Unarmed Civilian Self-Protection and Peacebuilding in Cameroon’s ‘Anglophone’ Conflict

Amidst the growing literature on unarmed civilian protection in violent conflicts, notably the edited volume by Furnari et al (2025) published by BUP, there is increased recognition of the significance of community self-protection or locally-based UCP. This stands in contrast to the earlier focus on the role of external actors, notably international NGOs and UN agencies, in civilian protection activities. The Cameroon case-study provides a unique and original perspective on community self-protection, not least because external actors, inclusive of both international and national NGOs, are prohibited by the Cameroon government from undertaking civilian protection activities in the English-speaking conflict-affected regions. Therefore communities affected by violence, notably poor, rural communities, have been dependent on their own initiatives and resources to protect their families and communities. The study’s findings present a remarkable array of community self-protection strategies and measures. These provide strong evidence of how local people in conflict-affected communities are active agents in their own protection, countering the relative neglect in the literature of locally-led self-protection measures.
While the book is empirically-based, containing a mass of primary data, it also makes significant theoretical contributions. It shifts the dominant conceptualisation of UCP as the domain of ‘UCP practitioners’ by highlighting the importance of grassroots actors in the provision of context-specific self-protection measures. It shifts perceptions of local populations as relatively passive recipients of protective measures to that of active agents in their own protection. Such a conceptualisation is broadly in line with the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Mac Ginty 2014), where local populations play a key role in conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts. And this theoretical contribution is further developed by linking the study findings with an ‘adaptive peacebuilding’ approach (de Coning et al. 2023; Saraiva and Erfe 2023), a more recent addition to the ‘local turn’ literature. This approach, not previously applied to the field of UCP, enables discussion on how local civilian agency can be strengthened by appropriate external support (e.g. from international NGOs) which sustains the leadership and agency of local people.
This theoretical contribution also translates into policy relevance. While the Cameroon case-study has demonstrated the active agency of local civilians in community self-protection, it also highlighted challenges faced by local conflict-affected communities in seeking to protect themselves. The linkage to adaptive peacebuilding indicates how external bodies, in contexts where their presence is permitted, can endeavour to address such challenges in a manner that bridges the local-international dichotomy in UCP practice. A further and important dimension of policy relevance is that the study provides much-needed evidence to support the emerging UN policy on ‘Civilian-centred approaches’ to the Protection of Civilians (UN OCHA May 2024), adding to the timely and topical nature of the book.