'Strange bedfellows?' Security, humanitarianism and the politics of protection.

Abstract

The 'politics of protection' is overwhelmingly a politics of competing discourses about the legitimacy and authority to protect, i.e., who has a right to act as protector, in what circumstances and within what kind of limits. Yet one of the most insidious outcomes of the ever increasing convergence between security, protection and humanitarianism is to render a fundamentally political act into a seemingly innocuous apolitical, moral humanitarian imperative. This paper is particularly concerned with capturing the diversity and complexity of arguments and contextualities presented by scholars and humanitarian commentators to highlight the analogies between a fluid and malleable concept of protection and the essentialist construction of the 'protected' as inherently lacking political agency and thus in need of tutelage and patronage. In particular, although military and humanitarian actors now standardly share the humanitarian space and may appear to have contesting ideologies and views which make them 'strange bedfellows', we argue that the similarities between them in their conceptualisation of the 'protected' are remarkably similar and highlights the essentialising project of protection 'experts' to speak and act on behalf of the 'other'.

Keywords: security, protection, new humanitarianism, politics, military, political agency

Introduction

To a large extent the most dominant discourses of security and protection are external to the societies and individuals who are the objects of 'global community' action. Although the concept of protection is susceptible to redefinition with each new context (and the new configuration of actors and stakeholders that it draws together) there is a pervading assumption that it is something which is done to people (and, on their behalf). Generally speaking, protection of civilians is thought to evoke a collective responsibility to make the 'responsible' authorities accountable where they lack the will or capacity to do so. On the surface 'who is responsible' for protection seems clear (i.e., it is either the state, and where that is not possible, the UN Security Council and the numerous other mandated agencies) (1). Despite the fact that throughout the 1990s the limits of the mandates of these mandated agencies was put to the test (2), and there have been numerous critiques of how they many of them have conducted themselves in given situations, overall their legitimacy and authority has remained unquestioned. In relation to non-government or non-mandated humanitarian and development organisations, the responsibility or duty of care in relation to protection of civilians is self-imposed and self-defined. Indeed, there are a growing number of non-mandated humanitarian agencies and organisations who are voluntarily taking on board the idea that they have role to play in protection, and since 2001 in particularly there has been a proliferation of scholarly and practitioner material on the topic.

Whilst there is no neat distinction between scholastic and practitioner writings on protection, there is a discernable difference between studies which focus on the extent to which politicisation of humanitarianism is inevitable and thus to be resisted or embraced; and those which aim to situate protection as part of the broader practices of humanitarian agencies alongside their primary role of providing aid or assistance to 'those who suffer' due to ongoing conflict or large scale natural disasters. Drawing primarily on their experience in the field many of the key international non-government organisations have constructed programmes and policy statements relating to the issue either individually (such as Oxfam GB's "Protection into Practice", 2005 (3), or MSF-Holland's "MSF and Protection", 2001 (4)) or collectively (e.g. ALNAP's manual on protection, 2005: or the IASC's "Growing the Sheltering Tree", 2002 (5)). For Pantuliano and O'Callaghan (6) it was donor pressure which led many organisations to become involved in protection for the first time, and they add that this is believed by many commentators to be "an attempt on the part of the diplomatic community to substitute political action with humanitarian action".

Not surprisingly, the insurgence of activities relating to protection by humanitarian organisations has highlighted the overall problems and lack of commonalities across agencies and organisations when it comes to applying protection mechanisms to real situations. As Pantuliano and O'Callaghan also note in their study of the protection crisis in Dafur, many of the protection staff deployed by both UN agencies and NGOs have been junior officers "when the sensitivity and complexity of the situation demanded staff with a greater understanding of the normative frameworks behind protection" (7). Further, even the more experienced agencies and organisations ultimately failed to protect because of an inability or reluctance to draw on local people or local knowledge about such things as the socio-economic dynamics and social and cultural structures. In short, though protection is now becoming embedded in programming (what is often referred to as 'mainstreaming'), for the most part it appears to remain more of a fashionable buzzword that must be included in humanitarian activities.