Protection Advocacy by International NGOs in Armed Conflict Situations: Breaking the Barriers

Collective efforts to enhance protection in humanitarian crises are a shared responsibility across humanitarian actors, as set out in the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Protection Policy (IASC, 2016), while advocating for strengthened protection of civilians is a key part of humanitarian action (Lilly and Spencer, 2020; Metcalfe-Hough, 2020). For decades, many international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) have engaged in protection activities as part of their humanitarian work and have developed significant institutional capacities including for advocacy to promote the protection of civilians. Such advocacy can take many forms, both direct and indirect, ranging from private diplomacy, through third-party diplomatic channels, to public communication (Metcalfe-Hough, 2020). The advocacy capacity of INGOs has particularly evolved over the last two decades in response to widespread and grave abuses of international humanitarian and human rights law in contexts such as Darfur, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Syria, where the international community’s abject failures to protect civilians in conflict became increasingly visible. INGOs vary significantly in the protection advocacy they undertake and how they prioritise and resource these efforts, with differences between global, regional and national offices within the same institution.