Military Planning to Protect Civilians

by Max Kelly, Alison Giffen

Overview

Military Planning to Protect Civilians: Proposed Guidance for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, by Max Kelly, with Alison Giffen. This publication builds on the cumulative body of research developed by the Future of Peace Operations program in its quest to develop solutions to prevent mass and systematic violence against civilians. This is an integral component of our work on all aspects of peace operations, and resonates with Stimson’s overall mission — to offer pragmatic steps to enhance international peace and security.

For a number of years, Stimson research identified a lack of adequate guidance, planning, and training on the protection of civilians as a critical liability for national militaries and peacekeepers around the world. For this reason, the Stimson Center launched the project “Addressing the Doctrinal Deficit,” which began with a workshop in September 2009 at the UK Defence Academy in Shrivenham, gathering current and former military and civilian experts with experience in field operations deployed in the context of protection crises. The workshop was designed to capture insights that could be distilled into guidance for future missions mandated to protect. The project resulted in four products:

A workshop report entitled Addressing the Doctrinal Deficit: Developing Guidance to Prevent and Respond to Widespread or Systematic Attacks Against Civilians;
A set of proposed guidance entitled Protecting Civilians: Proposed Principles for Military Operations;
Military Planning to Protect Civilians: Proposed Guidance for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations; and,
A case study Saving Port-au-Prince: United Nations Efforts to Protect Civilians in Haiti in 2006-2007.

The Stimson Center is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to developing pragmatic approaches to enduring and emerging problems of international security. The Center’s work on peace operations has been supported in recent years by the Carnegie Corporation, Compton Foundation, Humanity United, and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. We are deeply grateful for their support.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013575677
Publisher:	The Henry L. Stimson Center
Publication date:	11/07/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	60
File size:	737 KB

About the Author

While writing this report, Max Kelly was a research consultant at the Future of Peace Operations program at the Henry L. Stimson Center. He has since joined Booz Allen Hamilton, and is currently supporting the Center for Complex Operations at National Defense University. While at the Stimson Center, he worked primarily on military aspects of the protection of civilians in multilateral peace operations and preventing mass atrocities. He helped lead the conception, design, and implementation of Stimson’s initiative to address the doctrinal deficit on the protection of civilians. Mr. Kelly was also a contributing author to the landmark UN-sponsored study, Protecting Civilians in the Context of UN Peacekeeping Operations: Successes, Setbacks and Major Challenges (2009). Prior to joining the Stimson Center, he was the Managing Director of the Cambodian Genocide Group’s R2P Initiative, where he organized public education, research and advocacy on the Responsibility to Protect. As Policy Director of STAND Canada, Mr. Kelly developed policy recommendations and promoted Canadian engagement on the conflicts in Sudan. While studying at the University of Toronto’s Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, he was selected as a Beattie Scholar and conducted field research in Central and East Africa.

Alison Giffen is the Deputy Director of the Future of Peace Operations program. She is responsible for leading the program’s efforts to increase global preparedness to prevent and respond to violence against civilians in war-torn societies, including in its most extreme manifestation – mass atrocity and genocide. Ms. Giffen writes for, and speaks regularly to, military and civilian audiences on the challenges of protecting civilians in conflict – where civilians are not just caught in the crossfire, but a direct target. Ms. Giffen joined Stimson in 2009 with more than a dozen years experience monitoring and advocating on human rights and humanitarian crises.