The Creating Safer Space Exhibition was on show at the Temple of Peace and Health in Cardiff, UK, from 24-28 March. It was co-organised with Academi Heddwch Cymru and the Welsh Centre for International Affairs.

We were delighted to receive a visit from the First Minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan, who is the leader of the Welsh Government. We provided her with a tour of the exhibition, and a copy of our new Creating Safer Space brochure.

In conjunction with the Exhibition, we also co-hosted a Lunch & Learn policy event on Civilians and Nonviolence in Crisis Preparedness and Management. Speakers included Prof. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Creating Safer Space Principal Investigator), Prof. em. Colin McInnes (Academi Heddwch) and David Warren (Head of International Relations at Welsh Government). Discussion centred on how community-led civilian protection initiatives can be supported by Welsh politics and civil society, and how lessons from other contexts can enrich Welsh initiatives and policies, such as Academi Heddwch’s ‘Wales as a Nation of Peace’ report.

A new Creating Safer Space policy brief was also published for the occasion, Nonviolent Community Strategies Make Civilians Safer (available in English and Welsh).

The Creating Safer Space Exhibition was on show at Quaker House Brussels from 4-7 February 2025, and it was accompanied by three policy events.

On the first day, we held a policy event on “Civilians and Nonviolence in Crisis Preparedness and Management”, with several speakers: Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Rachel Julian (Creating Safer Space), Rosemary Kabaki (Head of Mission, Nonviolent Peaceforce South Sudan), Gaëlle Nizery (Service for Foreign Policy Instruments, European Commission) and Nora Loozen (Belgium Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

During the week, we also held two brown bag lunches. The first brown bag lunch focused on protective accompaniment and community-led Unarmed Civilian Protection in Colombia, with Emily Humphreys (Peace Brigades International) and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Creating Safer Space). The second focused on protecting human rights defenders, with speakers from the South Sudan Human Rights Defenders Network and Nonviolent Peaceforce.

We published two policy briefs for the occasion, for the EU and its member states:

The Creating Safer Space project ‘Civilian (Self-) Protection from Violent Conflict in Papua:
Exploring Local Infrastructures and Initiatives’ has disseminated its research to Indonesian military officers. This was part of a training programme on International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights facilitated by the National Human Rights Commission.

The Commission invited Delsy Ronnie, the Principal Investigator of the Creating Safer Space project and the Nonviolent Peaceforce Regional Representative for Asia, to hold a presentation on Human Security Aspects in Military Operations. He shared Nonviolent Peaceforce experiences in the Philippines, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Ukraine, and insights from the Creating Safer Space project in Papua. About 20 Indonesian middle-rank military officers from the Navy, Air Force and Army participated in the event.

The officers suggested that Nonviolent Peaceforce bring its experience to Papua, and recommended that it carry out work there to help the government reduce violence. This recommendation requires follow-up, since military decisions have to be made by officers of higher rank. Through this engagement activity, Nonviolent Peaceforce and its partner ICAIOS has influenced actors’ perspectives about violence and the importance of civilian protection in the armed conflict in Papua.

The Creating Safer Space network had the pleasure of co-organising a Protection of Civilians (POC) Week side event in New York on 23 May 2024.

The event was organised together with CIVIC, Global Protection Cluster (GPC)/UNHCR, HPG/ODI, Oxfam, Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), NORCAP, and PAX along with the Permanent Observer Mission of the African Union to the UN and the Permanent Missions of El Salvador, the Netherlands, Philippines, and South Sudan.

The event was chaired by Tiffany Easthom (Executive Director of Nonviolent Peaceforce), and speakers included Prof. Nerve Macaspac (Creating Safer Space Co-Investigator), Ambassadors from the Netherlands, El Salvador, South Sudan and the Philippines, peacemakers from South Sudan, and representatives of the African Union, ODI/HPG, MONUSCO, and other organisations.

Prof. Nerve Macaspac shared Creating Safer Space research, conducted by 26 project teams in eleven countries across three continents. Our research has found that communities and civil society organizations around the world often engage in practices of UCP without calling them such.

Our projects have uncovered and systematized a wide variety of hitherto unknown community activities and mechanisms of protection, including different forms of early warning and early response, protective accompaniment, and ways of negotiating with state officials and armed actors.

Prof. Macaspac highlighted the importance of recognizing local and community protection as an essential component of PoC; of including community protection strategies, capacities, and needs currently in place directly in the baseline of any assessment and funding decisions; and of ensuring that communities are included as decision-makers regarding how to use funding, who is involved in high-level meetings, and what protection approaches work in any given context. The full speech is available here.

We are very grateful to Gay Rosenblum-Kumar, Nonviolent Peaceforce’s Representative to the UN, as one of the main organisers of the event. A summary of the event is available here.

The Creating Safer Space network hosted an exhibition in the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2024, and took this opportunity to inform UN delegates, UN staff, and other interested stakeholders about Creating Safer Space research.

The exhibition was held at Delegates’ Entrance of the UN Headquarters from 29 April – 3 May 2024. The exhibition includes objects, images, and voices from Creating Safer Space research projects, and explores the unexpected power of nonviolence in the protection of civilians living in the midst of violence.

Prof. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Prof. Rachel Julian and Prof. Nerve Macaspac accompanied the exhibition, and informed UN delegates, UN staff, and other interested stakeholders about Creating Safer Space research. They shared the Creating Safer Space policy briefs on the potential role of Unarmed Civilian Protection in the Protection of Civilians (PoC) and other publications from Creating Safer Space projects.

Visitors described the exhibition as timely and important, and some raised personal reflections on the artwork. A member of a UN mission from a country in Africa remarked that the use of whistles as a method of early warning and early response, as illustrated by our exhibition material from Cameroon and South Sudan, was also used in their own country – and this practice had once saved their life.

An exhibition event was held on Tuesday 30 April for members of UN missions and other interested parties, with drinks, food and introductory speeches. Prof. Arlene Tickner, Ambassador of the Colombian Mission to the UN in New York, highlighted that, “[o]ne of the most fascinating things about this project, I think, is not only its work with communities affected by violence, but also the insistence on nonviolent mechanisms of protection and self protection to accompany civilians in contexts of violence and conflict”. Prof. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara highlighted how Creating Safer Space research across 11 countries has shown that we can find community-level unarmed civilian protection everywhere. Civilians are not just victims waiting to be saved by strangers – they are protectors in their own right – and these nonviolent protection strategies work in making people safer across a range of different violent contexts. There is a real opportunity for the UN and its member states to boost the protection of civilians by recognising and supporting the many civil society and community based protection activities that already exist across the world.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Permanent Mission of Colombia to the United Nations, for being our official sponsor, for all their help in making the week a success, and for enabling us to bring community voices from around the world to this global centre of power.

Prof. Rachel Julian and Prof. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara travelled to Washington, DC, from 5-9 May 2024 to share Creating Safer Space insights. With the help of local UCP Community of Practice members, they presented the findings and projects to policymakers and peace advocacy organisations.

Among the highlights was a roundtable organised by Alliance for Peacebuilding attended by c.30 people from around the world with an interest in de-escalating violence and local peacebuilding. In a meeting with the Friends Committee On National Legislation, Rachel and Berit spoke about the importance of Creating Safer Space research and projects to current crises and the need to work together to bring new ideas and thinking into discussion on how to create spaces of safety and peace. Rachel and Berit also talked to several people from the policymaking space on preventing violence, atrocity prevention, and civilian protection about how UCP in and by communities could fit into their work. The Network’s concrete examples of what people do and how safer spaces are used in communities helped these policymakers and practitioners understand the importance of thinking more about how we support community-led UCP and unarmed self-protection.

The Creating Safer Space project ‘Understanding Community-level Spontaneous Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP): A Comparative Study of Initiatives in South Sudan, Myanmar and Colombia’, has engaged policymakers to strengthen unarmed civilian protection in Nariño, Colombia.

The team organised an event to disseminate their policy brief, Civilians Protecting Civilians, in London on 21 March 2024. The event included the participation of H.E. Roy Barreras, Ambassador of Colombia to the United Kingdom, Louise Winstanley, from the British civil society organisation ABColombia and Victoria Bird, from the UK Foreign Office.

The policy brief was published by Rodeemos el Diálogo and written by Karen Arteaga Garzón and Andrei Gómez-Suárez, with illustrations by Sebastián Bucheli. The policy brief is available in English and Spanish.

Prof. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Creating Safer Space Principal Investigator) and Prof. Rachel Julian (Creating Safer Space Co-Investigator) submitted evidence to a UK Parliament inquiry in April 2024, relating to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).

The UK Parliament’s International Development Committee had launched an inquiry into the FCDO’s approach to supporting civil society and civil society organisations through its programming (more information here).

Drawing on Creating Safer Space research findings, Prof. Bliesemann de Guevara and Prof. Julian recommend that the FCDO acknowledge Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) and community self-protection as a credible and important practice in protection policy that is broadly applicable and effective in a range of situations of armed conflict. They recommend that the FCDO support civil society’s protection work through funding, inclusion in situational analysis, and recognition as one of the components of peace infrastructures and operations. They further recommend that communities are included as decision-makers regarding how to use funding, who is involved in high-level meetings, and what protection approaches work in any given context.

The full report is available here.