Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping: Effectively Protecting Civilians Without Threat of Violence

One of the thinking patterns most difficult to remove both in politics and society all over the world is that there are situations where “only violence can help”. Politicians and Think Tanks invoking the 'Responsibility to Protect' or the one-size-fits-all concept of “security” (which is not only defended at the Hindukush but everywhere in the world) agree here with rebels fighting against oppression, dictatorship, land grabbing etc. Is this thinking pattern based on unchangeable facts, even human nature? Or doesn’t it serve a purpose like an appendix and may lead, given modern weapon technology, to the destruction of all that is to be defended, secured or fought for?
Regarding uprisings there is statistical evidence that nonviolent uprisings have much more chances for success than armed ones. For war and defence there are no such statistics. Within the concept of civilian-based defence there is a concept of unarmed defence, based on a comparatively small number of cases of civil resistance, and there is growing knowledge about instances in which whole populations manage to avoid being drawn into war raging around them. But their number seems to be limited and civilian-based defence is still more conceptual than practice. What we present here is different. It is as well an element of a strategy to overcome war and violence by proposing a nonviolent alternative to military approaches, the military peacekeeping. But here practice dominates, and the conceptualization makes use of decades of experience. The subject is the protection of civil population in armed conflict. Protection without the use of arms and by other civilians, be it by internationals or by concerned fellow citizens. In the Anglo-Saxon world what we present here under the name of Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (UCP) has started to become known both in peace research and at the United Nations. In the German language area we are just at the beginning. With this paper, we describe what UCP is, how it works, some of the scientific knowledge about its impact, and how much political acceptance it has found, and we would like to make a contribution to making
the promising concept and practice known in the circles of the politically interested critical peace research.