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

研究背景：作为人道主义行动的一个领域，保护一直系统地资金不足。其中一个原因是，人道主义组织发现很难证明其干预措施的影响。一个问题是，变革的理论--即对活动如何在特定背景下产生影响的描述--往往并不明确。实现保护是一个复杂的社会变革过程。传统的逻辑框架等僵化的工具不太适合在冲突情况下规划和监测干预措施。缺乏更详细的变革理论不仅使人们更难证明保护措施的影响。它也可能对保护干预措施的设计产生负面影响，因为它更难检查假设，追踪先决条件，并在更广泛的结果链中找到活动。本研究首先分析和重建约束活动所依据的变革理论。该研究项目然后将这些变革理论与武装行为体关于影响其对平民行为的因素的看法进行比较。它还确定武装行为体、保护行为体和受冲突影响社区在多大程度上认为保护干预措施有效。研究将集中在伊拉克。目的：第一，重建和发展变革理论可望对人道主义组织如何规划和执行保护干预措施作出直接贡献。第二，它还将有助于了解如何评价保护活动的影响，这是一个迄今为止研究很少的领域。第三，通过以伊拉克为重点，该项目旨在为保护研究的概念方法提供信息，不再仅仅关注直接死亡和伤害，而是也考虑到对医院和其他基础设施的袭击造成的间接死亡和伤害。该项目成果的主要预期学术受众包括军事社会学、组织研究和区域研究领域，以及其他从事人道主义保护工作的研究小组。拟议的研究项目将为人道主义保护和相关领域的学术研究提供证据，说明保护干预措施的相关性及其预期效果。通过发展明确的变化理论，它还将有助于建立一个共同的概念框架，使未来的研究结果更具可比性。此外，它还将揭示影响正规和非正规武装团体的动机和影响因素，并有助于更好地了解伊拉克具体情况下的保护活动。除了这一学术贡献外，该项目预计将为保护工作者及其支持者带来宝贵的成果，使他们能够规划和实施更相关、更有针对性的保护干预措施。

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.