Protecting civilians from harm: How humanitarians can encourage armed actors to comply with norms.

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Research context: Protection has been systematically underfunded as an area of humanitarian action. One of the reasons for this is that humanitarian organizations have found it difficult to demonstrate the impact of their interventions. One problem is that the theories of change - that is, descriptions how activities lead to impact in a particular context - are often not made explicit. Achieving protection is a complex social change process. Rigid tools like classical log-frames are not well suited to planning and monitoring interventions in conflict contexts. The lack of more elaborate theories of change does not only make it harder to demonstrate the impact of protection interventions. It can also have negative effects on the design of protection interventions as it is harder to check assumptions, trace preconditions, and locate activities within a broader chain of results.Research focus: The research project focuses on a particular type of protection intervention, namely efforts to encourage armed actors to comply with norms, referred to as restraint. The research starts by analysing and reconstructing the theories of change on which restraint activities are built. The research project then compares these theories of change with the perceptions of armed actors on what influences their behaviour towards civilians. It also establishes to what extent armed actors, protection actors, and conflict-affected communities perceive protection interventions as effective. The research will focus on Iraq. Objectives: First, the reconstruction and development of theories of change is expected to make a direct contribution to how humanitarian organizations plan and implement protection interventions. Second, it will also contribute to the knowledge about evaluating impact of protection activities, an area where little research exists so far. Third, by focusing on Iraq, the project aims to inform the conceptual approach of protection research, moving away from only focusing on direct deaths and injuries, to also account for indirect mortality and injury caused by attacks on hospitals and other infrastructure.Potential applications and benefits: The main intended academic audience for the results of this project includes the fields of military sociology, organisation studies, and area studies, as well as other research teams working on humanitarian protection. The proposed research project will contribute evidence about the relevance of protection interventions and their perceived effectiveness to the academic study of humanitarian protection and related fields. By developing explicit theories of change, it will also help to create a common conceptual framework that can make future research findings more comparable. In addition, it will shed light on the motivations and influencing factors affecting formal and informal armed groups and contribute to a better understanding of protection activities in the specific context of Iraq. In addition to this academic contribution, the project is expected to generate valuable results for protection practitioners and their supporters that will enable them, among others, to plan and implement more relevant and better targeted protection interventions.