New community-informed approaches to humanitarian protection and restraint

The number of armed conflicts around the world, as well as the number of parties fighting in these conflicts, has risen significantly between 2001 and 2016. We therefore need to better understand the key factors at the community level that promote restraint and de-escalation in violent environments. Former studies show the value of understanding how a culture of restraint is socialised within a community. However, not much is known about the role that communities play in influencing the behaviour of armed groups. Current approaches to humanitarian protection are rooted in formalised legalistic approaches. However, these approaches have limits in contexts where global humanitarian norms are contested or ignored on the ground. A new bottom-up approach to humanitarian protection is needed and this research seeks to identify successful examples of local protection measures and generate methods for communicating these to similar communities experiencing violence and to aid agencies.

This project will work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where human rights abuses are widespread, including extremely high levels of sexual violence. Whilst the resolution of the conflict on a national and regional level is clearly the long-term solution, in the meantime aid agencies, local religious institutions and civil society groups struggle to protect civilians. This research aims to provide new understandings and tools to both communities and aid providers to reinforce protective measures. By identifying where such local measures have worked, and under what circumstances, the research will provide an evidence base for policy and practice.
Our consortium is formed of the Institute of Development Studies; two partner organisations in DRC - the Centre d'etude et de promotion en interventions socio-economiques (CEPRISE) and Institut National des Arts (INA); and Action Aid. We are ideally placed to undertake this research, bringing together deep experience of participatory methods, indigenous knowledge, gender and bottom-up approaches to humanitarianism, with storytelling through drama, music and literature.

Through identifying, locating, documenting and understanding where local protective measures have worked; we aim to help aid agencies and policy makers find appropriate ways to support these efforts and possibly find ways to replicate them. Our objectives are:

1. To generate evidence on whether local, community-based protection measures work, and in what circumstances.
2. To generate evidence on whether local, community-based measures to prevent or reduce sexual violence work and in what circumstances.
3. To generate evidence on differing local and community-based attitudes to victims of sexual violence, and under what circumstances these allow for rehabilitation.
4. To develop innovative local communication methods for transferring knowledge of successful protective measures.
5. To generate programmatic lessons for aid agencies so that they can adapt protection programmes to support local measures.
6. To generate policy lessons for aid agencies such that systemic approaches to protection can incorporate and support local action.

This research aims to have conceptual impact and provide new understandings and tools to both communities and aid providers to reinforce protective measures. By identifying where such local measures have worked, and under what circumstances, the research will provide an evidence base for policy and practice. Further, the research will have impact as it builds networks and connectivity; it will design, with communities, ways of communicating these successes so they can be adapted and replicated in other contexts. The project has a strong intellectual core, but also addresses an important policy and practical question, as the global humanitarian community have struggled to understand community level dynamics and factor them into their programmes.

The impact of this research is intended to be both academic and highly practical. Academically it will make an important contribution to the emerging literature on restraint, advancing conceptual thinking on the conditions under which local protection measures can be successful. Practically, understanding how to support local negotiated settlements, the conditions under which they occur and providing these lessons in locally accessible format could provide much needed evidence to underpin aid programmes in this area, and to strengthen networks connecting the supply of evidence to demand.

Local communities: Generating research that will be relevant and useful for conflict-affected communities is a fundamental aim of the project. The benefits for the communities with whom we will work include exposure to and experience of new participatory methods to capture local experiences of and responses to conflict; strengthened grassroots capabilities to mobilise local opinions in ways to influence decision-making on resource developments; and new knowledge and tools to support ongoing community-level dialogue on restraining conflict.

Humanitarian practitioners: The research will benefit humanitarian aid workers, providing them with practical insights and workable ideas on the types of community strategies that effectively build strategies of restraint and everyday practices of humanitarian protection. The project's participatory methods will provide a platform to co-produce improvements in humanitarian thinking between the three local communities in each country, the country advisory board and the research consortium.

Global policy: Members of the wider global humanitarian community will benefit from new transdisciplinary networks and collaborations in protection and new methodologies across art/humanities/social sciences to capture bottom up responses to protracted humanitarian crises. Broader lessons will be derived from the research that will benefit other countries and decision makers facing similar multiple humanitarian challenges.

Academic community: Researchers will benefit from new interdisciplinary networks and collaborations across the fields of humanitarian studies, peacebuilding and gender and new methodologies across art/humanities/social sciences to capture bottom-up responses to protracted humanitarian crises.

Dissemination: Supporting the communications is IDS' Knowledge, Impact and Policy (KIP) team. The KIP team leads and supports programme and project knowledge mobilisation, policy analysis and research uptake and communications. They are well versed in using social media for communications and will draw on existing contact databases for communicating key outputs to a broader audience as well as specialist groups. The project will also utilise the involvement of the ActionAid and their local partners, who have experience in community-based protection.

The KIP team are well versed in social media and will draw on established networks for communicating to broad and specialist audiences, e.g. communications staff at partner organisations, and communities of practice.

To broaden reach and ensure sustainability, all outputs will be shared via IDS' open access repository OpenDocs. They will also be distributed and promoted via IDS' website (80,000 unique visits per month), email alerts, newsletters that reach almost 20,000 subscribers, blogs and opinion pieces in media outlets (IDS Blogs receive over 100,000 page views per month).