Featuring Jennifer Welsh (McGill University), Jenna Russo (International Peace Institute), Daniel Levine-Spound (Harvard University), Emily Paddon Rhoads (Swarthmore College), Diego Da Rin (International Crisis Group) and more.
With more than 100 active armed conflicts currently raging around the world, the international crisis-response toolkit seems no longer fit for purpose. Parties to armed conflict display little concern for international humanitarian law, the UN Security Council is once again paralyzed by great-power discord while the Responsibility to Protect doctrine – adopted by UN member states in 2005 as a means of preventing mass atrocity crimes – now appears to be an artefact of a more hopeful era of liberal internationalism. At the same time, the most prominent contemporary agents of civilian protection – peacekeepers and humanitarians – are increasingly underfunded, unsupported, and under pressure to do more with less in the world’s most dangerous and difficult environments. Little wonder, then, that the UN Secretary General recently described the global landscape for civilian protection as ‘resoundingly grim.’
In the wider context of a multilateral system in crisis, this two-day workshop aims to take stock of the human consequences of an era marked simultaneously by a steep rise in violent conflict and a sharp decline in the will and capacity to alleviate the human suffering generated by such conflicts. The workshop will include thematic sessions on the state of the wider civilian protection toolkit, on both UN and African Union peacekeeping and protection of civilian mandates, on civilian self-protection strategies in the world’s ‘forgotten conflicts,’ and on the geopolitics of protection in light of ongoing crises in Ukraine and Gaza.
Workshop times:
Thursday, February 6, 9:00 am – 4:45pm
Friday, February 7, 8:45 am – 1:30pm
For further details, contact Timothy Donais at tdonais@wlu.ca or Sophie Greco at sgreco@balsillieschool.ca
