5 - The Protection of Civilians

Summary

The protection of civilians in armed conflict (what we have earlier termed the PoC doctrine) has become a policy of major importance in twenty-first-century global governance. Largely driven by the security council, PoC offers another example of global policy that can be understood as a bricolage of practices and values, with improvisation once again playing a key role. This improvisation is especially apparent in the permanent conflict between the desire to make PoC a more consistent global policy and the goal of avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach. An operational challenge for PoC therefore consists in making continual trade-offs between the different visions of “protection,” as well as between the various conceptions of PoC’s proper place among UN priorities. Rather than following a rational design, the history of PoC has been determined by the shifting balance of global power relations and the vagaries of international circumstances. On one hand, PoC has become highly institutionalized thanks to the mobilization of enormous human and financial resources by the UN, member states, and the NGO community. But on the other hand, as a policy, PoC has developed as a succession of improvised or ad hoc decisions.