posts and move locations. In keeping with this, Pottier et al's book, Negotiating Local Knowledge, first published in 2003, was re-issued in 2019 as part of a ‘revival’ publication series. They remind readers that local knowledge has always been ‘far more sophisticated than development professionals previously assumed and, as such, represents an immensely valuable resource’ (Pottier et al, 2019), which nevertheless remains underacknowledged and underused in formal aid and development.

Nothing in the world of nonviolence, protection from violence and transformative change is achieved alone or in isolation. Not only am I thankful for the people who have helped bring this book into existence but I am also grateful for the huge number of people I have learnt from, worked with and the projects that are doing exciting and inspiring work.

Unarmed civilian protection (UCP), which you’ve been reading so much about, has a long and rich history and is constantly evolving and growing. For those seeking to learn more about UCP, this chapter sets out some relevant resources and websites.

UCP has its own eco-system involving organizations and communities that practise UCP all over the world, including training, advocacy, research, supporter organizations and networks. They all do a lot with limited resources, and they would be very grateful for any help that can be provided. Follow your interests from the following websites.

For information about UCP around the world, see:

• Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP): https://nonvi olen tpea cefo rce.org/

• Peace Brigades International: https://peacebriga des.org/en

• Unarmed Civilian Protection/Accompaniment Community of Practice: https://www.ucpacommunityofpractice.org/

• ConnexUs: https://cnxus.org/theme/unarmed-civil ian-pro tection/

For training on UCP, see:

• UCP Training Academy (follow through Creating Safer Space [CSS]): https://creating-safer-space.com/

• Le Comité Français pour l’Intervention Civile de Paix (Comite ICP): https://interventioncivile.org/fr/comite-pour-une-intervention-civile-de-paix/

• DC Peace Teams: https://www.dcpeaceteam.org/upcoming-training-events

Introduction

International development volunteering, be it through professional volunteering or the more common form of ‘voluntourism’, primarily involves individuals based in the Global North travelling to areas of the Global South with the aim of supporting marginalized communities to improve their quality of life in some demonstrable way. This chapter explores the rapid rise of international volunteering both as a practice and as a now multi-billion-dollar industry, one that has seen ‘explosive growth’ in recent decades (Wearing and McGehee, 2013) and remains enormously popular despite a period of stagnation during the COVID-19 pandemic (Kabil et al, 2023), when many could not travel. Here the authors also discuss many of the challenges and questionable power dynamics that arise through this form of horizontal and potentially ‘amateur’ aid. While international volunteering primarily originated as a practice in the United Kingdom and Europe, the late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen exponential growth in organized volunteering across the entire Global North, notably including North America, Australia and countries with a stabilizing middle class across Asia and Africa (Alexander, 2012).

For the purposes of this chapter, we use definitions of professional volunteers – also known as skills-based volunteers (Steimel, 2018) – as individuals who seek to use their specific work experience and/or qualifications to provide support to social and humanitarian causes. Since the early 21st century, professional volunteering programmes have mostly targeted medical workers, engineers and teachers.

This chapter explores how feminism and anti-oppression approaches support and influence unarmed civilian protection (UCP), and how UCP in turn contributes to transformational change in order to address the structural violence underpinning the threats civilians face.

The chapter sets out how feminist peace theory thinks about war, its link to personal lives and experiences and why the inclusion of marginalized voices is important in defining key concepts in security, violence and rights. Through this inclusion of marginalized voices, new forms of knowledge are created. UCP specifically uses knowledge formed from experience to challenge the ‘gender myth of protection’ and remove forms of oppression.

There are many different perspectives in protection, some of which challenge the dominance of outsider-led policies. In UCP, nonviolence creates the possibility for protection to contribute to transforming situations by rehumanizing and connecting people. Placing the local at the heart of UCP ensures that the protection is contextually designed and driven. Bringing in more about how we value knowledge from experience, recognized within feminist thinking (Enloe, 2001), and how anti-oppression brings a new frame for thinking about the roots of violence (Crenshaw, 1991) affects our view of who is vulnerable, and why this matters in thinking about protection.

Feminism and anti-oppression are about putting people at the heart of any challenge or problem and recognizing that the struggles people face are both personal and caused by structures of power and privilege (Freire, 1970).

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.

Contemporary students and scholars of development studies should be forgiven for feeling increasingly disillusioned. Global challenges relating to inequality, poverty and the climate crisis are multiplying and becoming more intractable. And yet, the established institutions of aid that many look towards to tackle these issues, such as government aid budgets, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and multilateral agencies, have been subject to increasing and relentless critique. They have long been accused of inefficiency and ineffectiveness, paternalism, and mainly benefitting the Global North, further disenfranchising those in low-income countries and re-entrenching colonial hierarchies of knowledge and power. At the same time, through our own research, studying digital aid platforms in India, everyday humanitarianism in Cambodia and diaspora initiatives in Zimbabwe respectively, we gained glimpses into a multitude of other aid forms which fall outside the purview of development studies and its critics. They are only slowly being recognized in academic scholarship, let alone in development curricula. We have written this book to take these empirical insights and those of others seriously and to examine their significance for understandings, experiences and the practice of aid. Second, we aim to provide an answer to students, scholars and practitioners of international development when they ask, ‘what is the point of development studies?’, given that it appears to be such a flawed endeavour. Where should they put their efforts? We hope to achieve a radical widening and shifting of what is recognized as aid. This shift goes beyond the established institutions mentioned earlier and the critiques that have for so long been dominant in development discourse.

Having explored nonviolence as the underlying principle of unarmed civilian protection (UCP), the next essential feature is local ownership and community involvement. One of the key principles in UCP is the ‘primacy of the local’ (Julian and Schweitzer, 2015; UCP/Accompaniment Community of Practice [UCPACoP], 2024), which means that local people are involved in and can lead the process so that the protection of their community and countering or reducing the threats they face works for them. In this chapter, I explore the significance of the ‘primacy of the local’ element of UCP and how this works within communities.

Rooted in nonviolence, UCP is based on the principle that inclusion is key to building resilient communities composed of relationships and networks founded on trust. The primacy of the local in its simplest form is that in UCP, the protection work must include the ownership of local people and recognize their local structures and institutions. This element challenges the conventional narrative that ‘we’ go to protect ‘others’ or that communities are passively waiting for help.

The chapter will discuss why the inclusion of local people makes UCP significant in recognizing the agency and capacity of local communities, how they hold essential knowledge, develop systems for protection from violent conflict and have useful networks and relationships that help keep them safe.

The concept of the ‘local’ itself sits in the messy space of overlapping identities, multiple geographical boundaries and of living amid crisis, so we need to consider what we mean by local in protection from violent conflict.

New ways of fighting wars have created an endless and unimaginable level of threat of violence towards civilians. This violence means that many civilians experience a threat to life, or harm, every day. This could be a random shooting, rape, an assault on a village or targeted violence directed at human rights defenders or journalists. This direct violence is the visible threat we count in ‘battle deaths’, wounded, reports of harm, casualties and violent crime rates and that is causing people both immediate and lifelong problems. It deprives people of life, families of loved ones and communities of leaders.

Civilians have become a weapon of war. Despite laws and agreements to protect civilians from harm, militaries and armed groups continue to kill and harm them wherever there is violent conflict. Sometimes the attacks are direct and blatant, as for example when a country run by a military attacks civilians in order to instil a sense of fear throughout the population. Sometimes the attacks are described as ‘collateral damage’, meaning that the desire to attack was greater than the desire to protect civilians. Or sometimes civilians are killed while being used as ‘human shields’ in an attempt to save a military target from attack – in all these cases, civilians are being used as weapons of war.

Reports and narratives about these incidents where civilians are threatened, hemmed in, prevented from escape and harmed serve to normalize violence towards civilians.

Introduction

The previous chapter examined faith-based approaches to development, highlighting their intersections with the activities of diaspora communities. As patterns of global and regional mobility continue to accelerate, migrants and diasporas are emerging as increasingly significant actors in the development of their countries of origin. Historically, diaspora contributions have been most evident in financial remittances, which play a vital role in alleviating poverty, fostering community development and supporting infrastructure investment. However, in this chapter, we shift our attention to a less discussed but equally impactful dimension: socio-political remittances. Using a brief case study of the Zimbabwean diaspora in the UK, our analysis examines the diverse ways diasporas engage with their homelands beyond financial contributions, exploring practices such as diaspora philanthropy, civic activism and humanitarian initiatives. These forms of engagement highlight the potential of grassroots, diaspora-driven efforts to complement or challenge traditional, top-down approaches to development and aid. By critically examining these dynamics, we aim to uncover the broader implications of these horizontal, community-centred initiatives for sustainable development. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to enhance understanding of how diasporas shape not only the economic frameworks but also the socio-political landscapes of their countries of origin, fostering greater equity and empowerment within their communities.

Understanding diaspora

The concept of diaspora has undergone significant evolution over time, with contemporary understandings reflecting its complexity and fluidity. No longer confined to a purely historical experience, diaspora now functions as both a nuanced analytical framework and a theoretical construct.

Nonviolence has a transformative role in the world. In this chapter, we’ll be looking at how and why nonviolence plays an important role in protection, unarmed civilian protection (UCP) and in transforming the world away from the growing threat of violence to civilians from conflicts. Nonviolence is a way of changing dominant militarized norms and addressing the need to rethink civilian protection. There is a need to address the capacity and knowledge gap in how we are protecting civilians from violence.

By using nonviolence, UCP is a practice that challenges the underlying myths and assumptions associated with the need to use the military for protection from violence. It demonstrates that unarmed civilians within communities can make others safer. As well as being a mechanism for local and community protection from violence, UCP uses nonviolence as the basis for understanding how it is defined, and how it works to protect civilians in sites of violence.

The chapter sets out how nonviolence principles are used in UCP and how they help UCP protect people through strong relationships, inclusion and understanding changing power dynamics (Julian, 2020). Using nonviolence is based on collaborative forms of power and legitimacy (Sharp, 2005; Atak, 2012; Vintagen, 2015) which are accessible to everyone. Nonviolence has been de-legitimized in global politics, but by using nonviolence and creating peaceful methods, UCP shows that nonviolence is part of international politics and is a component of creating sustainable peace and social cohesion in communities by making them safer for people.

Introduction

The previous chapter has shown how forms of digital humanitarianism, including crowdfunding, can generate particular hierarchies, biases and blind spots. They extend advantage to some but further marginalize others who aim to make use of these fundraising mechanisms. Having surveyed a wide range of aid and development tools and practices with a view to their potential for horizontality, what, if any, fit that bill? Mutual aid is the most obvious notion to turn to. We understand mutual aid here as forms of reciprocal assistance among individuals and groups such as families, neighbourhoods or differently shaped communities. Such assistance may be within and among such groups. Within the discipline of anthropology, different types of reciprocity have been distinguished, including ‘balanced’ reciprocity, which involves both giving and receiving, and generalized reciprocity, where assistance is given without a particular or immediate expectation of return. One might further nuance this concept by including situations where people give and receive assistance but involving two parties; or indeed the practice known as ‘paying it forward’, where someone might give to a younger person, or give in the future, as a result of having received support in the past from someone else. In many ways, forms of mutual aid may therefore be the most obvious examples of horizontal peer-to-peer (P2P) support that we have been discussing so far.

Many theorists agree that mutual aid is not new and that ‘people have worked together to survive for all of human history’ (Spade, 2020), while Springer claims that ‘mutual aid is the fundamental basis of all human societies’ (Springer, 2020).