'A different kind of weapon'?: Nonviolent action and the protection of civilians in violent conflict

Abstract

This thesis examines how nonviolent action can be used to protect civilians in violent conflict. Using a relational approach, it provides a multi-sited ethnographic account of how communities and organisations practise unarmed civilian protection to protect themselves, their families, friends, and neighbours against the threat of violence. To this end, this thesis draws on over 140 interviews and participant-observation with civilians, peacekeepers and protection professionals, and government actors to better understand how they understand, practise, and experience unarmed civilian protection in violent conflict. Drawing on examples of unarmed civilian protection from around the world, from South Sudan to Myanmar to the United States, the thesis critically explores how the practice both challenges, and sometimes inadvertently reinforces, the power structures and assumptions that underscore conventional civilian protection practices contingent on the use of force. Exploring how the protection of civilians is possible without the use of force, the thesis argues that unarmed civilian protection works by and through co-constituted relations. The approach reconceptualises protection as a relational formation, rather than as an act, a service conferred, or outcome reached. By attending to violent conflict and civilian protection as relational systems, comprising a multiplicity of entry points and actors, unarmed civilian protection practitioners can identify opportunities for protection and repair that are otherwise overlooked. By decentring the state and force-centric approaches as the primary referents for protection practice, the approach also reorients power and agency in civilian-led, nonviolent action. The thesis demonstrates how different aspects of relationality - including between people and their positionalities, as well as structural forces including space, time, and institutional structures - shape understandings and practices of protection. Civilian-led nonviolent action emerges as a form of protection, recasting protective power as communal praxis, as opposed to protection that is provided to or for conflict-affected communities. To observe these entanglements, it is necessary to explore the power of unarmed civilian protection as it is enacted in the world. These observations enable understanding of the power that animates unarmed civilian protection, and how it is distinctive from other forms of protection contingent on the use of force. Understanding and analysing civilian protection as an outcome of relationships - as opposed to something enforced or provided by an external actor - has several analytical benefits: 1) the role of civilians themselves in civilian protection can be better illuminated; 2) possibilities for protection that exist beyond the state (and the use of force) can be identified and analysed; and 3) the way relations of power shape protection outcomes can be more holistically understood. This more holistic understanding of protection then enables political action, focused on transformation of unequal power relations and redress of persistent harms that characterise efforts to protect civilians experiencing violent conflict.