Advocacy

Increasingly, UCP is being recognized as an effective and affordable approach to protect civilians and prevent violence. Forty-two nongovernmental organizations now practice some form of UCP in 24 areas. Yet, few of these groups know, share or communicate with each other.

Nonviolent Peaceforce’s critical mission is to protect civilians. But protection is not only from physical harm. Protection is also about creating the empowering conditions for local communities to leverage existing structures and capacities to live peacefully with others.

Our advocacy team’s task is to amplify this work in international policy forums at the United Nations and in capitals around the world. We not only advocate for support for our protection work in specific countries, but also raise awareness on the necessity of non-militarized approaches and the importance of unarmed protection as both a complement to traditional peacekeeping and a key ingredient in attaining sustainable peace to communities facing violence and conflict.

You can read our latest report with our findings on Unarmed Civilian Protection here: "Examining Unarmed Civilian Protection in the UN Context: A Complement and Contribution to POC"

To address the increasing needs for UCP, NP’s Advocacy Project works in several ways:

• connecting groups using UCP;
  
  
• influencing key decision makers in local, national and multi-lateral organizations;
  
  
• improving nonviolent practices; and
  
  
• promoting adoption of those practices.

US citizens please write or email your members of congress (https://www.congress.gov) and urge them to support including unarmed civilian protection in the 2020 appropriations bill for state and foreign operations. You can find talking points here.

A massive scale up of unarmed civilian protection is needed. All present approaches for the protection of civilians, whether armed or unarmed, provided by governmental institutions and non-governmental organizations added together do not come close to meeting present needs. We need to continue to validate and share widely affordable and effective ways to protect civilians. We also need to fight for adequate funding that is equivalent to the UN military peacekeeping budget—about $6.7 billion USD.