The safety of strangers: the realities and politics of protecting civilians in times of war

Recent wars have brutally shown that civilians are not safe. This is despite high-level global commitments and multi-billion-dollar humanitarian spending to keep civilian strangers protected. The high civilian death tolls in recent armed conflicts are prompting new questions about how and if we can protect civilians in times of war, and what the real politics of such protection is. In this special section and its introduction, we argue that it is essential to pay attention to civilians’ actual experiences of protection and their own strategies for staying safe. Normative schemes, including those that seek to offer safety to strangers, are always contested and negotiated and are always bound up in claims for legitimacy, power and public authority. We argue that it is in civilians’ quotidian experiences of staying safe that we can best see and understand the local, national and international politics of civilian protection, as well as the forms of safety that are prioritised by civilians themselves. To do this, the special section draws together qualitative, ethnographic and ethnomusicological research in Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda to shed light on how the international community can keep civilians safe.