Peace Operations Group

Protection of Civilians (PoC) is no longer limited to the humanitarian community. It has also become a key task for military forces in international operations such as in Afghanistan and Libya. This report provides military practitioners with a comprehensive overview and comparison of current PoC-activities and practises among the most relevant international- and non-governmental organisations. The aim is to contribute towards a clarification of the potential role and purpose of military forces in PoC-operations.
The report begins by analyzing and comparing how dominating PoC-discourses among the three major international organisations – the UN, NATO and the EU – shape the type of PoC-concepts that are being developed for the operational and tactical levels. It then moves on to compare mission specific PoC-challenges in three UN missions (MONUSCO, UNMIS and UNAMID), before describing the history and development of PoC in the AU and among the major NGOs.
The report shows that the UN is at the forefront of developing PoC-concepts, guidelines and training tools. The organisation has come to realize that the (in)ability to protect affects not only each mission, but the legitimacy of the UN as a whole. The UN‘s approach to protection is therefore primarily direct, in that protection of civilians is seen as an end in itself. However, many of the recently developed concepts are not well attuned to military needs and planning processes.
NATO‘s approach to protection is first and foremost indirect, as it forms part of a larger strategy where the primary goal is to either counter or support an insurgency. Unlike the UN, EU and AU, NATO is not in the process of developing specific strategies, concepts or policies on protection of civilians. A weakness of NATO‘s (wanting) approach to PoC is its focus on how not to kill, rather than on how to directly protect. Another challenge for NATO in terms of providing sustainable protection is the lack of civilian capacities.
The EU has evolved quite far in its acknowledgement of the importance of PoC, but the organisation has few lessons learned to build on from its own operations. One of the most prominent differences between the EU and the UN regards the willingness to use military force. The EU sees ‗robustness‘ as a precondition for effective PoC, and EU member states are generally more favourable to this approach.
The AU has only recently commenced with the development of PoC-concepts- and strategies. While the AU has developed PoC-guidelines, no AU mission has to date developed a protection of civilians strategy. It is likely, however, that PoC will come to feature strongly in the planning for new operations in the AU context.
As protection actors, NGOs collectively have a tremendous impact on the protection agenda. Part of this influence is derived from the sheer size and spending power of the NGO community. There is of course no single philosophy or approach to protection that is universally embraced by the entire NGO community, which constitutes a wide range of actors.

This article explores why international actors assign such high importance to coherence. It argues that the assumptions on which the principle of coherence is based are flawed, and that the empirical and theoretical evidence indicates that there is much less room for coherence than generally acknowledged in the policy debate. It recommends that the international community should lower its expectations and adopt a more realistic polices. The current approach tends to put pressure on all partners to adopt a maximal approach to coherence, regardless of their relations to each other and the operational context. Coherence should not be understood as an effort aimed equally at all, nor should all partners be expected to achieve the same level of unity of effort. Coherence should rather be understood as a scale of relationships, and the most appropriate and realistic level of coherence that can be achieved will depend on the exact constellation of organizations in an interdependent relationship in that specific operational context. This article offers a typology of the range of likely relationships, as well as an explanation of the circumstances that may determine the level of coherence that can be realistically expected to develop, depending on the context and the nature of the relationships among the partners.