Unarmed civilian protection (UCP) originates, among other places, in the concept of a ‘peace army’, presumably drawing on the positive qualities of existing military armies, such as organization, training, discipline and selfsacrifice, while eliminating the downside of preparing soldiers to kill people and destroy things. The idea that those positive qualities properly applied to training and action in nonviolent methods could accomplish whatever good armed policing and military intervention purports to do, without police brutality or devastation of war, seems intuitive to many people, and recurrent in the last hundred years (Boulding, 1996, p ix). This book highlights the work of many scholars and activists, offering considerable hope for reducing violence in the world. Yet the vision of some of its early proponents for a great transformative practice on either the domestic or international front through large-scale deployment of nonviolent peacekeepers seems to have largely faded. This chapter explores the implications of UCP practitioners identifying as being in the humanitarian versus the security sector in conflict situations, along with other potentially limiting factors, for the growth of UCP interventions. It suggests ideas for further consideration to bring UCP to a larger scale.

The dream and the actuality

As early as 1921, Mohandas Gandhi had Indian Congress committees setting up volunteer corps under a vow of nonviolence to allay civil violence by engaging rioters (Weber, 1996, p 44). By 1938, he spoke of an army of nonviolent soldiers, or ‘Shanti Sena’, to quell the riots that often characterized Muslim/Hindu relations in India, writing: ‘the Congress should be able to put forth a non-violent army of volunteers numbering not a few thousands but lakhs [hundreds of thousands] who would be equal to every occasion where the police and the military are required’ (Weber, 1996, p 46).

Ron Sider laid out a particularly Christian vision in 1984 at the Mennonite World Conference, when he challenged his fellow Anabaptists: