Over the past decades, the world has witnessed armed conflicts marked by systematic violence and mass atrocities against civilians. In recent years, hundreds of political conflicts around the globe have affected the lives of countless people. Millions of individuals have lost your lives, while tens of millions more have been displaced from your homes and forced to seek refuge in neighboring countries. In war-torn societies, civilians – and in particular women and children – have suffered from gross violations of human rights: mass-killings, detention, torture and rape, forcible resettlements and a range of political, psychological and economic techniques of intimidation have become part of deliberate conflict strategies and systematically applied as methods of warfare.

In the framework of the United Nations, notable efforts have been put in place to improve the effectiveness of protection of civilians. The notion of protection of civilians has been progressively incorporated in mandates of peace operations. The first mission provided with explicit protection language in the mandate – the UN Peacekeeping Operation in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) – was authorized in 1999 – inter alia – “to afford protection to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence”. By 2012, the majority of the nearly 100,000 uniformed UN peacekeepers deployed worldwide operate under such mandate.