At the University of Konstanz, GPPi fellow discusses UN and NATO efforts to protect civilians in conflict

During a conference at the University of Konstanz from 14 – 16 June 2012, GPPi Fellow Philipp Rotmann discussed UN and NATO operational experience with trying to protect civilians from physical violence in armed conflict. The conference on ​“Norms and Practice of Humanitarian Intervention” was hosted jointly by the University of Konstanz and Frankfurt University. Rotmann presented the outline of a paper to be co-authored with Joachim Koops, a professor at Vesalius College at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the director of the Global Governance Institute.

The conference brought together an international mix of academics and senior UN and government officials working on the responsibility to protect (R2P), protection of civilians in UN peace operations, and German foreign policy. Rotmann contributed to a panel discussion titled ​“Operationalizing the Protection of Civilians in the Field.” He joined Richard Bennett, the director of human rights at the United Nations Mission in Southern Sudan, and Peter Schumann, a former senior UN official with particular experience in Sudan. Julian Junk, a research fellow at the cluster of excellence ​“Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt, chaired the panel.

Rotmann presented an outline of how operational experience with protecting civilians evolved in the UN and NATO. He argued that the UN Secretariat deliberated created a split between the debate at the political level — which revolves around the R2P concept — and the operational focus in the field on a different concept called ​“protection of civilians” (PoC). This split was introduced to insulate the operational level from the controversy surrounding R2P and humanitarian intervention. Following the same reasoning, the UN Secretariat conceptualize and implement PoC in tactical, case-by-case terms. With few but notable exceptions such as the UN’s use of force against Laurent Gbagbo’s regime in Côte d’Ivoire in 2011, they have consciously shied away from a strategic engagement with the sources of systematic threats to civilians and rather focused on small-scale, mostly non-coercive measures within the framework of host government consent.

In contrast, NATO looks back to two decades of experience with strategic coercion to protect civilians. Since its air campaign to stop mass atrocities in Bosnia in the mid-1990s and the Kosovo intervention of 1999, NATO has been at the center of the debate about legality and legitimacy, and the role of Security Council authorization and politics among its permanent members. In this regard, the case of Libya in 2011 merits much closer attention, Rotmann argued. The UN Security Council mandated a coalition led by France, Britain and the US under a NATO umbrella and using NATO command structures to ensure the protection of civilians in Libya against the threat of Gaddafi’s forces. In light of the earlier experience with Kosovo, the decision of the coalition to translate the mandate into the political-military objective of driving the ruling regime from power should be seen as quite surprising. In that regard, the results of the planned lessons-learned process at the operational level between the UN and NATO secretariats will be particularly interesting.