This article explores the growth of international civilian-protection concepts since the 1990s and the question of what protection means in a qualitative sense. It makes a significant intervention in advancing a typology of positive and negative protection, allowing more systematic analysis of whether protective practices fulfil the normative goals of internationalised protection and creating openings for expanded imagination of possible protective practices. It is argued that practices of refugee protection during this period have been shaped by logics of externalisation that seek to maintain distance between protector and protected and attenuate cosmopolitan solidarity with vulnerable non-citizens, both of which have detrimental impacts on the depth of protective practices and the experience of protection. These practices occur at the intersection of conflicting interpretative backdrops – between the cosmopolitan-minded commitments to the protection of vulnerable non-citizens and backdrops that frame migration as a problem. Using the case of the United Kingdom (UK) asylum system, the article argues that this is generative of negative protection – practices providing immediate physical protection, but simultaneously constructing conditions of acute vulnerability. Conversely, positive protection might be found in practices that embody fuller solidarity with protected people and enable them to flourish as a socially embedded individuals.

The concept of protecting civilians in armed conflict is enshrined in international humanitarian law and widely acknowledged in humanitarian norms. Making this concept operational in humanitarian service delivery is a challenge. Yet, there are many ways in which humanitarian workers could learn from local people about underlying tensions in their community and with these new insights adjust service delivery accordingly.

The 2009 WG developed a qualitative verbal tool that could be used by humanitarian field staff to assist them in understanding issues of civilian protection from the local perspective. The attributes and uses of this tool are described in detail in this WG report. The fundamental aim of this tool is to enhance the capacity of humanitarian workers in their daily work to observe markers of activity and behavior and to inquire and listen from local people about what these markers might or might not mean. The WG emphasized the needs for confidentiality, focus on service delivery (not legal or advocacy work), and iterative routine integration of information gained into field team deliberations. The proposed tool is offered as a possible pilot step towards improving humanitarian understanding and response to local civilian protection needs.

The modern Law of International Armed Conflict is principally framed upon a linear notion of warfare. It classically anticipates massed armies engaging one another upon the battlefield where victory is achieved by way of decisive military defeat of one side by the other. The targeting philosophy underpinning this paradigm is that civilians are to be spared to the greatest extent possible during the course of the conflict. Concomitantly, military force is to be applied in a surgical and economic manner mainly against the sovereign forces of the enemy as well as defined ‘military objectives’, with the law being relatively comprehensive as to the character of each of these categories. Under the prevailing philosophy, the law nonetheless acknowledges that where civilians vitiate their protected status and elect to participate directly in hostilities, then they might also be targeted. The paucity of legal prescription in this area strongly suggests, however, that this is regarded as a somewhat exceptional phenomenon.