At the height of the 1982-1985 famine in Ethiopia, a cruel joke was often heard in Spain. A particular European religious leader visits a refugee camp, and seeing a desperate mother holding an emaciated baby, he asks her: What’s wrong with him? Lowering her gaze, she answers, in a barely audible voice: He does not eat! The leader shakes his head, looks reproachingly at the baby and goes, gently pinching his cheek: But you must eat!
Granted, this is a pretty bad one -but mind you, it is not exactly a joke. A message to mothers to prioritize breastfeeding, entirely void of context, featured highly on key messages by an UN agency during the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa. Since the inception of the current protection coordination system, and in particular during emergencies, Protection clusters or sectors regularly produce short, public “key messages” or “protection messages” of highly general context and with limited analysis of causes or culprits of protection problems. They are also in most cases addressed generally to “communities”, or to “government authorities”.
Here in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon Syrian refugees are going through a difficult moment. There has been pressure to relocate refugees away from the Litani river, on grounds of protection of the environment. Authorities have ordered the dismantlement of all brick houses at refugee settlements, to be replaced by wood and plastic sheeting – including at places heavily vulnerable to snowfall in winter. Recently, more than 400 refugees have been expelled from Deir el Ahmar municipality, following a local dispute.
It seems, thus, a good moment to reflect on the practice and effectiveness of “protection messages”, when used on the context of humanitarian protection. We will also look at whether there is a wider, deeper rooted unease in the protection profession behind the current glut for protection messages.
What’s wrong with protection messages?
In many ocasions, protection messages contain advice to communities, or to powerful persons within communities – at the same title or level as those addressed to authorities or armed groups. This seems to suggest that duty holders are at the same level as duty bearers in humanitarian situations – which is a fairly problematic proposition. The humanitarian and development communities have made important steps in the direction of considering communities and persons of concern at the centre of planning and implementation – through a variety of consultation and evaluation mechanisms, as well as with the thrust to identify first what communities propose or can do for themselves, before mobilizing humanitarian or State resources. This is obviously laudable.
At the same time, the passion for community-based protection is contemporaneous with other more worrying trends. One of them is the success of catch-all, disingenuous expressions such as “resilience” – which seems to put the emphasis on the ability of persons and communities to resist shocks, without much inquiry on who is at the basis of these shocks. This is similar to the insistence of SGBV practitioners to call their clients “survivors”, rather than “victims” – which ignores that many of them actually do not survive, and leaves also aside perpetrators.
Language is not innocent. The trend associated with the use of these expressions is parallel to the fad on “entrepreneurship” after the 2008 economic crises – suggesting that the lower classes have only their passivity to blame for not being able to innovate themselves out of poverty. Protection practitioners are, on the whole, not guilty of victim blaming. However, when critical thinking is not present they are as vulnerable as anybody else to fads and uses of language designed to perpetuate unequal power relations.
Perhaps a more worrying weakness of protection messages is that, in almost all cases, they stand in an abstract, distant relationship to the direct objective of any protection action – i.e. to increase access to rights, and to decrease abuse and exploitation.
By virtue of them being semi-public, very short and the product of large consensuses, most protection messages lack causality or context analysis. However, understanding the motivations of duty bearers when violating rights or refusing to protect them is key to any successful protection intervention with them. Also, when taken seriously as negotiating positions for humanitarian negotiation (which is not unheard of), the use of protection messages may lead to flawed, generalized agreements with authorities or other duty bearers, without achieving any tangible results on persons of concern.
The blurred relationship between “protection messages” and humanitarian advocacy is the most important flaw of the current trend of using protection messages. Humanitarian advocacy is the effort, through public or private means, to persuade powerful persons and organizations to stop doing bad things to people, or to start doing good things to them. Thus, any advocacy strategy must have clear, measurable, rights-based objectives in terms of behaviour or normative change and must designate clear targets, actors and means. Where solid advocacy strategies exist, protection messages have little purpose. It is perhaps useful to ask ourselves why protection messages are such a popular practice among protection practitioners.
Protection messages – the canary in the coal mine
There is an incantatory, almost superstitious quality in the practice of protection messages – the faith in the ability of language alone to change reality. The belief that language and signs stand in a material, causal relationship with reality, rather than in a conventional relationship, is at the basis of the Western magical tradition. One is tempted to think that the practice of protection messages is akin to prayer flags, mantras or the ritual repetition of the names of God – the launching of messages into the aether, to an audience which only exists in the realm of faith, with the hope that something will change. Now, protection practitioners are not stupid or unprofessional. It is thus legitimate to ask ourselves whether the extensive practice of protection messages is not consistent with a wider unease within the protection profession.
Together with many positive ones, humanitarian reform has also had negative effects on protection coordination – or on collective protection action. Protection Clusters or sectors are often large, unwieldy and very varied bodies with a wide divergence of opinions. Often, participants come from all walks of life – national and International, confessional and non-confessional, State and non-state and with widely different allegiances to the principle of neutrality. Trust in each other is essential for a sensitive endeavor such as collective advocacy action – however, the larger the group, the more difficult trust will be. The exigences of participation will in most cases have Protection working groups reaching for the lowest common denominator. Any protection practitioner is familiar to the gasp of relief that accompanies the finalization of an agreed – upon text – no matter, often, how vague and non actionable it might be.
Other factors are also at play. Instant communication and the increase presence of donors in coordination meetings and close to the delivery point are also creating immense pressures to deliver, or to be seen as delivering, on protection actors – which is not the best way to enable rational decision-making. Often, this results in protection teams delivering statements rather than action. One of the most rewarding and also most bitter experiences in my career was being Protection Cluster coordinator in the Central African Republic, in the first half of 2014. Immense pressure was exerted by Geneva and New York to deliver on the drafting of a strategy for humanitarian evacuations – only for the matter of actually evacuating people to gently disappear from the agenda once the drafting was done, due to poor decision-making, lack of accountability and opposition from authorities.
The protection profession has also known a rapid professionalization, standardization and subdivision into specialized realms. Vertical control and support mechanisms, such as the Global Protection Cluster, regularly produce guidance and indications on the standard products that protection working groups need to produce: TORs, monitoring mechanisms, reports, regular meetings, donor briefings, mainstreaming workshops, protection messages.
Curiously, the humanitarian protection world seems to be undertaking a transformation similar to the one the world economy underwent in the 70s: from the productive economy to the services economy. Protection teams, particularly in capitals, spend an inordinate amount of time on products whose clients are increasingly themselves and other humanitarians – rather than affected communities.
Protection is no longer a contact sport. A safe bubble is then created, in which the primordial anguish of any protection officer, i.e. having to protect people without the use or threat of violence, disappears into a reassuring array of preordained, routine tasks which easily fills one´s agenda and safely feeds the machine. Protection messages have the potential of falsely reassuring protection teams of doing something – without the risk of failure associated to hard-nosed humanitarian negotiation.
Let’s come back to the basic premise of these notes – overall, protection professionals are not a lazy, self-delusional, superstitious crowd. Perhaps the basic question here is: when it comes to protection, where does the bucket stop – in other words, who is accountable for successful humanitarian negotiation? After the end of the temporary certainties of the 90s, in which the geopolitics of the post-cold war era seemed to play the game of humanitarian protection, the last fifteen years have been beset with traps.
Quantitative models show a steady increase in deaths in armed conflict since 2004, and most new conflicts have proven wholly intractable. The R2P doctrine seems to have forever been buried in the sands of Libya. By reaffirming the responsibilities of humanitarian coordinators, humanitarian country teams and protection clusters as regards protection, the IASC policy on the centrality of humanitarian action does not seem to clarify the issue of accountability. Similarly, recent evaluations of the UN role in Myanmar may well cast doubts on the effectiveness of the Human Rights up Front initiative.
On the whole, systemic efforts to place accountability for protection higher in the UN / humanitarian hierarchy seem to have had a triple negative effect. Too many individuals or structures are accountable. Secondly, the higher in the hierarchy, the stronger the pull of conflicts of interest or professional self-protection. Third, and more importantly for the purposes of this article, protection practitioners seem to have been disempowered and void of their own realm of action, on the grounds that important protection issues, and in particular those requiring advocacy, are now the realm of the HCT, the Humanitarian Coordinator or other humanitarian leaders.
Many protection practitioners are now left with the feeling that, actually, the system is designed to dilute accountability. It takes now exceptionally solid, courageous humanitarian leaders, as well as seasoned and persistent protection officers, for the chain between protection analysis and action to work properly. When this is not the case, protection practitioners are left to drafting protection messages.