Civilian Protection: The Imperative Role of Civil Society

"Civilians are noncombatants who by definition, are not on active duty in the armed services, nor on a police or firefighting force. Yet civilians often shoulder the brunt and brutality of armed conflict around the globe. Throughout the past century, measures have evolved to better protect civilians from physical harm during conflict, each met with varying degrees of success and failure. One of the more recent developments in civilian protection is the norm known as the “responsibility to protect,” which simply put, affirms the international community’s right to protect civilians when a nation state cannot or will not do so itself. Civilian groups, that is, civil society, were instrumental in developing this concept, which arose from a very public debate regarding the failure to protect civilians in both Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990s. There is evidence that civilians involved in armed conflict today are dying in smaller numbers than in earlier times. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program reports that “the average battle-death toll per conflict [involving a state] in the 1950s was almost 10,000, while the equivalent figure for the new millennium has been less than 1,000. These estimates leave no doubt that there has been a huge decline in the deadliness of warfare since the 1950s.” 1 This measurable progress towards a decline in civilian death is a welcome development. However, multiple instances of armed conflict remain where civilians are still not sufficiently protected, and the majority of these conflicts involve a non-state actor. In this thesis, I argue that conflict involving an armed non-state actor (ANSA) is fundamentally different from traditional interstate conflict in so far as the methodology of civilian protection is concerned. Therefore, for the norm of civilian protection to be appropriately expanded to include ANSA conflicts, it is imperative that civil society actors, who have greater access and fewer negotiating constraints than states, be treated as partners in the process of norm expansion"