As Australia prepares to assume its two-year seat on the U.N. Security Council from Jan. 1, it will either have to react to, or may well decide to actively promote, the cause of protecting civilians caught in harm's way in contemporary armed conflicts. Either way, it would benefit from drawing on a recent study by the U.N. University in Tokyo and the UNU-affiliated Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law (IEGL) based at Griffith University in Brisbane.
There has been a steady rise over the 200 years in the proportion of civilians killed in armed conflict, whether in the violence of war directly, or from conflict-related hunger and disease. The international community has responded to the calls to protect them by developing two principles in parallel, the protection of civilians (POC) and the responsibility to protect (R2P).
As the intervention in Libya last year showed, R2P remains a subject of debate and some confusion. POC, whose emergence on the agenda of global policy coincides chronologically with that of R2P, has been markedly less contentious, to the point where its advocates and actors fear contagion from the more politicized R2P. Hence the need for a detailed and nuanced exposition of the points of convergence, overlap, tension and divergence between R2P and POC on the normative, institutional and operational dimensions.