“Survivor” by Bisa Butler
We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. Gwendolyn Brooks
It is today that our best work can be done. W. E. B. Du Bois
Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from. Mae West
Don’t let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter. Michael Bassey Johnson
As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. Colson Whitehead
Life is so complete that even when we are knocked on our backs, we have the best view of the stars. Laura Teresa Marquez
Yeah, exactly where a dad should be. Holding a firearm and warding off potential suitors until that daughter is of consenting age, he said. “Which in my book is about forty-six. Mary H.K. Choi
This was “protection of civilians week” at the UN, an annual event when we examine our commitments to protect the vulnerable and threatened, but also to honor those whose skills and instincts for protecting others put their lives at risk and much-too-often end them entirely.
We at the UN normally associate our protection commitments with peacekeeping operations, the soldiers, police and civilian components, most often seconded from UN member states, who are tasked with protecting civilians in some of the most demanding conflict environments on earth. Through ever-more sophisticated intelligence gathering, logistical support, threat assessment and (in the best of circumstance) adequate ground and air assets, peacekeepers are increasingly able to stay a step ahead of armed groups and other “spoilers” while providing gender and culturally-sensitive assistance to communities and host states through what seems to be an ever-widening range of mandated duties from election monitoring and vaccination assistance to “quick impact projects” designed to build both trust and capacity in host communities.
In a series of UN discussions over this past week, including in the Security Council, the UN and its partners both honored sacrifices made and assessed the current state of play in what is an increasingly complex tapestry of both protection responsibilities and threats to protectors. Among the former are efforts to address deficits related to food insecurity and health-related access as climate change and armed conflict disrupt agricultural cycles and vaccine “hoarding” leaves many millions vulnerable to a deadly virus and its seemingly unrelenting variants. Among the latter are threats from formally-designated terrorists and other armed groups increasingly able to incite violence through digital means with seemingly unfettered access to trafficked weapons and the capacity to construct and deploy improvised explosive devices which constitute perhaps the greatest, current, operational threat to peacekeeper safety.
To my mind, amidst the many helpful protection-related discussions at the UN this week, two in particular stood out. The first of these was an event entitled “Local Perspectives on the Protection of Civilians: The Impact of Conflict and Hunger,” which shifted vantage points on protection towards the most fundamental of needs – for nutrition, for access to water, for livelihoods that can sustain families and communities. A South Sudanese advocate spoke of the “dream” of many women in her country for “livelihood options” in a country still wrestling with corruption and insurgency, weapons trafficking (despite an arms embargo) and diverse impediments to agricultural sufficiency. The Afghanistan director of the UN’s World Food Programme put the local protection crisis in sharper (and somewhat shocking) relief, citing vast, conflict-induced nutritional deficits that raise the prospect, based on her long experience in conflict zones, of generations literally “being wiped out.” One speaker after another reinforced what has now and sadly become commonplace, the degree to which the impacts of conflict in this time of asymmetrical threats, now complicated by a pandemic, bear protection implications far beyond conventional fields and/or modalities of struggle.
Another important protection event of the week was hosted by Ireland and devoted to “Improving the Protection of Civilians in UN Peacekeeping Transitions,” a discussion on how UN contingents can best honor responsibilities assumed and relationships forged once the decision has been made by the Security Council to draw down peacekeeping operations and transition responsibilities to other UN capacities and, especially, to national contingents. Ireland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Simon Coveny made several helpful contributions to the broader discussion on protection, noting that peacekeeping transitions must be sensitive both to the situation on the ground and to the relationships which have been forged at local level, people who may now find themselves dependent for some aspects of protection on government forces who may have the capacity to protect but may also lack the will to do so. The MFA noted that the “path to peace,” the path that could one day make peacekeeping obsolete, requires more of us in the interim, including greater sensitivity to the anxiety from security risks that withdrawal might engender. At the very least, he noted, we must ensure that the pace of such withdrawals is determined by specific community concerns and security-related circumstances and not driven merely by “budgetary considerations.”
While protection mandates for peacekeepers continue to expand there is also the need to expand our assessment of what protection requires; certainly to those tasked with providing it but also to those living in that zone that most of us find ourselves in over the course of our lives – needing protection in some aspects but also offering it ourselves, offering it to children of course but also to neighbors, the elderly, those who have been through harrowing circumstances, those experiencing limited capacity to fend off threats to themselves in the short or long term.
In this regard, an image was offered at the top of this post courtesy of Bisa Butler’s remarkable exhibit now at Chicago’s Art Institute. Among her stunningly colorful, woven portraits of African-American culture is this one depicting a woman in considerable distress being held up by two other women, neither of whom appear to be “protectors” in the professional sense, but both of whom were clearly in accompaniment to the suffering of the third, bearing at least some of her burdens and providing reassurance that the suffering she now experienced would not have to be experienced alone.
For many of us, this is the lens on protection that is most familiar, bearing the wounds of others in real time, caring for those close at hand, making hard decisions about when and how to assume risks, acting on our best assessments of the experiences that harm and those that traumatize, how to respond best to short and longer-term dangers to personal and and community well-being.
In a world awash in weapons often in the hands of unscrupulous actors, it is understandable to put protection from weapons in the hands of those also bearing weapons, those able to respond to threats of armed violence with coercive measures in kind. But this is not at all the end of the matter. For instance, Indonesia made a particularly good point this week in calling for “mentoring” of national contingents by peacekeeping forces, thereby helping to ensure that such contingents manifest both the capacity and the will to protect, and that such protection is undertaken with full regard for the dignity and rights of the protected.
But there is another piece to this mentoring, the piece communicated by Butler’s woven portrait, the piece embodied by those with their fingers on the pulse of what protection is needed and what is merely intrusive, the protection that requires a blend of both outside assistance and community resolve, including the will to accompany and the creation of enabling environments to endure, to heal and to reintegrate. The mentoring of these equally-essential skills and capacities, as some of the voices from diverse conflict zones made plain this week, must also be a part of our modalities of protection, must also and increasingly be part of how we help our professional protectors help the rest of us to be “each other’s magnitude and bond” when troubles loom.
In this time of multiple stressors, we find more and more people pulling inward, creating moats of sorts around their most intimate places, protecting with a vengeance from threats that seem largely assumed and at times even invented. We must resist the tendency to allow the rain to drive us to the wrong shelter, a shelter that is either heavily weaponized or cut off from the world we should be prepared to re-enter once the rain passes. The “business” of protection is for all of us, not only in assessing threats but in holding each other up in times of crisis, in times of need, of being each other’s harvest, of ensuring that loss and pain will not be the final word.
As many who serve in peacekeeping operations know well, weapons and other coercive measures are only part of the solution to protection threats. The rest is a common responsibility grounded in our capacity to formulate and uphold, to assess and accompany, to assist those knocked on their backs to recognize that there are stars above, that there is, indeed, hope for peace and health, for sustenance and livelihood once the current misery has been dispelled.
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