GCRF Development Award on Protection from Enduring and Overlapping Forms of Violence

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This Development Award establishes the preliminary work for a Network on Protection from Enduring and Overlapping Forms of Violence. Humanitarian protection is often associated with particular situations of crisis. However, the vulnerability of specific individuals and groups is also rooted in enduring and multiple forms of conflict and violence. The Protection Network therefore starts with the recognition that there is a need to broaden our conceptual and empirical understanding of protection. In doing so, it examines the challenges of protecting vulnerable people from the perspective of those in need of protection rather than formal organisations, frameworks and norms. The proposed Protection Network is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, Open University of Sri Lanka, Law and Society Trust, USIU-Africa, Aalborg University and the University of East Anglia and will extend out to include other researchers and practitioners interested in the complex protection needs of vulnerable populations. Conceptualising protection from the bottom up allows us to appreciate the multiple forms that protection needs take, as they are embedded in social, economic and political contexts. Focusing on people rather than events or normative frames means we can see crisis as non-exceptional, and break with the divide between prevention and response. Doing so also helps us move beyond the silos that have shaped humanitarian interventions, to learn across distinct research and policy domains and to support new communities of practice. It allows us to understand the multiple ways in which people seek to protect themselves from violence - which may, for example, relate to livelihoods as much as legal entitlements - whilst acknowledging that these practices might themselves be contradictory, counter-productive and exclusionary. Either way, starting with on the ground protection needs and practices is essential if we are to begin to find solutions to affirming protective rights and to develop interventions that are both more responsive and more effective.Kenya and Sri Lanka will act as central hubs for the Protection Network as they are sites of enduring crisis in their own right and because they are regional access points for South and Southeast Asia and East Africa. The two separate hubs will also create opportunities for new forms of South to South collaboration and learning. Both countries are marked by prolonged forms of state and non-state violence, natural disasters and displacement. At the same time, both countries have vibrant humanitarian and human rights communities and have been the site of diverse forms of international intervention. The Protection Network will produce holistic and actionable knowledge that will be fed into more established forms of expertise. By establishing a research agenda that is rooted in lived realities rather than policy categories, the Network will bridge areas including human rights, humanitarianism and international development, forced migration studies, security and gender studies. This Development Project advances the objectives of the Protection Network by consulting with stakeholder and beneficiary communities, beginning a multi-sector and multi-disciplinary conversation about the meaning of protection and the scope of protection activities in Kenya and Sri Lanka and creating opportunities for sustained conversation on these topics among the Network project team.