Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping Documentation of a symposium held in Bonn, 10th of October 2015

"The Federation for Social Defence (Bund für Soziale Verteidigung - BSV, www.sozialeverteidigung.de) together with the Institute for Peace Work and Nonviolent Conflict Transformation (www.ifgk.de) organised a symposium on Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping / Protection (UCP) on the 10th of October 2015 in Bonn. The symposium has been an important element of the campaign on UCP that the BSV is undertaking in order to familiarize politics and peace movement with this approach. We have been able to win international experts to speak at the conference, and would like to present the interesting contributions to a wider audience through this documentation. The symposium took place at a time when the news knew only one headline – the thousands of refugees coming to Germany. In the meanwhile, there are also other topics on the public agenda, though our governments still have to find a convincing strategy how to respond to the obvious failure of the regulations of Schengen and Dublin. Still people from crisis areas are coming to Europe seeking protection. They come because the world community has not found a concept how to protect civilian population in armed conflict so that people do not need to flee. At the same time it is obvious that military interventions do not lead to peace but only to new conflicts, and cause new causes for people to be displaced. Recently Kundus in Afghanistan – the symbol for German military engagement in Afghanistan – was for a short-time re-occupied by Taliban troops. This shows how little the long military presence and the fight against Islamists contributed to stability in that country. The question which alternatives there may be to military interventions is a very urgent one. Civil alternatives how to protect civilian population are comparatively unknown but they exist. Every day they make the life of people in certain regions more secure and can help to protect people from death. But civilian peacekeeping is still miles away from being able to prevent a war. The concept needs much more attention, and much more resources and capacities. We know that unarmed civilian protection works, but yet have to learn which exactly the conditions for UCP are in order to be successful. How can we become more effective, and how can we convince politics and the wider public to believe in the possibilities of unarmed protection? At the symposium we have been searching for answers to these questions and found some, though at the same time many new questions arose. In the audience there have been German as well as surprisingly many international peace activists and researchers, as well as some representatives of political parties. We hope that the readers of this documentation will also find much food for thought here! "