The Metrics and Ethics of Protecting Civilians

This article asks how success is defined and measured for humanitarian action and military interventions aimed at protecting civilians from violence and harm in situations of armed conflict. It starts by illustrating how humanitarian and military protection actors differ in their ability or willingness to mobilize coercive force to achieve their common goal of protecting civilians. As a second step, it classifies different types of protection activities implemented by these actors. A distinction is made between actions designed to mitigate protection threats and actions that aim at eliminating the underlying causes of violence against civilians. This classification is important for two reasons. First, it serves to narrow down the problem of complementarity and contradiction between military and humanitarian approaches to protection. Second, it helps to highlight methodological, ethical and epistemological barriers to demonstrating success for specific types of protection interventions. The article concludes by exploring how normative considerations may guide protection policy and practice in the absence of conclusive empirical evidence on what works in protecting civilians

Action (physics · Coercion (linguistics · Complementarity (molecular biology · Contradiction · Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Harm · International humanitarian law · International law · Law and economics · Normative · Political science · Psychological intervention · Public relations · Responsibility to Protect · Sociology · Use of force · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law · Peacebuilding and International Security · Psychology

• The Responsibility to Protect

  Open Access•Adrian Gallagher, Blake Lawrinson et al.•Global Responsibility to Protect•2023

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• The Responsibility to Protect in a world of already existing intervention

  Open Access•Richard Dunford, Robin Dunford et al.•European Journal of International…•2019

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