Don’t let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter. Michael Bassey Johnson
The greatest protection any of us can have is faith in ourselves. Maya Angelou
Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde
If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos. Susan Elizabeth Phillips
The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine. Ralph Waldo Emerson
By allowing your mother to protect you, you gave her a gift. Kristin Cashore
So you don’t think three protection dogs, a room filled with weapons, a panic room and house that eats people isn’t just a little overkill? Christine Feehan
The measure of strength is how gently it can hold the fragile. Lawrence Nault
It’s easy to have ethics when what you love is not in danger. Mariana Enríquez
I realized protecting my children meant speaking truths I had buried for decades. Denika Fercho
The phrase in the title of this post comes from the representative of Liechtenstein speaking at a Security Council debate on civilian protection. Last week was “protection of civilians” week, an opportunity for the UN to examine generally mandated tasks to protect civilians endangered by armed conflict, but also to examine measures to, as was noted in a side event, “protect the protectors.” Liechtenstein has been among the most important UN members in calling attention to deficits in civilian protection but also in atrocity crime prevention and in upholding international law.
There are, indeed, expectations for protection, expectations of our military and police contingents, expectations of our UN peacekeeping forces and first responders, expectations of our political and community leaders, expectations of our families and neighbors, expectations that these and others are committed to a degree of protection from threats which so often seem to be beyond local capacity to respond, and which may indeed, at least in some instances, be beyond our capacity to grasp.
Like some of our readers, my relatives saw their military commitments largely as acts of protection of the places and people they loved. They entered such service willingly but not vindictively, understanding the potential horrors of armed conflict while hoping and praying that horrors would end quickly and impact as few communities as possible.
While these sentiments may have been self-deluding in some measure, they derived from the idea that protection in itself had noble aspects, that threats were real and that, while all had a responsibility to protect, that burden was higher for some. They were prepared to respond to a crisis as it unfolds, to run towards danger rather than from it, to take on risks so that others could have their own risks reduced. While protection is incumbent upon all who are capable of protecting, some in our dangerous world are certainly more fragile than others, as some are better equipped (in military hardware if not necessarily in temperament) to meet threats and challenges than others.
What emerged from the UN’s “protection of civilians” week was a tapestry defined by increasing state and non-state brutality, a willingness to disregard international law and the UN’s own Charter, and a liquidity crisis which has exacerbated the UN’s own reputational concerns. In the Security Council, delegation after delegation implored the Council to take their protective responsibilities more seriously and to do so in accordance with the values that led to the founding of the UN in the first instance. These delegations understood (as did those of us witnessing the discussion) the degree to which our global economic and security systems have become partisan entities which benefit the few and increase pressures on the many. They understood that the UN’s liquidity crisis impedes the ability of the UN system to properly fund protective operations, but that the need for protection is now more acute than in the past, not less.
Not all of the UN’s shrinking roster of peacekeeping operations have protection mandates. But all have protection expectations of people living in countries where physical insecurity is as much a factor of daily life as economic, food and health insecurity. These people need “blue helmets” to respond even as response is compromised by combinations of funding shortfalls, increasingly mistrustful host governments and troop contributing countries concerned about the ability of their troops to protect themselves in increasingly hostile contexts let alone to protect others.
During the Council debate, it was Panama who highlighted the irony that over a dozen civilians will have lost their lives “while we sit here and debate how to protect them.” Indeed, it is a failure to either manage or meet protection expectations which generates irony such as Panama’s, which in turn generates a sense that the UN’s protective architecture now falls well short of what is needed given our current laundry list of vulnerabilities.
And the gap is likely to increase as threats from a world increasingly indifferent to international law or climate change, a world in which the US and others are turning their backs on (and closing their wallets to) multilateral solutions, a world (to cite the ICRC this week) which is literally drowning in language used to justify our own brutality, language which includes what Somalia referred to as the “exceptionalism” which justifies any and all IHL violations, language easier employed when we simply choose to stop seeing adversaries as human beings.
It is, indeed, harder to uphold ethics when the things you love are under threat. But threat is a common factor not a partisan one and those commonalities are becoming more severe not less (as Pakistan, Denmark and others noted last week) due to the disinformation and misinformation increasingly generated by artificial intelligence tools. Indeed, one of the major threats now to UN protection measures is the AI-generated lies which seek to pit communities against each other and undermine confidence in authorities and their protective responses. We now see the results of that mistrust play out in communities worldwide, people who have given up on any assistance from outside and have turned that mistrust into emotional and physical barricades which, of course, cannot viably protect themselves and their loved ones from the crossfire of either weapons or weaponized “information.”
Thankfully, mistrust of authorities and their entities does not automatically remand into privatized “overkill.” One of the takeaways of “protection of civilians” week is the role that communities can and must play in their own protection rather than simply huddling together in expectation of an external force which might never arrive, which might make matters worse, or which otherwise might be insufficient to task if it does arrive.
As with many other issues, the discourse at UN headquarters struggles to properly acknowledge local expertise and capacity to address a range of threats which have defied multilateral solution. But the event on “protecting the protectors,” dominated by civil society voices, had no such struggle. Nonviolent Peace Force is perhaps the most notable of a global movement which invests in the community dimensions of protection, helping to build bonds of trust and active good neighborliness which can help create protective agency when and where external protective forces are delayed or absent.
While this approach does, as was noted at the session, transfer some risk from external protectors to frontline actors, it also acknowledges the skill that frontline actors have to protect themselves and the communities with which they are aligned. At a time when the UN admits to “unprecedented” numbers of victims, often at the hands of state actors with full impunity, the UN’s ability to provide external protection to civilians on a wide scale is clearly compromised. More and more, such peacekeepers are the targets of violence as they also seek to be a prompt and trusted response to violence.
So this is where we are now. Peacekeepers facing threat from drones and other state and non-state weapons which also threaten those they seek to protect. Government forces applying their own protective measures selectively, more consistent with political rather than humanitarian objectives. Peacekeepers lacking dependable funding and host country respect for status-of-forces agreements, including an increasing willingness to suspend adherence to international law for often poorly defined national interests. Communities also are facing increased protection-related risks without the skills or training in too many instances to build local trust and cultivate local protection expertise.
As with so much else in our world, we have done this to ourselves. We have created this moment with corruption embedded in virtually every economic transaction, with abuse normalized and agreements purely instrumentalized, with nations doing more or less what they please because there are fewer and fewer persons and institutions committed to diverting their more nefarious intentions.
Until we can get these circumstances turned around, the need for protection remains acute – from families and neighbors, from properly trained soldiers, officers and agents, from people of many backgrounds who recognize the absolute imperative of meeting the protection expectation and doing so in ways which honor and uphold the law, not trample on it.
On this day and all days, may those who protect teach the rest of us how to choose or even build more effective shelters from the storms which so often surround us. And may they all survive the gauntlet they have so bravely chosen to traverse.
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