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.
